Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

518 J HOW THE MIND WORKSness, and an ability to predict the consequences of our actions. The differentparts of the mind struggle to engage or disengage the clutch pedalof behavior, so bad thoughts do not always cause bad deeds. JimmyCarter, in his famous Playboy interview, said, "I have looked on a lot ofwomen with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times." Butthe prying American press has found no evidence that he has committedit in real life even once.And on the larger stage, history has seen terrible blights disappearpermanently, sometimes only after years of bloodshed, sometimes as if ina puff of smoke. Slavery, harem-holding despots, colonial conquest,blood feuds, women as property, institutionalized racism and anti-Semitism,child labor, apartheid, fascism, Stalinism, Leninism, and war havevanished from expanses of the world that had suffered them for decades,centuries, or millennia. The homicide rates in the most vicious Americanurban jungles are twenty times lower than in many foraging societies.Modern Britons are twenty times less likely to be murdered than theirmedieval ancestors.If the brain has not changed over the centuries, how can the humancondition have improved? Part of the answer, I think, is that literacy,knowledge, and the exchange of ideas have undermined some kinds ofexploitation. It's not that people have a well of goodness that moralexhortations can tap. It's that information can be framed in a way thatmakes exploiters look like hypocrites or fools. One of our baserinstincts—claiming authority on a pretext of beneficence and competence—canbe cunningly turned on the others. When everyone seesgraphic representations of suffering, it is no longer possible to claimthat no harm is being done. When a victim gives a first-person accountin words the victimizer might use, it's harder to maintain that the victimsare a lesser kind of being. When a speaker is shown to be echoingthe words of his enemy or of a past speaker whose policies led to disaster,his authority can crumble. When peaceable neighbors aredescribed, it's harder to insist that war is inevitable. When MartinLuther King said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise upand live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to beself-evident, that all men are created equal,'" he made it impossible forsegregationists to maintain they were patriots without looking like charlatans.And as I mentioned at the outset, though conflict is a human universal,so are efforts to reduce it. The human mind occasionally catches a