Abstract
In 1979, anthropologist Alan Page Fiske travelled to Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) to study the customs of the Moose, the country’s largest ethnic group (Fiske, 1990, 2004). After two years living a largely pre-modern existence in remote West Africa, he returned to the United States with a remarkable hypothesis: all social relationships, among all people, in all cultures, he claimed, could be reduced to four types.
First, there were what Fiske called ‘market pricing’ relationships, which tended to be dispassionate, brief, circumscribed, and arithmetical; anyone could take part in them, and everyone was paid what they were worth. Second, there were ‘authority ranking’ relationships, a hierarchal arrangement between superiors and subordinates, trading respect and loyalty for protection and leadership. Third, there were ‘equality matching’ relationships, which above all were strictly even. Fourth, there were ‘community sharing’ relationships, which emphasized unity, sometimes at the expense of outsiders.
He found the same four interactions in all aspects of Moose life – and in Western life too: magistrates sentencing lawbreakers conformed to ‘market pricing’ relationships; trading partners in the city displayed ‘equality matching’ relationships; and so on. Culture dictated the rules and expectations of such exchanges in any given context, but the four types remained the same whatever the setting. He codified his observations into what became known as ‘relational models theory’.
Thirty-five years later, Fiske’s latest book, co-written by Tage Shakti Rai, finds an ingenious application for his past work: explaining violence. Regular theories say violence stems from a loss of self-control, a want for empathy, or plain self-interest. But, by adding a moral dimension to relational models theory, Fiske and Rai argue just the opposite: violence arises from morality, not from its lack.
Inspired by a great deal of ethnographic research to have found that moral standards are neither universal nor always based on avoiding harm, the authors propose a new definition of morality (Rai and Fiske, 2011). Morality is about regulating our relationships to make them align with the four ideal types (each of which corresponds to one of four fundamental moral motives: proportionality, hierarchy, equality, and unity). In some cultures, the regulating is done violently. Most commonly where violence is concerned, the intention is to correct a transgression in order to restore a relationship gone ‘wrong’ to its ‘right’ equilibrium.
For instance, domestic abuse typically occurs in strong ‘authority ranking’ relationships. If a husband believes that his wife has wronged him (by appearing to flirt with another man, perhaps), he may feel that the only way to restore his status over her is to beat her. Likewise, a rapist who attacks a stranger may be motivated by the idea that by putting her beneath him, he is by proxy avenging all female moral wrongs against him. Relationships with third parties as well as victims may be regulated violently. When soldiers commit rape during wartime their moral motives may be not only to demean the women they violate but also to humiliate the men of the defeated side (a ‘hierarchy’ motive) and gain the respect of fellow soldiers (a ‘unity’ motive). In accounts like these, the authors reveal the operation of the familiar models behind such diverse acts as physical punishments, executions, pugilistic sports, honour killings, self-defence, war, initiation rites, torture, homicide, lynching, genocide, suicide, and even robbery.
A number of criminologists and sociologists have previously observed the moralistic bent in violent deeds. Donald Black (1983), for instance, argued that from the point of view of the offender, crime is about justice. But Fiske and Rai, who acknowledge Black as an influence, push the concept of moral violence much further, showing that it has other uses beyond punishing wrongdoing; it may also be used to create and sustain social relationships. For instance, among football hooligans, a capacity for violence carries a certain prestige, and fighting with rival fans serves to bind ‘community sharing’ relationships.
Virtuous Violence settles the question of whether violence is a rational act or an expressive gesture triggered by the emotions. Morally-motivated violence, the authors explain, is based on emotional experience. But while emotions may be acted on impulsively, there is no reason why a moral stance cannot be arrived at logically and pursued with careful planning. This solution is much more intellectually satisfying than the binary division of one versus the other, and means that the message of the book may be reconciled with the work of diverse theorists. On the one hand, it can accommodate a sociologist like Zygmunt Bauman (1989), who argued that the Holocaust was a coldly logical product of an efficient modern bureaucracy (a ‘market pricing’ fix). On the other hand, it has room for the great many theorists who consider feelings of shame to be essential to the understanding of violence (cf. Gilligan, 2000).
Virtuous Violence is the second of two brilliant books in this decade to have presented a radical take on the problem of violence. The first was, of course, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012). Both books turn upside-down long-held assumptions about the subject. Whereas Fiske and Rai challenge commonplace thinking that says violence is for sinners, Pinker takes on the orthodoxy that says violence in the Western world is increasing nowadays. He reports emphatically that the present is more peaceful than the past. The two books are better than bravely non-conformist – they are paradigm-shifters and, read as companions, decisively advance our understanding of where violence comes from and where it is going.
