Steven Pinker on Utopian Ideologies & Genocides
From The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.
Why should utopian ideologies so often lead to genocide? At first glance it seems to make no sense. Even if an actual utopia is unattainable for all kinds of practical reasons, shouldn’t the quest for a perfect world at least leave us with a better one—a world that is 60 percent of the way to perfection, say, or even 15 percent? After all, a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. Shouldn’t we aim high, dream the impossible dream, imagine things that never were and ask “why not”?
Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.
Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You do the math.
The second genocidal hazard of a utopia is that it has to conform to a tidy blueprint. In a utopia, everything is there for a reason. What about the people? Well, groups of people are diverse. Some of them stubbornly, perhaps essentially, cling to values that are out of place in a perfect world. They may be entrepreneurial in a world that works by communal sharing, or bookish in a world that works by labor, or brash in a world that works by piety, or clannish in a world that works by unity, or urban and commercial in a world that has returned to its roots in nature. If you are designing the perfect society on a clean sheet of paper, why not write these eyesores out of the plans from the start?
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, the historian Ben Kiernan notes another curious feature of utopian ideologies. Time and again they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise, which they seek to restore as a healthful substitute for prevailing urban decadence. In chapter 4 we saw that after the Enlightenment had emerged from the intellectual bazaar of cosmopolitan cities, the German counter-Enlightenment romanticized the attachment of a people to their land—the blood and soil of Kiernan’s title. The ungovernable metropolis, with its fluid population and ethnic and occupational enclaves, is an affront to a mindset that envisions a world of harmony, purity, and organic wholeness. Many of the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries were guided by utopian images of ethnic groups flourishing in their native homelands, often based on myths of ancestral tribes who settled the territory at the dawn of time. This agrarian utopianism lay behind Hitler’s dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry, which he associated with commerce and cities, and his deranged plan to depopulate Eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city-dwellers to colonize. Mao’s massive agrarian communes and Pol Pot’s expulsion of Cambodian city-dwellers to rural killing fields are other examples.
Commercial activities, which tend to be concentrated in cities, can themselves be triggers of moralistic hatred. As we shall see in chapter 9, people’s intuitive sense of economics is rooted in tit-for-tat exchanges of concrete goods or services of equivalent value—say, three chickens for one knife. It does not easily grasp the abstract mathematical apparatus of a modern economy, such as money, profit, interest, and rent. In intuitive economics, farmers and craftsmen produce palpable items of value. Merchants and other middlemen, who skim off a profit as they pass goods along without causing new stuff to come into being, are seen as parasites, despite the value they create by enabling transactions between producers and consumers who are unacquainted or separated by distance. Moneylenders, who loan out a sum and then demand additional money in return, are held in even greater contempt, despite the service they render by providing people with money at times in their lives when it can be put to the best use. People tend to be oblivious to the intangible contributions of merchants and moneylenders and view them as bloodsuckers. (Once again the metaphor comes from biology.) Antipathy toward individual middlemen can easily transfer to antipathy to ethnic groups. The capital necessary to prosper in middlemen occupations consists mainly of expertise rather than land or factories, so it is easily shared among kin and friends, and it is highly portable. For these reasons it’s common for particular ethnic groups to specialize in the middleman niche and to move to whatever communities currently lack them, where they tend to become prosperous minorities—and targets of envy and resentment. Many victims of discrimination, expulsion, riots, and genocide have been social or ethnic groups that specialize in middlemen niches. They include various bourgeois minorities in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and the Jews in Europe.
