The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,422

We also know that exchange in the real world can be a lucrative positive-sum game. But we don’t know whether exchange itself reduces hostile tensions. As far as I know, in the vast literature on empathy and cooperation and aggression, no one has tested whether people who have consummated a mutually profitable exchange are less likely to shock each other or to spike each other’s food with three-alarm hot sauce. I suspect that among researchers, gentle commerce is just not a sexy idea. Cultural and intellectual elites have always felt superior to businesspeople, and it doesn’t occur to them to credit mere merchants with something as noble as peace.6

FEMINIZATION

Depending on how you look at it, the late Tsutomu Yamaguchi is either the world’s luckiest man or the world’s unluckiest man. Yamaguchi survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, but then made an unfortunate choice as to where to go to flee the devastation: Nagasaki. He survived that blast as well and lived another sixty-five years, passing away in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. A man who survived the only two nuclear strikes in history deserves our respectful attention, and before he died he offered a prescription for peace in the nuclear age: “The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.”7

Yamaguchi was invoking the most fundamental empirical generalization about violence, that it is mainly committed by men. From the time they are boys, males play more violently than females, fantasize more about violence, consume more violent entertainment, commit the lion’s share of violent crimes, take more delight in punishment and revenge, take more foolish risks in aggressive attacks, vote for more warlike policies and leaders, and plan and carry out almost all the wars and genocides (chapters 2, 3, 7, and 8). Even when the sexes overlap and the difference between their averages is small, the difference can decide a close election, or set off a spiral of belligerence in which each side has to be a bit more bellicose than the other. Historically, women have taken the leadership in pacifist and humanitarian movements out of proportion to their influence in other political institutions of the time, and recent decades, in which women and their interests have had an unprecedented influence in all walks of life, are also the decades in which wars between developed states became increasingly unthinkable (chapters 5 and 7). James Sheehan’s characterization of the postwar transformation of the mission of the European state, from military prowess to cradle-to-grave nurturance, is almost a caricature of traditional gender roles.

Yamaguchi’s exact prescription, of course, can be debated. George Shultz recalls that when he told Margaret Thatcher in 1986 that he had stood by as Ronald Reagan suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that they abolish nuclear weapons, she clobbered him with her handbag.8 But, Yamaguchi might reply, Thatcher’s own children were already grown up, and in any case her views were tuned to a world that was run by men. Since the world’s nuclear states will not all be governed by women anytime soon, let alone by nursing mothers, we will never know whether Yamaguchi’s prescription is right. But he had a point when he speculated that a more feminized world is a more peaceful world.

Female-friendly values may be expected to reduce violence because of the psychological legacy of the basic biological difference between the sexes, namely that males have more of an incentive to compete for sexual access to females, while females have more of an incentive to stay away from risks that would make their children orphans. Zero-sum competition, whether it takes the form of the contests for women in tribal and knightly societies or the contests for honor, status, dominance, and glory in modern ones, is more a man’s obsession than a woman’s. Suppose that in the Pacifist’s Dilemma, some portion of the rewards of victory and the costs of defeat—say, 80 percent—consists of the swelling and bruising of the male ego. And suppose that the choices are now made by female actors, so these psychic payoffs are reduced accordingly (figure 10–4; I have omitted the symmetrical Other’s Choices for clarity). Now peace is more tempting than victory, and war more costly than defeat. The pacifist option wins hands-down. The reversal would be even more dramatic if we adjusted the war cell to reflect a greater cost of violent conflict to women than to men.

To be sure, a shift from male to female influence in