The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,321

as abolitionism and animal rights.151 In the 20th, women’s groups have been active, and intermittently effective, in protesting nuclear tests, the Vietnam War, and violent strife in Argentina, Northern Ireland, and the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. In a review of almost three hundred American public opinion polls between the 1930s and 1980s, men were found to support the “more violent or forceful option” in 87 percent of the questions, the others being tied.152 For example, they were more supportive of military confrontation with Germany in 1939, Japan in 1940, Russia in 1960, and Vietnam in 1968. In every American presidential election since 1980, women have cast more votes for the Democratic candidate than men have, and in 2000 and 2004 majorities of women reversed the preference of men and voted against George W. Bush.153

Though women are slightly more peace-loving than their menfolk, the men and women of a given society have correlated opinions.154 In 1961 Americans were asked whether the country should “fight an all-out nuclear war rather than live under communist rule.” Eighty-seven percent of the men said yes, while “only” 75 percent of the women felt that way—proof that women are pacifist only in comparison to men of the same time and society. Gender gaps are larger when an issue divides the country (as in the Vietnam War), smaller when there is greater agreement (as in World War II), and nonexistent when the issue obsesses the entire society (as in the attitudes among Israelis and Arabs toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict).

But women’s position in society can affect its fondness for war even if the women themselves are not opposing war. A recognition of women’s rights and an opposition to war go together. In Middle Eastern countries, the poll respondents who were more favorable to gender equality were also more favorable to nonviolent solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.155 Several ethnographic surveys of traditional cultures have found that the better a society treats its women, the less it embraces war.156 The same is true for modern countries, with the usual continuum running from Western Europe to blue American states to red American states to Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.157 As we shall see in chapter 10, societies that empower their women are less likely to end up with large cohorts of rootless young men, with their penchant for making trouble.158 And of course the decades of the Long Peace and the New Peace have been the decades of the revolution in women’s rights. We don’t know what causes what, but biology and history suggest that all else being equal, a world in which women have more influence will be a world with fewer wars.

Dominance is an adaptation to anarchy, and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilizing process or in an international system regulated by agreements and norms. Anything that deflates the concept of dominance is likely to drive down the frequency of fights between individuals and wars between groups. That doesn’t mean that the emotions behind dominance will go away—they are very much a part of our biology, especially in a certain gender—but they can be marginalized.

The mid- and late 20th century saw a deconstruction of the concept of dominance and related virtues like manliness, honor, prestige, and glory. Part of the deflation came from the informalization process, as in the Marx Brothers’ burlesque of jingoism in Duck Soup. Partly it has come from women’s inroads into professional life. Women have the psychological distance to see contests of dominance as boys making noise, so as they have become more influential, dominance has lost some of its aura. (Anyone who has worked in a mixed-sex environment is familiar with a woman belittling the wasteful posturing of her male colleagues as “typical male behavior.”) Partly it has come from cosmopolitanism, which exposes us to exaggerated cultures of honor in other countries and thereby gives us a perspective on our own. The word macho, recently borrowed from Spanish, has a disdainful air, connoting self-indulgent swagger rather than manly heroism. The Village People’s campy “Macho Man” and other homoerotic iconography has further undermined the trappings of masculine dominance.

Another deflationary force, I think, is the progress of biological science and its influence on literate culture. People have increasingly understood the drive for dominance as a vestige of the evolutionary process. A quantitative analysis of Google Books shows recent leaps in the popularity of the biological jargon behind dominance, including testosterone beginning in the 1940s,