The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,319

dominance—humiliation, envy, and rage—to which narcissists are prone. Historians such as Liah Greenfield and Daniel Chirot have attributed the major wars and genocides in the early decades of the 20th century to ressentiment in Germany and Russia. Both nations felt they were realizing their rightful claims to preeminence, which perfidious enemies had denied them.138 It has not escaped the notice of observers of the contemporary scene that Russia and the Islamic world both nurse resentments about their undeserved lack of greatness, and that these emotions are nonnegligible threats to peace.139

Heading in the other direction are European countries like Holland, Sweden, and Denmark that stopped playing the preeminence game in the 18th century and pegged their self-esteem to more tangible if less heart-pounding achievements like making money and giving their citizens a pleasant lifestyle. 140 Together with countries that never cared about being magnificent in the first place, like Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand, their national pride, though considerable, is commensurate with their achievements, and in the arena of interstate relations they don’t make trouble.

Group-level ambition also determines the fate of ethnic neighbors. Experts on ethnicity dismiss the conventional wisdom that ancient hatreds inevitably keep neighboring peoples at each other’s throats.141 After all, there are some six thousand languages spoken on the planet, at least six hundred of which have substantial numbers of speakers.142 By any reckoning, the number of deadly ethnic conflicts that actually break out is a tiny fraction of the number that could break out. In 1996 James Fearon and David Laitin carried out one such reckoning. They focused on two parts of the world that each housed a combustible mixture of ethnic groups: the republics of the recently dissolved Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which had 45 of them, and newly decolonized Africa from 1960 to 1979, which had at least 160, probably many more. Fearon and Laitin counted the number of civil wars and incidents of intercommunal violence (such as deadly riots) as a proportion of the number of pairs of neighboring ethnic groups. They found that in the former Soviet Union, violence broke out in about 4.4 percent of the opportunities, and in Africa it broke out in fewer than 1 percent. Developed countries with mixtures of ethnic groups, such as New Zealand, Malaysia, Canada, Belgium, and recently the United States, have even better track records of ethnic nonviolence.143 The groups may get on each other’s nerves, but they don’t kill each other. Nor should this be surprising. Even if ethnic groups are like people and constantly jockey for status, remember that most of the time people don’t come to blows either.

Several things determine whether ethnic groups can coexist without bloodshed. As Fearon and Laitin point out, one important emollient is the way a group treats a loose cannon who attacks a member of the other group.144 If the malefactor is reeled in and punished by his own community, the victimized group can classify the incident as a one-on-one crime rather than as the first strike in a group-against-group war. (Recall that one reason international peacekeepers are effective is that they can chasten spoilers on one side to the satisfaction of the other.) The political scientist Stephen van Evera suggests that an even bigger factor is ideology. Things get ugly when intermingled ethnic groups long for states of their own, hope to unite with their diasporas in other countries, keep long memories of harms committed by their neighbors’ ancestors while being unrepentant for harms committed by their own, and live under crappy governments that mythologize one group’s glorious history while excluding others from the social contract.

Many peaceable countries today are in the process of redefining the nationstate by purging it of tribalist psychology. The government no longer defines itself as a crystallization of the yearning of the soul of a particular ethnic group, but as a compact that embraces all the people and groups that happen to find themselves on a contiguous plot of land. The machinery of government is often rubegoldbergian, with complex arrangements of devolution and special status and power-sharing and affirmative action, and the contraption is held together by a few national symbols such as a rugby team.145 People root for clothing instead of blood and soil. It is a messiness appropriate to the messiness of people’s divided selves, with coexisting identities as individuals and as members of overlapping groups.146

Social dominance is a guy thing. It’s not surprising that men, the more dominance-obsessed gender, have stronger tribalist feelings than women, including