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

Standard Equipment 51honest ethnography shows that foraging peoples, like the rest of us, aremore savage than noble. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert aje-eftenheld out as a relatively peaceful people, and so they are^cjarnpared withother foragers: their murder rate is only as high as^Betroit's. A linguistfriend of mine who studies the Wari in the^Afnazon rainforest learnedthat their language has a term for ediWethings, which includes anyonewho isn't a Wari. Of coursejjarfians don't have an "instinct for war" or a"violent brain," as tfje-'Seville Statement assures us, but humans don'texactly haveaiHnstinct for peace or a nonviolent brain, either. We cannotattribute all of human history and ethnography to toy guns andsufJerhero cartoons.Does that mean that "biology condemns man to war" (or rape or murderor selfish yuppies) and that any optimism about reducing it should besnuffed out? No one needs a scientist to make the moral point that waris not healthy for children and other living things, or the empirical pointthat some places and periods are vastly more peaceable than others andthat we should try to understand and duplicate what makes them so. Andno one needs the bromides of the Seville Statement or its disinformationthat war is unknown among animals and that their dominance hierarchiesare a form of bonding and affiliation that benefits the group. Whatcould not hurt is a realistic understanding of the psychology of humanmalevolence. For what it's worth, the theory of a module-packed mindallows both for innate motives that lead to evil acts and for innatemotives that can avert them. Not that this is a unique discovery of evolutionarypsychology; all the major religions observe that mental life isoften a struggle between desire and conscience.When it comes to the hopes of changing bad behavior, the conventionalwisdom again needs to be inverted: a complex human nature mayallow more scope for change than the blank slate of the Standard SocialScience Model. A richly structured mind allows for complicated negotiationsinside the head, and one module could subvert the ugly designs ofanother one. In the SSSM, in contrast, upbringing is often said to havean insidious and irreversible power. "Is it a boy or a girl?" is the first questionwe ask about a new human being, and from then on parents treattheir sons and daughters differently: they touch, comfort, breast-feed,indulge, and talk to boys and girls in unequal amounts. Imagine that thisbehavior has long-term consequences on the children, which include allthe documented sex differences and a tendency to treat their childrendifferently from birth. Unless we stationed parenting police in the mater-