The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,309

castrating it with two bricks. When asked, “Doesn’t that hurt,” the farmer replies, “Not if you keep your thumbs out of the way.”77

Because predatory violence is just a means to a goal, it comes in as many varieties as there are human goals. The paradigm case is literal predation—hunting for food or sport—because it involves no animosity toward the victim. Far from hating their quarry, hunters valorize and totemize them, from Paleolithic cave paintings to trophies above the mantels in gentlemen’s clubs. Hunters may even empathize with their prey—proof that empathy alone is not a bar to violence. The ecologist Louis Liebenberg studied the remarkable ability of the !Kung San to infer the whereabouts and physical condition of their game from a few faint tracks as they pursue them across the Kalahari Desert.78 They do it with empathy—putting themselves in the hooves of the animal and imagining what it is feeling and where it is tempted to flee. There may even be an element of love. One night after the ninth inning of a baseball game, I was too comatose to get off the couch or even change the channel and passively watched the following program on the cable sports network. It was a show about fishing, and consisted entirely of footage of a middle-aged man in an aluminum boat on a nondescript stretch of water pulling in one large bass after another. With each catch he brought the fish close to his face and stroked it, making little kissy noises and cooing, “Ooh, aren’t you a beauty! You’re a pretty one! Yes, you are!”

The chasm between the perpetrator’s perspective—amoral, pragmatic, even frivolous—and the victim’s is nowhere wider than in our predation of animals. It’s safe to say that the bass, if given the chance, would not reciprocate the fisherman’s affection, and most people would not want to know the opinion of a broiler chicken or a live lobster on whether the mild pleasure we get from eating their flesh rather than a plate of eggplant justifies the sacrifice they will make. The same incuriosity enables coldhearted predatory violence against humans.

Here are a few examples: Romans suppressing provincial rebellions; Mongols razing cities that resist their conquest; free companies of demobilized soldiers plundering and raping; colonial settlers expelling or massacring indigenous peoples; gangsters whacking a rival, an informant, or an uncooperative official; rulers assassinating a political opponent or vice versa; governments jailing or executing dissidents; warring nations bombing enemy cities; hoodlums injuring a victim who resists a robbery or carjacking; criminals killing an eyewitness to a crime; mothers smothering a newborn they feel they cannot raise. Defensive and preemptive violence—doing it to them before they do it to you—is also a form of instrumental violence.

Predatory violence may be the most extraordinary and perplexing phenomenon in the human moral landscape precisely because it is so mundane and explicable. We read of an atrocity—say, rebel soldiers encamped on a rooftop in Uganda who passed the time by kidnapping women, tying them up, raping them, and throwing them to their deaths—shake our heads, and ask, “How could people do these things?”79 We refuse to accept obvious answers, like boredom, lust, or sport, because the suffering of the victim is so obscenely disproportionate to the benefit to the perpetrator. We take the victim’s point of view and advert to a conception of pure evil. Yet to understand these outrages, we might be better off asking not why they happen but why they don’t happen more often.

With the possible exception of Jain priests, all of us engage in predatory violence, if only against insects. In most cases the temptation to prey on humans is inhibited by emotional and cognitive restraints, but in a minority of individuals these restraints are absent. Psychopaths make up 1 to 3 percent of the male population, depending on whether one uses the broad definition of antisocial personality disorder, which embraces many kinds of callous troublemakers, or a narrower definition that picks out the more cunning manipulators.80 Psychopaths are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals, and commit half the serious crimes.81 They also perpetrate nonviolent crimes like bilking elderly couples out of their life savings and running a business with ruthless disregard for the welfare of the workforce or stakeholders. As we saw, the regions of the brain that handle social emotions, especially the amygdala and orbital cortex, are relatively shrunken or unresponsive