Let’s begin with a little primer. According to Christian doctrine, especially in Western Christianity, sin and death entered the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve, the proto-parents of the human race, who defiantly ate of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and thus earned God’s enmity and attracted the brutality of the punishment — namely labour and child-bearing — that has been borne by the human race ever since. Of course, no doubt, in context, the story is a mythical-allegorical account of what it means to become human, to become conscious of the choice that we can make between good and evil, and to know that we will die. Thus the story tells us about ourselves, and how, through consciousness, we became aware of our situation in the world, how awareness grew that we can make good and bad choices, and that choices have consequences. The story of Cain and Abel which follows close on the heels of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden of delights into the stony ground of the world where life is hard, and violence reigns, and death is an ever present reality, is an allegory of the gift and curse of consciousness.
The church however did not interpret the story allegorically — or, if it did allow for allegory, also gave it a totally realistic cast as well, assuming that it was an actual historical event that took place at the very beginning, when human beings were first created, and who, in defiance of their creator, took their first halting steps towards autonomy, and sought to become as gods, who alone, knowing good and evil, can be truly autonomous. The result, according to Christian doctrine, is that, ever since their first parents sinned through disobedience, humankind has been inherently corrupt in the core of its very being and essence, a corruption that can only be healed by a creative act of God. Just as God created humanity whole and without blemish, so only a new creation will suffice to remove the corruption which, by their hubris and attempt at self-creation, the first parents of the human race bequeathed to their children and children’s children until today.
There is, however, evidence that this is not true, which is one of the reasons why Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature, is a decisive response to the Christian doctrine of the Fall of Man and Original Sin. According to Christian doctrine intraspecies violence, since it springs from an inherent fault in human beings, caused by
Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
(as Milton put it) and thus derives from a deep-seated urge or drive towards evil, should be relatively constant throughout history. There should be no way for human beings themselves to resolve the problem of human violence and evil; instead, all we should be able to do is to await our deliverance, an event which Christians celebrate with joy and solemnity in the Christmas-Easter cycle, when a “greater Man restore[s] us” to the promise and inheritance that was ours by right of creation, though stolen from us by disobedience. What was lost by disobedience was restored by obedience even unto death. And the restoration was, according to Christians, sealed by the resurrection, which is the guarantee that we have been made whole, if only we, in turn, remain faithful unto death. This is why the martyrs are still celebrated by the church and remembered with so much piety, for martyrs are, in a sense, our warrant that what was promised in Christ will be fulfilled.
However, Pinker puts a lie to all that. I have only been able, since the book arrived yesterday noon, to read seventy pages or so, but it is clear on one thing. Primitive hunter-gatherer societies were dangerous societies. People in early societies, such as might have been represented by Adam and Eve and their kin, stood a far greater chance of dying violently at the hands of other human beings than practically any of us in a world of governments and nation states. If we were inherently prone to this kind of violence — that is, if killing our con-specifics was a natural urge, as the Original Sin hypothesis suggests, and not based on calculations of interest — then governance should have little control over rates of violent deaths.
As Pinker says:
Though war is common among foraging groups, it is certainly not universal. Nor should we expect it to be if the violent inclinations in human nature are a strategic response to the circumstances rather than a hydraulic response to an inner urge. [52; my italics]
I am assuming that Original Sin is not based on calculated advantage but on what Pinker calls “a hydraulic response to an inner urge.” If it were based on calculated advantage, then the problem is context, not the nature of the person. The fact that, in societies in which the monopoly of violence is ceded (whether voluntarily or not) to a government to which all are subject, the rate of violent death declines with astonishing rapidity, seems to indicate quite clearly that violence is not the result of an inner urge to kill, and not, thus, dependent upon a nature altered, as suggested, by an original act of disobedience, but that it is, instead, the result of the lack of certainty in ungoverned societies, and the outcome of a strategic calculation of advantage in circumstances governed by such uncertainty. In other words, there are game-theoretic reasons why Cain killed Abel, probably related to the fact that Cain was a hunter-gatherer and Abel an agriculturalist, and the conflict between these two different groups of early Homo sapiens, and not because one’s sacrifice was acceptable to God whereas the other’s was not.
I don’t want to carry this particular piece of speculation further than this for the moment, but it seemed worthwhile mentioning, since the question of Original Sin and its “metaphysical” status has been at issue lately. If Pinker is right, and, despite John Gray’s more pessimistic assessment of the nature of human violence, it seems to me that he probably is, then there is pretty substantial evidence suggesting that the idea of Original Sin, based, no doubt, on the observation that life in certain circumstances, as Hobbes claimed, is largely “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” is not, despite claims to the contrary, the result of a careful analysis of the nature of being human, and may derive entirely from selection bias, the early writers simply not having the advantage, as we do, of a great deal more evidence than was available to the writers of the Genesis fable upon which Christianity has based so much.
“Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and were punished by God.”
This is a small detail, but it’s always bothered me. How could they have known it would be wrong to eat the fruit of the tree, before they knew what wrong was?!
