The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,65

United States.

Anarchy was not the only cause of the mayhem in the Wild West and other violent zones in expanding America such as laborers’ camps, hobo villages, and Chinatowns (as in, “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown”). Courtwright shows that the wildness was exacerbated by a combination of demography and evolutionary psychology. These regions were peopled by young, single men who had fled impoverished farms and urban ghettos to seek their fortune in the harsh frontier. The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.102 Not only are males the more competitive sex in most mammalian species, but with Homo sapiens a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood.

The violence of men, though, is modulated by a slider: they can allocate their energy along a continuum from competing with other men for access to women to wooing the women themselves and investing in their children, a continuum that biologists sometimes call “cads versus dads.”103 In a social ecosystem populated mainly by men, the optimal allocation for an individual man is at the “cad” end, because attaining alpha status is necessary to beat away the competition and a prerequisite to getting within wooing distance of the scarce women. Also favoring cads is a milieu in which women are more plentiful but some of the men can monopolize them. In these settings it can pay to gamble with one’s life because, as Daly and Wilson have noted, “any creature that is recognizably on track toward complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory.”104 The ecosystem that selects for the “dad” setting is one with an equal number of men and women and monogamous matchups between them. In those circumstances, violent competition offers the men no reproductive advantages, but it does threaten them with a big disadvantage: a man cannot support his children if he is dead.

Another biological contribution to frontier violence was neurobiological rather than sociobiological, namely the ubiquity of liquor. Alcohol interferes with synaptic transmission throughout the cerebrum, especially in the prefrontal cortex (see figure 8–3), the region responsible for self-control. An inebriated brain is less inhibited sexually, verbally, and physically, giving us idioms like beer goggles, roaring drunk, and Dutch courage. Many studies have shown that people with a tendency toward violence are more likely to act on it when they are under the influence of alcohol.105

The West was eventually tamed not just by flinty-eyed marshals and hanging judges but by an influx of women.106 The Hollywood westerns’ “prim pretty schoolteacher[s] arriving in Roaring Gulch” captures a historical reality. Nature abhors a lopsided sex ratio, and women in eastern cities and farms eventually flowed westward along the sexual concentration gradient. Widows, spinsters, and young single women sought their fortunes in the marriage market, encouraged by the lonely men themselves and by municipal and commercial officials who became increasingly exasperated by the degeneracy of their western hellholes. As the women arrived, they used their bargaining position to transform the West into an environment better suited to their interests. They insisted that the men abandon their brawling and boozing for marriage and family life, encouraged the building of schools and churches, and shut down saloons, brothels, gambling dens, and other rivals for the men’s attention. Churches, with their coed membership, Sunday morning discipline, and glorification of norms on temperance, added institutional muscle to the women’s civilizing offensive. Today we guffaw at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (with its ax-wielding tavern terrorist Carrie Nation) and at the Salvation Army, whose anthem, according to the satire, includes the lines “We never eat cookies ‘cause cookies have yeast / And one little bite turns a man to a beast.” But the early feminists of the temperance movement were responding to the very real catastrophe of alcohol-fueled bloodbaths in maledominated enclaves.

The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology. A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third