Chapter 17: War and Peace

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Welcome, curious minds, to another deep dive.

Today we're plunging into, while one of the most thought -provoking chapters from Robert M.

Sapolsky's incredible book, Behave, we're that title, coming from Sapolsky, you might initially think, uh -oh, this is going to be pretty bleak.

Right.

Yeah.

And when you first open the chapter, he kind of leans into that, reminds us of all our biological baggage, you know, the amygdala's biases, oxytocin making us mean to outsiders, the limits of empathy, even gene variants linked to antisocial stuff.

Pretty grim picture, yeah.

Enough to make you wonder if peace is even possible.

Exactly.

It feels like he's setting us up for some serious pessimism.

Indeed, he lays out those challenges with, uh, stark clarity.

But what's really fascinating is how he pivots.

Despite all these deep -seated tendencies biologically, historically, he actually argues there's, well, significant ground for optimism.

Okay.

So this deep dive isn't just about, like, cataloging our worst behaviors.

It's about understanding how our better angels, as Pinker might say, are actually ascendant and how we can actively cultivate them.

All right.

So our mission today,

dig into Sapolsky's evidence for humanity getting better, explore the strategies,

some surprising, that boost our good behavior, find maybe some emotional support in unexpected acts of kindness, and yeah, figure out how he justifies calling the chapter war and peace.

Let's dive in.

Okay.

So Sapolsky immediately challenges our maybe rosy view of the past, the good old days, maybe not so good.

He shows the world today is remarkably different and, you know, arguably better than even a few centuries ago.

Yeah.

He meticulously documents this historical decline in our absolute worst behaviors.

I mean, think about the early 19th century, slavery, global, child labor, universal, laws protecting animals, pretty much non -existent.

Right.

Now, fast forward.

Nearly every nation's outlawed slavery.

Most have labor laws.

Rates are way down.

And most regulate animal treatment.

It's a huge shift.

And it's not just the laws, right?

The world is actually measurably safer.

He gives the stat about 15th century Europe, 41 homicides per hundred thousand people.

Just imagine that.

It's staggering.

Compared to today's global average of 6 .9 or Europe's 1 .4.

And then you have places like Iceland, Japan, Singapore down at 0 .3.

That's a profound change in how we behave towards each other.

And it's not just homicide.

Think about other really grim aspects of the past.

Forced marriages, public executions for like minor things, persecuting people for being gay or having epilepsy.

Much rarer now, or at least globally condemned.

And the flip side, the positive stuff we've invented, mostly in the last century or so.

Bans on certain weapons, the World Court for crimes against humanity, the UN, peacekeeping forces.

International agreements against trafficking diamonds, tusks, even people.

Global aid agencies.

Sapolsky acknowledges, look, laws aren't always enforced perfectly.

Problems definitely still exist.

But his core argument, backed by his own field research too, is clear.

Overall, worldwide, things have gotten better.

He leans quite a bit on Steven Pinker's big book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, right?

Which really paints this frankly appalling picture of historical inhumanity.

Oh, absolutely.

Roman Colosseum massacres, medieval armies just wiping out villages.

Pinker really drives home how unbelievably brutal the past could be.

It was a sickeningly different world.

So Pinker asks this key question.

Why were people so awful then?

And maybe more importantly, why are we less awful now?

Exactly.

And Pinker points to a few big things working together.

First, states getting a monopoly on forced the civilizing process.

Second, the spread of commerce, making trade more profitable and rating.

And third, something he calls an escalator of reasoning.

An escalator of reasoning.

Yeah, the idea that over time, our ability to reason abstractly has increased,

expanding our circle of empathy, who counts as us.

This fuels things like rights revolutions for women,

minorities, animals even.

He links it to the Flynn effect, you know, rising IQ scores.

Right, that documented rise.

He suggests a kind of moral Flynn effect.

Smarter thinking leads to better perspective

appreciating peace more.

Okay, but Pinker's view isn't universally accepted, is it?

Critics jump in.

Definitely.

Some say he overvalues reason, maybe ignores religion's role or downplays emotion.

And then the really big point of contention.

Have people really gotten less awful?