@Tim
I had the same problem with the story… and also the general question of why they were expected to resist the temptations of the Snake when they didn’t have experience dealing with anyone else besides God and each other. And also, what if they just ate the fruit randomly after it fell and got mixed with other fruit, or fell into a stream contaminated the water supply with the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The Adam and Eve story is a weird one, because it puts all the blame on humans, yet its clearly an unjust decision, an avoidable situation that happened because of a negligent God as much as because of human sin. Did that interpretation of A&E ever exist historically?
Perhaps I needed to add one more piece to the primer, namely, that the duty of obedience to God is assumed to be obvious. As Milton says, his poem will be about “man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree.” Had they not been disobedient the first humans would have continued, we are to suppose, in innocence of good and evil, knowing only good.
Which really puts paid to the idea, frequently expressed as a defence against the problem of evil, that without free will we would not be completely human and yet with it we must be able to choose evil.
But Adam and Eve did not choose evil, as you both point out, for they could not know good and evil until they had eaten of the tree, that is, until they had chosen to disobey. So presumably they could have remained innocent, but, remaining innocent, they would never have become human, but would have lived in unconscious innocence like the rest of the animal kingdom.
However, there has to be a contradiction at the heart of the story anyway. How else do you get a story off the ground, for there can be no story until the protagonists know that evil is a possibility? Stories are inevitably about choices. The human story cannot be told until humans know they can choose. Thus the possibility of evil is foreordained from the start.
However, my point is that, though this is true, the possibility of evil does not lie in the very nature of the human, but in the circumstances in which humans are placed. Context provides the impetus for evil, not nature. And for that, God (presuming there is such a being) must be wholly responsible. The fact that we can conceive of a heaven, a place where evil will not result from the interaction of the very same beings who inhabit earth, shows clearly that God is the villain of the piece.
I thought at first you were entering a deconstruction or reinterpretation of the Eden myth, in context of the conflict between allegorical and literal meaning. I think that might be an interesting puzzle for theologians to pass their time with, if we decided that mankind needed a meaning for pain and suffering, and so that is why it invented such myths. I think Hesiod’s Work and Days also shows that pain and suffering required meaning and Nietzsche in his The Genealogy of Morals thinks the same way.
As for Pinker, I remain sceptical, and I do tend towards Gray’s interpretation. What Pinker is doing is only supporting what René Girard says in ( Violence and the Sacred ) or what Freud said about civilization (See Civilization and Its Discontents ), that society creates coercive or suppressive institutions so as to prevent our basic desires for violence. It’s a conservative viewpoint, and even justifies such suppressive institutions.
The view I take is that modern democracies are rather like prisons, and than living in cages we live in dreams dictated to us by the state and business. Rather than the stick, we’re given the carrot, and that is a rather different form of enslavement and pacification, while the state remains as violent as ever in its positive liberal philosophy of imposing freedom on others combined with the realities of realpolitik.
I think the advancement of understanding must reach everyone and not just the elite if we are to ‘grow up’ as a civilization, but the suppressive institutions and coercive forces still keep people ignorant and enslaved in their desires, and given the dangers of mass ignorance in America, I don’t hold any such optimism if we continue the way we function.
Power (and therefore violence) never went away.
Egbert – correct me if I’m wrong, but describing democracy as a prison paints the image of a person wanting to do something, and being restricted from doing it. I believe Eric’s point – and this is what seems true to me, as well – is that under the right conditions, humans do not want to be violent.
Put another way, human nature is defined by a number of complicated if/then statements. Given a certain environment, humans will tend toward violence. Given another, we will tend towards non-violence. The religious try to state human nature solely in terms of the consequent: “Humans are evil.” Except this is demonstrably false, because of all the instances in which we are not.
Another tangential point which is even more subversive…
The tale of Adam and Eve and Original Sin all revolve around Good, Evil, and knowledge. Yet there are some people who argue that ‘Evil’ is no more real than ‘Absolute Morality’.
Quote from the blurb for ‘Zero Degrees of Freedom’:
I’ve not yet read the book myself so I can’t judge how applicable it is to this debate. But – we have already decoupled god from explanations for natural events such as lightning, disease, earthquakes. If ‘human evil’ turns out to be no more than selfish people being insufficiently empathic, we don’t need god to explain that either.
It always amuses me when Westerners idealise the Noble Savage. Here in Australia the government spends millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money so that some of the the remaining Aboriginals can live in remote communities without doctors or supermarkets, out of some bizarre urge to preserve the ‘tribal’ lifestyle; but if those taxpayers or politicians were asked to lead a genuinely tribal lifestyle they would quickly be on their mobile phones demanding the police come and get them NOW. Thank goodness people like Pinker are prepared to stand up for modern civilisation.
