The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,404

test, the students were asked to pick out the United States on a map of the world! Their great-grandparents were required to “name the states you would pass through in traveling on a meridian from Columbus [Ohio] to the Gulf of Mexico and name and locate the capital of each.” On the other hand, a typical test item today requires students to grapple with rates, amounts, multiple contingencies, and basic economics:A community is located in a region where very little drinking water is available. In order to manage their water resources, which of the following should the community NOT do?

A. Increase their water usage.

B. Buy water from another community.

C. Install water-saving devices in homes.

D. Charge higher rates for water.

Anyone who understands the phrase law of supply and demand realizes that option D cannot be the correct answer. But if you simply have an image of a pool of water and people drinking from it, the connection between how much it costs and how quickly it shrinks is not immediately apparent.

Flynn suggests that over the course of the 20th century, scientific reasoning infiltrated from the schoolhouse and other institutions into everyday thinking. More people worked in offices and the professions, where they manipulated symbols rather than crops, animals, and machines. People had more time for leisure, and they spent it in reading, playing combinatorial games, and keeping up with the world. And, Flynn suggests, the mindset of science trickled down to everyday discourse in the form of shorthand abstractions. A shorthand abstraction is a hard-won tool of technical analysis that, once grasped, allows people to effortlessly manipulate abstract relationships. Anyone capable of reading this book, even without training in science or philosophy, has probably assimilated hundreds of these abstractions from casual reading, conversation, and exposure to the media, including proportional, percentage, correlation, causation, control group, placebo, representative sample, false positive, empirical, post hoc, statistical, median, variability, circular argument, tradeoff, and cost-benefit analysis. Yet each of them—even a concept as second-nature to us as percentage—at one time trickled down from the academy and other highbrow sources and increased in popularity in printed usage over the course of the 20th century.251

It isn’t just the chattering classes that have absorbed the shorthand abstractions of the technocracy. The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has commented on Bruce Springsteen’s lyric in “The River”: “I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company / But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy.” Only in the last forty years, Nunberg notes, would ordinary people have talked about “the economy” as a natural force with causal powers like the weather.252 Earlier they might have said “on account of times are hard.” Or, he might have added, on account of the Jews, the Negroes, or the rich peasants.

We can now put together the two big ideas of this section: the pacifying effects of reason, and the Flynn Effect. We have several grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of reason—specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one’s ideas in abstract, universal terms—would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence. And we have just seen that over the course of the 20th century, people’s reasoning abilities—particularly their ability to set aside immediate experience, detach themselves from a parochial vantage point, and think in abstract terms—were steadily enhanced. Can we put these two ideas together to help explain the documented declines of violence in the second half of the 20th century: the Long Peace, New Peace, and Rights Revolutions? Could there be a moral Flynn Effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence?

The idea is not crazy. The cognitive skill that is most enhanced in the Flynn Effect, abstraction from the concrete particulars of immediate experience, is precisely the skill that must be exercised to take the perspectives of others and expand the circle of moral consideration. Flynn himself drew the connection in recounting a conversation he had with his Irish father, who was born in 1884 and was highly intelligent but relatively unschooled.

My father had so much hatred for the English that there was little room left over for prejudice against any other group. But he harbored a bit of racism against blacks, and my brother and I tried to talk him out of it. “What if you woke up one morning and discovered your skin had turned black? Would that make you any less of a