Pinker famously argues we might be in the most peaceful era ever for our species, pointing to Europe's long peace since 1945.

But critics immediately say, hold on, what about the 20th century?

World War I, World War II, 130 million deaths just there, plus ongoing wars, proxy wars.

Right, the Eurocentrism critique.

Sapolsky, being the scientist, digs into Pinker's method.

Pinker corrects for total population size that eighth century Aleutian rebellion.

Only 36 million deaths, but that was like a sixth of the world's population then.

Whoa.

Proportionally equivalent to maybe 429 million deaths today.

So correcting for population helps compare the rate of violence across history.

It's a valid way to look at frequency.

Okay, that makes sense for comparing rates.

But Sapolsky adds another layer, right?

He corrects for duration, how long the killing went on.

Exactly.

And this is crucial.

When you factor in duration, how quickly the deaths happened.

World War II tragically jumps to number one.

World War I is number three.

And the Rwandan genocide, which wasn't even high on Pinker's original list, pops up at number seven.

700 ,000 people killed in just a hundred days.

Horrifying speed and intensity.

So what's the takeaway from Sapolsky's analysis here?

It's nuanced.

Things have improved in terms of who we consider us, who gets rights, who gets empathy.

Fewer people act violently day to day.

But the reach of the violent few is way greater now.

Technology,

global connections, they allow for destruction on a scale unimaginable before.

So his conclusion is kind of sobering optimism.

Pretty much.

As he puts it, things have improved, but that doesn't mean they're good.

Okay, so given that complex picture, how do we actually move forward?

How do we encourage the better angels?

Sapolsky looks at some traditional routes.

Right.

One really ancient strategy is just moving.

Simple as that.

Hunter gatherers, if tensions got high in a band, people would often just leave and join another band.

Fluidity reduced conflict.

Makes sense.

Avoidance.

Then there's trade.

You hear that saying, where goods don't cross frontiers, armies will.

Exactly.

He mentions Thomas Friedman's golden arches theory.

Oh yeah, the McDonald's theory.

Countries with McDonald's don't fight each other.

Right.

The idea being that economic interdependence makes peace more valuable than war.

Now, obviously there are exceptions and trade isn't always benign, but yeah, long distance trade can be a powerful deterrent.

And related to that is just general cultural diffusion.

Yeah, trade facilitates it, but so does modern stuff like digital access.

Just encountering other ways of life, other ideas generally seem to promote understanding and hopefully peace.

Okay, next up,

religion.

Sapolsky seems almost reluctant to get into this one.

He admits he'd love to skip it, but you can't ignore its immense power, right, for both our absolute best and our absolute worst behaviors.

He even cares a bit about his own journey.

Raised orthodox, lost faith, now sort of baffled by, but also moved by religious people.

So what does he highlight about religion's role?

He notes some common threads.

Religions have intensely personal aspects, but also really strong communal ones, and these work very differently on behavior.

Rituals can comfort us when we're anxious, although sometimes the religion itself creates the anxieties.

Belief often provides explanations, purpose, social support, all things that reduce psychological stress.

Studies even show less alarm bell activity in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex for religious folks facing certain problems.

But crucially, all major religions draw lines between us and them.

Right, the eternal question, are religious people actually nicer?

Well, the studies are messy.

Mixed results.

Some show more volunteering, more generosity, especially towards their own group, their in group.

Others find no real difference.

And there's often this issue of saying they're more generous than they actually are, or pro -sociality being tied to, like public display, or only happening on the Sabbath.

So it's complicated.

Does the type of religion matter?

Hugely.

Research by people like Norensian shows small scale societies rarely invent big moralizing gods.

It's when societies get larger, when you interact with strangers anonymously, that you tend to see the emergence of judgmental gods who are watching you.

Ah, the supernatural monitoring idea.

Exactly.

And reminders of that judgmental god,

even subtle stuff like seeing religious words or images of eyes can boost pro -social behavior.

It works similarly to secular cues, like thinking about police or juries, that feeling of being watched.

What about gods who punish?

Hell versus heaven.

Turns out, the more punitive the god, the more generosity towards fellow believers.

