The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,406

abstract intelligence began to accumulate. A century ago dozens of great writers and artists extolled the beauty and nobility of war, and eagerly looked forward to World War I. One “progressive” president, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the decimation of Native Americans was necessary to prevent the continent from becoming a “game preserve for squalid savages,” and that in nine out of ten cases, “the only good Indians are the dead Indians.”257 Another, Woodrow Wilson, was a white supremacist who kept black students out of Princeton when he was president of the university, praised the Ku Klux Klan, cleansed the federal government of black employees, and said of ethnic immigrants, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” 258 A third, Franklin Roosevelt, drove a hundred thousand American citizens into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the Japanese enemy.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the young Winston Churchill wrote of taking part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” in the British Empire. In one of those jolly little wars, he wrote, “we proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.” Churchill defended these atrocities on the grounds that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” and he said he was “strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He blamed the people of India for a famine caused by British mismanagement because they kept “breeding like rabbits,” adding, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” 259

Today we are stunned by the compartmentalized morality of these men, who in many ways were enlightened and humane when it came to their own race. Yet they never took the mental leap that would have encouraged them to treat the people of other races with the same consideration. I still remember gentle lessons from my mother when my sister and I were children in the early 1960s, lessons that millions of children have received in the decades since: “There are bad Negroes and there are good Negroes, just like there are bad white people and good white people. You can’t tell whether a person is good or bad by looking at the color of his skin.” “Yes, the things those people do look funny to us. But the things we do look funny to them.” Such lessons are not indoctrination but guided reasoning, leading children to conclusions they can accept by their own lights. Surely this reasoning was within the ken of the neural hardware of the great statesmen of a century ago. The difference is that today’s children have been encouraged to take these cognitive leaps, and the resulting understanding has become second nature. Shorthand abstractions like freedom of speech, tolerance, human rights, civil rights, democracy, peaceful coexistence, and nonviolence (and their antitheses such as racism, genocide, totalitarianism, and war crimes) spread outward from their origins in abstract political discourse and became a part of everyone’s mental tool kit. The advances can fairly be called a gain in intelligence, not completely different from the ones that drove scores in abstract reasoning upward.

Moral stupidity was not confined to the policies of leaders; it was written into the law of the land. Within the lifetimes of many readers of this book, the races in much of the country were forcibly segregated, women could not serve on juries in rape trials because they would be embarrassed by the testimony, homosexuality was a felony crime, and men were allowed to rape their wives, confine them to the house, and sometimes kill them and their adulterous lovers. And if you think that today’s congressional proceedings are dumb, consider this 1876 testimony from a lawyer representing the city of San Francisco in hearings on the rights of Chinese immigrants:In relation to [the Chinese] religion, it is not our religion. That is enough to say about it; because if ours is right theirs must necessarily be wrong. [Question: What is our religion?] Ours is a belief in the existence of a Divine Providence that holds in its hands the destinies of nations. The Divine Wisdom has said that He would divide the country and the world as the heritage of five great families; that to the blacks He would give