The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,57

Polly Wiessner examines the historical trajectory of violence among the Enga, a New Guinean tribal people. She begins with an excerpt from the field notes of an anthropologist who worked in their region in 1939:We were now in the heart of the Lai Valley, one of the most beautiful in New Guinea, if not in the world. Everywhere were fine well-laid out garden plots, mostly of sweet potato and groves of casuarinas. Well-cut and graded roads traversed the countryside, and small parks . . . dotted the landscape, which resembled a huge botanical garden.

She compares it to her own diary entry from 2004:The Lai Valley is a virtual wasteland—as the Enga say, “cared for by the birds, snakes, and rats.” Houses are burned to ash, sweet potato gardens overgrown with weeds, and trees razed to jagged stumps. In the high forest, warfare rages on, fought by “Rambos” with shotguns and high-powered rifles taking the lives of many. By the roadside where markets bustled just a few years before, there is an eerie emptiness. 70

The Enga were never what you could call a peaceable people. One of their tribes, the Mae Enga, are represented by a bar in figure 2–3: it shows that they killed each other in warfare at an annual rate of about 300 per 100,000, dwarfing the worst rates we have been discussing in this chapter. All the usual Hobbesian dynamics played out: rape and adultery, theft of pigs and land, insults, and of course, revenge, revenge, and more revenge. Still, the Enga were conscious of the waste of war, and some of the tribes took steps, intermittently successful, to contain it. For example, they developed Geneva-like norms that outlawed war crimes such as mutilating bodies or killing negotiators. And though they sometimes were drawn into destructive wars with other villages and tribes, they worked to control the violence within their own communities. Every human society is faced with a conflict of interest between the younger men, who seek dominance (and ultimately mating opportunities) for themselves, and the older men, who seek to minimize internecine damage within their extended families and clans. The Enga elders forced obstreperous young men into “bachelor cults,” which encouraged them to control their vengeful impulses with the help of proverbs like “The blood of a man does not wash off easily” and “You live long if you plan the death of a pig, but not if you plan the death of a person.”71 And consonant with the other civilizing elements in their culture, they had norms of propriety and cleanliness, which Wiessner described to me in an e-mail:The Enga cover themselves with raincapes when they defecate, so as not to offend anybody, even the sun. For a man to stand by the road, turn his back and pee is unthinkably crude. They wash their hands meticulously before they cook food; they are extremely modest about covering genitals, and so on. Not so great with snot.

Most important, the Enga took well to the Pax Australiana beginning in the late 1930s. Over the span of two decades warfare plummeted, and many of the Enga were relieved to set aside violence to settle their disputes and “fight in courts” instead of on the battlefield.

When Papua New Guinea gained independence in 1975, violence among the Enga shot back up. Government officials doled out land and perks to their clansmen, provoking intimidation and revenge from the clans left in the cold. Young men left the bachelor cults for schools that prepared them for nonexistent jobs, then joined “Raskol” criminal gangs that were unrestrained by elders and the norms they had imposed. They were attracted by alcohol, drugs, nightclubs, gambling, and firearms (including M-16s and AK-47s) and went on rampages of rape, plunder, and arson, not unlike the knights of medieval Europe. The state was weak: its police were untrained and outgunned, and its corrupt bureaucracy was incapable of maintaining order. In short, the governance vacuum left by instant decolonization put the Papuans through a decivilizing process that left them with neither traditional norms nor modern third-party enforcement. Similar degenerations have occurred in other former colonies in the developing world, forming eddies in the global flow toward lower rates of homicide.

It’s easy for a Westerner to think that violence in lawless parts of the world is intractable and permanent. But at various times in history communities have gotten so fed up with the bloodshed that they have launched what criminologists call a civilizing offensive.72 Unlike the unplanned reductions in