And believing more strongly in hell rather than heaven actually correlates with lower national crime rates.

Sticks seem more effective than carrots, maybe, when it comes to eternity.

Wow.

But there's the dark side, too, right?

The out -group hostility.

Absolutely.

That's the huge downside.

History is just filled with examples.

Religious wars often last longer, are harder to resolve than secular ones.

Studies show even subtle religious primes, like walking past a church, can increase negative attitudes towards outsiders.

Reading a Bible passage where God sanctions violence can increase aggression, even in people who aren't devout.

And it's the communal aspect again.

That's what's striking.

It's often not private prayer, but being surrounded by your core religionists, affirming that shared identity, sometimes shared hatreds, that's what seems to fuel the inner -group hostility.

So religion, not going away.

Sapolsky seems to think boosting the in -group sociality part might be useful, but the challenge is that communal part driving hostility,

and changing religions to broaden their uselessness, discouragingly tough.

Very tough.

Okay, moving from religion to contact, just getting people together.

The simple idea that familiarity breeds understanding.

Yeah, the contact hypothesis.

Sapolsky immediately throws some cold water on that.

Contact can absolutely make things worse if it's not managed carefully.

How so?

It backfires when groups are treated unequally, or there are big power imbalances, or the boundaries are just confusing.

To make contact work, you need the opposite, equal status, equal numbers, neutral settings, some kind of institutional support,

and critically, a shared goal.

A shared goal, like they have to work together on something.

Exactly.

Something that forces them to stop seeing each other primarily is them, and start seeing them as teammates needed to achieve the goal.

That re -prioritizes the SDEM thinking.

And when it's done right.

It works.

A huge meta -analysis over 500 studies showed sustained, well -structured contact significantly decreases prejudice, increases knowledge, increases empathy for thems.

The workplace, actually, can be a really effective setting for this.

What about programs like Seeds of Peace,

bringing kids from conflict zones together?

They show immediate positive effects, yeah.

Less fear, more positive views of the other side, but often those effects don't last once they go back home.

People rarely stay in touch, and sometimes the prejudice reduction boils down to exceptionalism.

Meaning, okay, most of them are awful, but I met this one guy, Mohamed David, and he was okay.

It doesn't always generalize.

But Sapolsky offers this really interesting reframe here.

Progress isn't just about not hating someone for their ancestors.

Right.

It's when you start getting irritated because they ate the last more.

That shift from group -based animosity to everyday individual friction, that's a sign of expanded easeness.

Susan Fisk's neuroscience work backs this up, even those automatic negative amygdala flickers when seeing other race faces can fade when you actually engage with a person, not the category.

He tells that incredible story about Pumla Gaboto Matakizala interviewing Eugene de Kock, the apartheid killer.

Yeah, a truly horrific figure.

But through their interviews, her empathy grew, unconsciously, to the point where she reflexively reached out and touched his finger through the prison bars.

It wasn't like they became friends.

Of course not.

But it was this stunning moment where basic human connection, that fragile oseness, briefly overcame this immense historical divide.

It shows the potential power of contact, even in extreme cases.

This links to his idea of burning and unburning bridges, right?

Exactly.

Conflict groups sometimes force new recruits to burn bridges, maybe commit atrocities against their own former community so their only loyalty, their only us, is the new group.

It's brutal.

And the flip side, unburning.

Liberated child soldiers, for instance, do much better if a relative takes them back, unbones that bridge.

But tragically, girls rescued from groups like Boko Haram are often shunned by their communities.

The bridge stays burned.

Which brings up the danger of pseudo -speciation, framing them as less than human.

Yes, demagogues do it all the time.

But Sapolsky also points to subtler forms, like manipulating our empathy.

Remember the fabricated incubator story before the Gulf War, designed specifically to horrify Americans, dehumanize Iraqis, and build support for war.

And it worked.

Scary stuff.

Okay, so if that's how we break connections, how do we build the opposite cooperation, especially among non -relatives, which humans are weirdly good at?

It's a huge puzzle, right?

Classic prisoner's dilemma logic says the first person to cooperate risks getting exploited.

So how does it even start, let alone become widespread?

Kin selection helps in small groups.

