The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,425

that living in a more cosmopolitan society, one that puts us in contact with a diverse sample of other people and invites us to take their points of view, changes our emotional response to their well-being. Imagine taking this change to its logical conclusion: our own well-being and theirs have become so intermingled that we literally love our enemies and feel their pain. Our potential adversary’s payoffs would simply be summed with our own (and vice versa), and pacifism would become overwhelmingly preferable to aggression (figure 10–5).

Of course, a perfect fusion of the interests of every living human is an unattainable nirvana. But smaller increments in the valuation of other people’s interests—say, a susceptibility to pangs of guilt when thinking about enslaving, torturing, or annihilating others—could shift the likelihood of aggressing against them.

We have seen evidence for both links in this causal chain: exogenous events that expanded opportunities for perspective-taking, and a psychological response that turns perspective-taking into sympathy (chapters 4 and 9). Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society’s norms. Vivid depictions of the suffering wrought by slavery, sadistic punishments, war, and cruelty to children and animals preceded the reforms that outlawed or reduced those practices. Though chronology does not prove causation, the laboratory studies showing that hearing or reading a first-person narrative can enhance people’s sympathy for the narrator at least make it plausible (chapter 9).

FIGURE 10–5. How empathy and reason resolve the Pacifist’s Dilemma

Literacy, urbanization, mobility, and access to mass media continued their rise in the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the second half of the 20th a Global Village began to emerge that made people even more aware of others unlike themselves (chapters 5 and 7). Just as the Republic of Letters and the Reading Revolution helped to kindle the Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century, the Global Village and the electronics revolution may have helped along the Long Peace, New Peace, and Rights Revolutions of the 20th. Though we cannot prove the common observation that media coverage accelerated the civil rights movement, antiwar sentiment, and the fall of communism, the perspective-sympathy studies are suggestive, and we saw several statistical links between the cosmopolitan mixing of peoples and the endorsement of humanistic values (chapters 7 and 9).14

THE ESCALATOR OF REASON

The expanding circle and the escalator of reason are powered by some of the same exogenous causes, particularly literacy, cosmopolitanism, and education.15 And their pacifying effect may be depicted by the same fusion of interests in the Pacifist’s Dilemma. But the expanding circle (as I have been using the term) and the escalator of reason are conceptually distinct (chapter 9). The first involves occupying another person’s vantage point and imagining his or her emotions as if they were one’s own. The second involves ascending to an Olympian, superrational vantage point—the perspective of eternity, the view from nowhere—and considering one’s own interests and another person’s as equivalent.

The escalator of reason has an additional exogenous source: the nature of reality, with its logical relationships and empirical facts that are independent of the psychological makeup of the thinkers who attempt to grasp them. As humans have honed the institutions of knowledge and reason, and purged superstitions and inconsistencies from their systems of belief, certain conclusions were bound to follow, just as when one masters the laws of arithmetic certain sums and products are bound to follow (chapters 4 and 9). And in many cases the conclusions are ones that led people to commit fewer acts of violence.

Throughout the book we have seen the beneficial consequences of an application of reason to human affairs. At various times in history superstitious killings, such as in human sacrifice, witch hunts, blood libels, inquisitions, and ethnic scapegoating, fell away as the factual assumptions on which they rested crumbled under the scrutiny of a more intellectually sophisticated populace (chapter 4). Carefully reasoned briefs against slavery, despotism, torture, religious persecution, cruelty to animals, harshness to children, violence against women, frivolous wars, and the persecution of homosexuals were not just hot air but entered into the decisions of the people and institutions who attended to the arguments and implemented reforms (chapters 4 and 7).

Of course it’s not always easy to distinguish empathy from reason, the heart