Even if he was not the first to identify the fall in violence, Pinker can take credit for putting it on the map. His enterprise is to assemble the empirical evidence from hundreds of different studies and weave it into an engaging narrative. For instance, he consults historical research on homicide, a crime considered to be the most reliable indicator of the level of violence in society at any given period. In England, the homicide rate (unlawful deaths per 100,000 population) declined from around 20 in the 13th century to 15 at the end of the Middle Ages, seven in 1600, two in 1800, and around one at the beginning of the 20th century – falling as low as 0.3 in 1931 and 1951. Although homicide rose after the 1950s and continued to do so for 40 years (the homicide index hit 1.8 in 2002/3), it began to fall again at the turn of the century. To bring Pinker’s story up to date: the murder rate is today around 0.9, and it is not too far a leap to say that the contemporary fall in violence is the resumption of his general historical trend. His message has reached the mainstream: a telling marker of the present mood in Britain is that, in contrast with the general election campaigns of the 1990s, not one candidate from any party in the 2015 polls stood on a law-and-order ticket; in fact, violent crime was not spoken of at all.
It so happens that when Fiske’s relational models are arranged in historical sequence they align perfectly with Pinker’s thesis. In order of emergence in human history, they rank as follows: (1) ‘community sharing’, (2) ‘authority ranking’, (3) ‘equality matching’, and (4) ‘market pricing’. Violence (especially expressive violence) is more common in (1) and (2), especially when the people concerned have few other means of regulating the relationship or have no access to alternative relationships (which explains why violence is more prevalent in small, closed communities that are difficult to leave). But in the last two hundred years, as the world has become more globalized and democratic, the more dispassionate and less intrinsically violent (4) has taken precedence. Democratic countries nowadays prefer trade barriers to war when it comes to hardball foreign policy, for example.
Pinker identifies the rise of the modern state and its exclusive claim on the use of legitimate violence as a significant force behind the historical decline in violence – an important theme in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process (1982), which he references appreciatively. The same basic idea can be couched in the language of Virtuous Violence. In traditional societies, catching and punishing wrongdoers is a collective task (‘communal sharing’). For example, in Moose culture, when a ‘witch’ is suspected of killing someone, the community as one drives her out. But in the modern West, the state, not the community, operating in ‘authority ranking’ mode, enforces the law and metes out punishment. Over time, the state has reduced, relatively speaking, its own use of violence in favour of gentler methods of control.
A strange case compared with the rest of the West is the United States, where the state routinely administers the law by resorting to violence – at the extreme end, via the death penalty, which, despite a temporary abolition in the 1970s, survives in a number of states – but cannot claim the ‘moral’ monopoly that its counterparts (to an extent) can. There are at least two reasons for this. First, partly owing to the legacy of the War of Independence and the constitution’s preserving of the right to carry arms, loose gun control laws in the US make it permissible for citizens to buy and carry handguns. The result is a high homicide rate (around 4.5 nationally, but much higher in some cities), a disproportionately high number of homicides involving firearms, and an appallingly high frequency of mass shootings like the kind seen at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, and, in 2015, Charleston, where a 21-year-old gunman shot nine people dead after a Bible study. In the last example, the murderer’s motive was, it appears, to restore white supremacy (a ‘hierarchical’ motive). But he shared with the shooters in the other cases a moral rejection of the state’s ‘authority ranking’ position as monopolizer of legitimate violence, reserving the right to dispense his own ‘equality matching’ justice. Second, many police departments have lost the confidence of large sections of their communities, either because operational tactics are perceived as discriminatory or needlessly violent or both. In the past years a number of American cities rioted in response to the deaths of black men who died after police contact. For the protesters in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, the use of violence by officers was amoral; the state had violated its ‘authority ranking’ relationship with them, so they rioted out of unity with fellow citizens (‘community sharing’) while visiting retribution on the establishment (‘equality matching’).
But Fiske and Rai note that police violence, like any other kind, usually has a moral basis. So, in American culture, a police patrolman might beat a suspect in order to elicit respect, which he believes is integral to his legitimate ‘authority ranking’ relationship with the civilian population. Some officers who believe that the justice system is ineffective decide to employ their own punishments instead (an ‘equality’ motive). And the courts implicitly condone their actions. Jurors are reluctant to punish police officers, tending almost always to give them the benefit of the doubt. Since 2005, out of thousands of cases nationwide of police fatal shootings in the line of duty, only 54 officers have been criminally charged, and only 11 convicted (Kimberley and Kimbriell, 2015).
The logical flipside of Fiske and Rai’s argument is that in cultures where the use of violence is deemed immoral, people give it up. So any violent society that wishes to free itself must start by changing its culture. Neither of America’s two problems is easily fixed. If the country wants to end police brutality, its courts and training academies must send the message to its officers that excessive force is not acceptable. Easier said than done, but tackling gun crime is trickier still. All evidence shows that the frequency of mass shootings could be reduced by restricting the sale of firearms, but any legislative move in that direction is always blocked by the gun lobby, a powerful coalition led by the National Rifle Association and conservative lawmakers. Fiske and Rai’s book shows that the best way to understand a homicidal gunman is to make the effort to understand his feelings on right and wrong. Rather than, every time such a gunman goes on a spree, blame his victims for being unarmed, members of the gun lobby might reflect on how he reached those feelings in the first place.