Maybe green beard effects.

Yeah, those are potential starting points.

A gene that makes you cooperate and lets you recognize others with the same gene.

But for large -scale human stuff, you need more.

Sapolsky highlights some cool mechanisms.

Like what?

Like open -ended play.

If you don't know how many rounds are in a game or an interaction,

cooperation becomes more likely because of the shadow of the future.

You might need that person later, or they might retaliate.

Also, open book play.

Reputation matters.

Reputation.

So gossip is actually useful.

In a way, yes.

Gossip spreads reputational information.

A moralizing god is like an internally open reputation book.

This allows for indirect reciprocity.

I helped you.

Someone sees it.

They're more likely to help me later.

Reputation becomes the currency.

Okay, that makes sense.

And then there's punishment.

Crucial.

All human cultures show willingness to punish people who break the rules, even at a cost to themselves.

And this willingness correlates with prosociality, like that Ethiopian charcoal study.

Villages more willing to punish free riders had healthier forests.

But punishing is costly for the punisher.

How do we solve that?

We evolved layers.

We punish people who fail to punish norm violators, secondary punishment.

We reward punishers, think police, judges, and we share the cost of punishment through things like taxes.

When all those pieces work together reasonably well, you get extraordinary levels of cooperation.

He mentions that online study, too, where people paid more if half went to charity.

Right.

Showing how intertwining personal benefit with collective good can be super powerful,

but always the crucial caveat.

What's that?

Cooperation itself is value neutral.

It takes cooperation to raise a barn, sure.

But it also takes cooperation to raid the neighboring village.

The mechanisms are the same.

It's how we use them.

Right.

Okay, so lots of mechanisms, lots of challenges.

Sapolsky then shifts gears a bit, looking for emotional support for the idea that change is really possible.

And he starts with baboons.

Rousseau with a tale.

Yeah, this is a fantastic story from his own decades of research.

Savannah baboons are typically really aggressive, hierarchical, what biologists call a tournament species.

Lots of male -male competition.

But something happened in one troop he studied.

Something extraordinary.

The most aggressive, high -ranking males started raiding a tourist lodge garbage dump for food.

They got easy calories, but missed out on crucial social time back in the troop.

Then, tragically, contaminated meat at the dump led to a tuberculosis outbreak that selectively killed off almost all of those hyper -aggressive males.

Wow.

So the troop's dynamic changed?

Unbelievably so.

The remaining troop became incredibly peaceful.

There was still a dominance hierarchy among the males, but very little bullying or displacement aggression.

Males groomed each other much more.

Their stress hormone levels dropped.

You even saw adult males grooming each other super rare normally.

That's amazing.

But did it last?

That's the kicker.

The peaceful social culture was transmitted.

New adolescent males would transfer in from other typically aggressive troops, as baboons do.

And within about six months, these newcomers assimilated.

They adopted the low -aggression, high -affiliation style of the troop.

It seems the existing females, who are no longer being constantly harassed, were more relaxed and willing to make friendly overtures to the new guys.

Helping them integrate into this different social world.

The culture itself changed the behavior of incoming individuals.

That completely upends the idea of baboons being just hardwired for aggression.

Totally.

And Sapolsky's point is powerful.

If baboons can show this much social plasticity, this much capacity for cultural change towards peace,

then surely we can too.

Anyone who says our worst behaviors are inevitable, he argues, knows too little about primates, including us.

That baboon story is incredible.

And it leads into the impact one person can have.

We think of the big names, Mandela, Gandhi, MLK.

Right, the obvious catalysts.

But Sapolsky also highlights lesser -known individuals whose actions had massive ripple effects.

Like Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia.

Yeah, the food seller.

His self -immolation in 2010 wasn't planned as a political act to reform the Middle East.

It was an act of utter desperation and rage after police abuse.

But that single act ignited the Arab Spring, toppling regimes across the region.

One person's despair changed history.

Then there's Zenji Abe, the Japanese pilot from Pearl Harbor.

Another amazing story.

50 years after the attack, Abe and other surviving Japanese pilots traveled to Pearl Harbor to apologize to American survivors.

