The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,375

tilt the payoffs so that a deferral of gratification, in particular, an avoidance of impulsive violence, pays off in the long run. The knock-on effect is a strengthening of people’s self-control muscles that allow them (among other things) to inhibit their violent impulses, above and beyond what is strictly necessary to avoid being caught and punished. The process could even feed on itself in a positive feedback loop, “positive” in both the engineering and the human-values sense. In a society in which other people control their aggression, a person has less of a need to cultivate a hair trigger for retaliation, which in turn takes a bit of pressure off everyone else, and so on.

One way to bridge the gap between psychology and history is to look for changes in a society-wide index of self-control. As we have seen, an interest rate is just such an index, because it reveals how much compensation people demand for deferring consumption from the present to the future. To be sure, an interest rate is partly determined by objective factors like inflation, expected income growth, and the risk that the investment will never be returned. But it partly reflects the purely psychological preference for instant over delayed gratification. According to one economist, a six-year-old who prefers to eat one marshmallow now rather than two marshmallows a few minutes from now is in effect demanding an interest rate of 3 percent a day, or 150 percent a month.125

Gregory Clark, the economic historian we met in chapter 4, has estimated the interest rates that Englishmen demanded (in the form of rents on land and houses) from 1170 to 2000, the millennium over which the Civilizing Process took place. Before 1800, he argues, there was no inflation to speak of, incomes were flat, and the risk that an owner would lose his property was low and constant. If so, the effective interest rate was an estimate of the degree to which people favored their present selves over their future selves.

FIGURE 9–1. Implicit interest rates in England, 1170–2000

Source: Graph from Clark, 2007a, p. 33.

Figure 9–1 shows that during the centuries in which homicide plummeted in England, the effective interest rate also plummeted, from more than 10 percent to around 2 percent. Other European societies showed a similar transition. The correlation does not, of course, prove causation, but it is consistent with Elias’s claim that the decline of violence from medieval to modern Europe was part of a broader trend toward self-control and an orientation to the future.

What about more direct measures of a society’s aggregate self-control? An annual interest rate is still quite distant from the momentary exercises of forbearance that suppress violent impulses in everyday life. Though there are dangers in essentializing a society by assigning it character traits that really should apply to individuals (remember the so-called fierce people), there may be a grain of truth in the impression that some cultures are marked by more self-control in everyday life than others. Friedrich Nietzsche distinguished between Apollonian and Dionysian cultures, named after the Greek gods of light and wine, and the distinction was used by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict in her classic 1934 ethnography collection Patterns of Culture. Apollonian cultures are said to be thinking, self-controlled, rational, logical, and ordered; Dionysian cultures are said to be feeling, passionate, instinctual, irrational, and chaotic. Few anthropologists invoke the dichotomy today, but a quantitative analysis of the world’s cultures by the sociologist Geert Hofstede has rediscovered the distinction in the pattern of survey responses among the middle-class citizens of more than a hundred countries.

According to Hofstede’s data, countries differ along six dimensions.126 One of them is Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation: “Long-term oriented societies foster pragmatic virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular saving, persistence, and adapting to changing circumstances. Short-term oriented societies foster virtues related to the past and present such as national pride, respect for tradition, preservation of ‘face,’ and fulfilling social obligations.” Another dimension is Indulgence versus Restraint: “Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms.” Both, of course, are conceptually related to the faculty of self-control, and not surprisingly, they are correlated with each other (with a coefficient of 0.45 across 110 countries). Elias would have predicted that both of these national traits should correlate with the countries’ homicide rates, and the