We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.
It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite.
I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.
The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception
Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.
A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.
The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.
So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.
In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires.
What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.
Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by.
Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, “natural” in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don’t want it.
As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can’t kill someone and trade with him too.
The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.
Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.
A…reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.
The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.
Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone’s claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.
A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift
The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.
As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.
The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.
When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.
I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.
Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.
The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.
Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.
They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being.
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that’s an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents’ eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).
Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.
A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.
Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.
we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.
The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.
In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die.
The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.
legal investigation. As Clinton noted, “My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful.
The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, ‘One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,’ gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)
The typical imperative from biology is not “Thou shalt… ,” but “If … then … else.
The whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle imaginable.
Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not.
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking – watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.
I’ve never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can’t understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.
America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for – until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.
Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts – decoration of surfaces and bodies – appears to be a human universal.