The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,337

counterparts. As a rule, however, brutal penetration is not what turns them on. Their excitement comes—not from violating the bodies of strangers with phallic objects—but from a grotesque, sadistic travesty of intimacy and love: from spooning poisoned medicine into the mouth of a trusting patient, for example, or smothering a sleeping child in its bed. In short, from tenderly turning a friend, family member, or dependent into a corpse—from nurturing them to death.240

With so many sources for sadism, why are there so few sadists? Obviously the mind must be equipped with safety catches against hurting others, and sadism erupts when they are disabled.

The first that comes to mind is empathy. If people feel each other’s pain, then hurting someone else will be felt as hurting oneself. That is why sadism is more thinkable when the victims are demonized or dehumanized beings that lie outside one’s circle of empathy. But as I have mentioned (and as we shall explore in the next chapter), for empathy to be a brake on aggression it has to be more than the habit of inhabiting another person’s mind. After all, sadists often exercise a perverted ingenuity for intuiting how best to torment their victims. An empathic response must specifically include an alignment of one’s own happiness with that of another being, a faculty that is better called sympathy or compassion than empathy. Baumeister points out that an additional emotion has to kick in for sympathy to inhibit behavior: guilt. Guilt, he notes, does not just operate after the fact. Much of our guilt is anticipatory—we refrain from actions that would make us feel bad if we carried them out. 241

Another brake on sadism is a cultural taboo: the conviction that deliberate infliction of pain is not a thinkable option, regardless of whether it engages one’s sympathetic inhibitions. Today torture has been explicitly prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. 242 Unlike ancient, medieval, and early modern times when torture was a form of popular entertainment, today the infliction of torture by governments is almost entirely clandestine, showing that the taboo is widely acknowledged—though like most taboos, it is at times hypocritically flouted. In 2001 the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz addressed this hypocrisy by proposing a legal mechanism designed to eliminate sub rosa torture in democracies.243 The police in a ticking-bomb scenario would have to get a warrant from a disinterested judge before torturing the lifesaving information out of a suspect; all other forms of coercive interrogation would be flatly prohibited. The most common response was outrage. By the very act of examining the taboo on torture, Dershowitz had violated the taboo, and he was widely misunderstood as advocating torture rather than seeking to minimize it.244 Some of the more measured critics argued that the taboo in fact serves a useful function. Better, they said, to deal with a ticking-bomb scenario, should one ever occur, on an ad hoc basis, and perhaps even put up with some clandestine torture, than to place torture on the table as a live option, from which it could swell from ticking bombs to a wider range of real or imagined threats.245

But perhaps the most powerful inhibition against sadism is more elemental: a visceral revulsion against hurting another person. Most primates find the screams of pain of a fellow animal to be aversive, and they will abstain from food if it is accompanied by the sound and sight of a fellow primate being shocked.246 The distress is an expression not of the monkey’s moral scruples but of its dread of making a fellow animal mad as hell. (It also may be a response to whatever external threat would have caused a fellow animal to issue an alarm call.)247 The participants in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, who obeyed instructions to deliver shocks to a bogus fellow participant, were visibly distraught as they heard the shrieks of pain they were inflicting.248 Even in moral philosophers’ hypothetical scenarios like the Trolley Problem, survey-takers recoil from the thought of throwing the fat man in front of the trolley, though they know it would save five innocent lives.249

Testimony on the commission of hands-on violence in the real world is consistent with the results of laboratory studies. As we saw, humans don’t readily consummate mano a mano fisticuffs, and soldiers on the battlefield maybe petrified about pulling the trigger.250 The historian Christopher Browning’s interviews with Nazi reservists who were ordered to shoot Jews at close range showed that their initial