The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,411

smarter people tend to favor. Put the two together, and we can entertain the possibility that more education can lead to smarter citizens (in the sense of “smart” we care about here), which can prepare the way for democracy and open economies, which can favor peace.

It’s difficult to verify every link in that chain, but the first and last links have been correlated in a recent paper whose title is self-explanatory: “ABC’s, 123’s, and the Golden Rule: The Pacifying Effect of Education on Civil War, 1980–1999.” 281 The political scientist Clayton Thyne analyzed 160 countries and 49 civil wars taken from the dataset of James Fearon and David Laitin, which we visited in chapter 6. Thyne discovered that four indicators of a country’s level of education—the proportion of its gross domestic product invested in primary education, the proportion of its school-age population enrolled in primary schools, the proportion of its adolescent population that was enrolled in secondary schools (especially the males), and (marginally) the level of adult literacy—all reduced the chance the country would be embroiled in a civil war a year later. The effects were sizable: compared to a country that is a standard deviation below the average in primary-school enrollment, a country that is a standard deviation above the average was 73 percent less likely to fight a civil war the following year, holding constant prior wars, per capita income, population, mountainous terrain, oil exports, the degree of democracy and anocracy, and ethnic and religious fractionation.

Now, we cannot conclude from these correlations that schooling makes people smarter, which makes them more averse to civil war. Schooling has other pacifying effects. It increases people’s confidence in their government by showing that it can do at least one thing right. It gives them skills that they can parlay into jobs rather than brigandage and warlording. And it keeps teenage boys off the streets and out of the militias. But the correlations are tantalizing, and Thyne argues that at least a part of the pacifying effect of education consists of “giving people tools with which they can resolve disputes peacefully.” 282

Sophistication of Political Discourse. Finally, let’s have a look at political discourse, which most people believe has been getting dumb and dumber. There’s no such thing as the IQ of a speech, but Tetlock and other political psychologists have identified a variable called integrative complexity that captures a sense of intellectual balance, nuance, and sophistication.283 A passage that is low in integrative complexity stakes out an opinion and relentlessly hammers it home, without nuance or qualification. Its minimal complexity can be quantified by counting words like absolutely, always, certainly, definitively, entirely, forever, indisputable, irrefutable, undoubtedly, and unquestionably. A passage gets credit for some degree of integrative complexity if it shows a touch of subtlety with words like usually, almost, but, however, and maybe. It is rated higher if it acknowledges two points of view, higher still if it discusses connections, tradeoffs, or compromises between them, and highest of all if it explains these relationships by reference to a higher principle or system. The integrative complexity of a passage is not the same as the intelligence of the person who wrote it, but the two are correlated, especially, according to Simonton, among American presidents.284

Integrative complexity is related to violence. People whose language is less integratively complex, on average, are more likely to react to frustration with violence and are more likely to go to war in war games.285 Working with the psychologist Peter Suedfeld, Tetlock tracked the integrative complexity of the speeches of national leaders in a number of political crises of the 20th century that ended peacefully (such as the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Cuban Missile Crisis) or in war (such as World War I and the Korean War), and found that when the complexity of the leaders’ speeches declined, war followed.286 In particular, they found a linkage between rhetorical simple-mindedness and military confrontations in speeches by Arabs and Israelis, and by the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War.287 We don’t know exactly what the correlations mean: whether mule-headed antagonists cannot think their way to an agreement, or bellicose antagonists simplify their rhetoric to stake out an implacable bargaining position. Reviewing both laboratory and real-world studies, Tetlock suggests that both dynamics are in play.288

Has the integrative complexity of political discourse been pulled upward by the Flynn Effect? A study by the political scientists James Rosenau and Michael Fagen suggests it may have.289 The investigators coded the integrative complexity