Egbert, you said:
I don’t think so. I think Pinker is saying that violence arises from context, not from the nature of being human. Girard is a mad Catholic, so far as I am concerned, and his idea of violence and scapegoating is Catholic apologetics, and runs along comfortably with the doctrine of Original Sin. I don’t think it deserves the attention that it has been given. I found his stuff unreadable, and so ideological as to be irrelevant to the real world as we find it. And since Giles Fraser thinks it’s the cat’s whiskers, that’s enough reason for me to go on avoiding it.
Besides, I agree with Discovered Joys here. I haven’t read Baron-Cohen, but I think evil is a religious category, and probably better understood in terms of a lack of empathy. I use it as a convenient way of speaking about the problem of evil (which can as well be called the problem of pain or suffering). I’m only at page 109 or so of Pinker’s book, and I will reserve judgement regarding the conclusion, but I think it may go some way towards showing that human beings, though capable, as we all know, of great violence and cruelty, may be far less prone to cruelty and violence, instrinsically, than has been widely thought, and that is an encouraging discovery, if it turns out to be true. If violence and cruelty are largely contextual — though of course this can never deal with sociopathy of psychopathy — this may make the reduction of violence a matter of ‘social engineering.’
Egbert, I cannot quite understand why you should take the view of government monoplies of power that you do. Certainly, it is true that there are such monoplies that are not overall beneficial, and may even be usurped, But there is surely no reason for holding governments in general, even though unequal social power and wealth may make even democratic governments unjust in varying degrees, and sometimes to great degrees, to be like prisons, or cages where we live in dreams dictated to us by business and the state. That is altogether too pessimistic, and is not borne out by the freedom and the opportunities that many people have. Of the democracies, the one that worries me the worst is the United States, because the inequalities there, I am afraid, may prompt grave misuses of power.
Eric (and Egbert), an excellent book is Lawrence H. Keeley’s ‘War before Civilisation: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage’, a book which seems to adumbrate quite a lot of Pinker’s themes (I haven’t read Pinker’s latest yet). And, Egbert, I must say I loathe John Gray’s pessimism and would put against it ‘The Great Transformation’ by that wonderfully humane and balanced thinker, Karl Polanyi.
Eric, thanks for your considered and comprehensive response. I must admit that every time I try and understand the nature of evil, I learn something new that makes me re-evaluate it all over. But the common theme seems to be that whenever dogma and authoritarianism rears up, so does evil. What scares me most is that I see it in most people, including the most rational and knowledgeable. It probably resides in me too, and so I can’t exactly make claim to any high ground.
However, if we value truth highly, then we must admit that liberalism has a violent and revolutionary history. Perhaps that violence is justified, since all justice seems to consist of the use of force and therefore violence. It might mean that values such as peace, justice, happiness, morality and truth sometimes become disharmonious, or even conflict. I don’t claim to know what the answers are, only that I am trying to understand the best I can.
Egbert, are you sure? What is liberalism’s violent history? You may be right, of course, but when I think about liberalism, violence isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, at least for me. Of course, some violence is justified; there are some wars, for example, that needed to be fought, regretful as may have been to fight them. But liberalism itself as the source of violence: I’d have to think about that.
Yes, Tim, I haven’t read Keeley’s book, but have read some history of war, and wars before civilisation, as Pinker also shows, were incredibly brutal and bloodthirsty affairs. Amongst some tribes the lives of up to 60% of the population ended violently. It’s a real eye-opener, and eye-witness testimony from Europeans who lived amongst the Aborigines in Australia report raids and wars of almost unbelievable violence and torture — as Jon Jermey suggests. I have had to quell the romance of some people I know who delude themselves into thinking that native North Americans lived lives of peacefulness in harmony with nature. While Hobbes did not have the evidence to say what he said about the life of man in the state of nature, whether solitary or not, it was certainly poor, nasty, brutish and short.
It is true in my opinion, that since the enlightenment, we’ve had plenty of violence, including wars and revolutions globally. John Gray wrote many examples in his article, although I think the recent riots in the UK is a silly example that has nothing to do with liberalism.
And some of it is justified, for example the French Revolution, possibly the American Revolution and the recent revolutions in the Arab world. The war against Germany too, and possibly the Cold War may be justified. Wars and violence waged in the fight for communism, are in my view, unjustified, as they’re authoritarian.
However, we all know that without a sufficient process of civilization–and Islam inhibits such a process–nothing good will replace the previous tyrannies. The same applies to all authoritarian religions.
Peace isn’t the prime concern of liberalism, but freedom and mostly justice are. That is why liberalism is not necessarily about peace. And that is the price we pay, and we struggle today to fight against authoritarianism within the state and society, it never ends, sometimes it is violent.
I still think liberalism is far better than tyranny, but I do recognize the very serious problems that liberalism is in, both theoretically and practically.
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Pinker notes that over time, with ups and downs, the percent of the world’s population killed violently in any given century has declined. As I recall, the second half of the 20th century was the least violent of all, despite the steady stream of proxy wars.
Note that this is a percentage comparison, not absolute numbers. So 60 million deaths in the 20th century is less than 40 million in the 18th, etc.