Democides are often scripted into the climax of an eschatological narrative, a final spasm of violence that will usher in millennial bliss. The parallels between the utopian ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries and the apocalyptic visions of traditional religions have often been noticed by historians of genocide. Daniel Chirot, writing with the social psychologist Clark McCauley, observes:
Marxist eschatology actually mimicked Christian doctrine. In the beginning, there was a perfect world with no private property, no classes, no exploitation, and no alienation—the Garden of Eden. Then came sin, the discovery of private property, and the creation of exploiters. Humanity was cast from the Garden to suffer inequality and want. Humans then experimented with a series of modes of production, from the slave, to the feudal, to the capitalist mode, always seeking the solution and not finding it. Finally there came a true prophet with a message of salvation, Karl Marx, who preached the truth of Science. He promised redemption but was not heeded, except by his close disciples who carried the truth forward. Eventually, however, the proletariat, the carriers of the true faith, will be converted by the religious elect, the leaders of the party, and join to create a more perfect world. A final, terrible revolution will wipe out capitalism, alienation, exploitation, and inequality. After that, history will end because there will be perfection on earth, and the true believers will have been saved.
Drawing on the work of the historians Joachim Fest and George Mosse, they also comment on Nazi eschatology:
It was not an accident that Hitler promised a Thousand Year Reich, a millennium of perfection, similar to the thousand-year reign of goodness promised in Revelation before the return of evil, the great battle between good and evil, and the final triumph of God over Satan. The entire imagery of his Nazi Party and regime was deeply mystical, suffused with religious, often Christian, liturgical symbolism, and it appealed to a higher law, to a mission decreed by fate and entrusted to the prophet Hitler.
Finally, there are the job requirements. Would you want the stress and responsibility of running a perfect world? Utopian leadership selects for monumental narcissism and ruthlessness. Its leaders are possessed of a certainty about the rectitude of their cause and an impatience for incremental reforms or on-the-fly adjustments guided by feedback from the human consequences of their grand schemes. Mao, who had his image plastered all over China and his little red book of sayings issued to every citizen, was described by his doctor and only confidant Li Zhisui as voracious for flattery, demanding of sexual servicing by concubines, and devoid of warmth and compassion.123 In 1958 he had a revelation that the country could double its steel production in a year if peasant families contributed to the national output by running backyard smelters. On pain of death for failing to meet the quotas, peasants melted down their woks, knives, shovels, and doorknobs into lumps of useless metal. It was also revealed to him that China could grow large quantities of grain on small plots of land, freeing the rest for grasslands and gardens, if farmers planted the seedlings deep and close together so that class solidarity would make them grow strong and thick. Peasants were herded into communes of 50,000 to implement this vision, and anyone who dragged his feet or pointed out the obvious was executed as a class enemy. Impervious to signals from reality informing him that his Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward, Mao masterminded a famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.
The motives of leaders are critical in understanding genocide, because the psychological ingredients—the mindset of essentialism; the Hobbesian dynamic of greed, fear, and vengeance; the moralization of emotions like disgust; and the appeal of utopian ideologies—do not overcome an entire population at once and incite them to mass killing. Groups that avoid, distrust, or even despise each other can coexist without genocide indefinitely. Think, for example, of African Americans in the segregated American South, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, and Africans in South Africa under apartheid. Even in Nazi Germany, where anti-Semitism had been entrenched for centuries, there is no indication that anyone but Hitler and a few fanatical henchmen thought it was a good idea for the Jews to be exterminated. When a genocide is carried out, only a fraction of the population, usually a police force, military unit, or militia, actually commits the murders.
In the 1st century CE, Tacitus wrote, “A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of a few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.” According to the political scientist Benjamin Valentino in Final Solutions, that division of labor applies to the genocides of the 20th century as well. A leader or small clique decides that the time for genocide is right. He gives the go-ahead to a relatively small force of armed men, made up a mixture of true believers, conformists, and thugs (often recruited, as in medieval armies, from the ranks of criminals, drifters, and other unemployable young men). They count on the rest of the population not to get in their way, and thanks to features of social psychology that we will explore in chapter 8, they generally don’t. The psychological contributors to genocide, such as essentialism, moralization, and utopian ideologies, are engaged to different degrees in each of these constituencies. They consume the minds of the leaders and the true believers but have to tip the others only enough to allow the leaders to make their plans a reality. The indispensability of leaders to 20th-century genocide is made plain by the fact that when the leaders died or were removed by force, the killings stopped.