Think about the intense hatred between those nations during the war.

Unimaginable.

But Abe, apparently moved by shame and also by decent treatment he received as a POW, initiated this reconciliation.

He even became close friends with the survivor, Richard Fisk, who had initially hated the Japanese so intensely it gave him a bleeding ulcer.

It shows how individual actions can bridge even the deepest divides, given time and sincerity.

And maybe the most chilling but also inspiring example of individual action.

My lie.

Yeah, the massacre in Vietnam, March 1968.

American soldiers killing hundreds of unarmed civilians.

Many participated, many just stood by.

But some refused.

And specifically, Hugh Thompson Jr.

and his helicopter crew.

Incredible bravery.

Thompson wasn't even part of the ground unit.

He saw what was happening from the air, landed his helicopter between the terrified villagers and his fellow American soldiers.

He trained his machine guns on the Americans and ordered his crew Glenn Andriada and Lawrence Colburn to fire if the soldiers harmed any more civilians.

He threatened to fire on his own side to save civilians.

In that moment, his us wasn't his fellow soldiers, it was the innocent people about to be killed.

A staggering recategorization under extreme pressure.

He actively stopped the killing.

And finally, John Newton.

Amazing grace.

Right, the famous abolitionist.

But Sapolsky emphasizes that Newton's path wasn't some sudden blinding conversion on the road to Damascus.

No.

Not at all.

Newton was a slave trader for years, capped in slave ships.

Even after his supposed spiritual conversion, even after becoming an Anglican priest, he continued to invest in slave trading ventures for a while.

Seriously, that complicates the picture.

Massively.

But that's why Sapolsky finds him inspiring.

Newton's stumbling, familiar moral failties.

His slow, inconsistent, lurching journey towards becoming this moral giant.

It shows that change is possible, even for people like us.

Full of inconsistencies and rationalizations.

It wasn't automatic.

It was a long, hard -won evolution.

So whether it's a split -second decision like Thompson's or a decades -long struggle like Newton's, individuals really can drive change.

Absolutely.

And that potential expands when we look at collective action.

Sapolsky points out how surprisingly often enemy soldiers would fraternize in war's past, bartering, sharing news, even holding religious services together before battles.

Right, leading into World War I and the trenches.

The Christmas Truce of 1914.

A truly remarkable event.

Spontaneously along miles of the Western Front, soldiers from opposing sides just stopped fighting.

Climbed out of their trenches, shared food, sang carols, exchanged gifts, apparently even played soccer in no man's land.

Wild.

Though it wasn't universally popular, right?

No.

Condemned by some hardliners, including, famously, a young Corporal Hitler.

And the high command cracked down hard afterwards, so it was rarely repeated on that scale.

What made it possible that one time?

Several factors converged.

The static trench warfare meant soldiers were facing the same enemies for long periods, allowing for repeated interactions that shadow of the future again.

They likely had a shared, basic culture, similar backgrounds, maybe even some top -down nods of approval from certain officers or the Pope's call for a truce.

But even more amazing, perhaps, was the live and let live system.

Yeah, this was even more bottom -up.

Soldiers evolved stable, informal truces, without explicit communication or official approval.

They just stopped shooting during mealtimes or when the weather was awful.

They learned not to shell the enemy's supply wagons or latrines because they knew their own would be hit in return.

How did they even establish these silent agreements?

Often through signaling.

A sniper might repeatedly hit the exact same spot on an abandoned building near the enemy trench, demonstrating skill, but deliberately choosing not to kill anyone.

It was a complex game of modified tit for tat.

Cooperate first.

Don't shoot.

Retaliate if fired upon.

Maybe fire two shells back for everyone received.

But also be willing to forgive and return to cooperation.

The psychology behind that is fascinating.

It really is.

First, soldiers had to see the enemy not as monsters, but as rational actors playing the same game.

Then, a kind of moral responsibility emerged.

You don't betray someone who deals reliably with you, even if they're the enemy.

They started recognizing shared miseries.

The mud, the rats, the bad food, the distant clueless officers.

Though us and them shifted.

Exactly.

The primary them stopped being the guys 50 yards away in the other trench and started being the rain or the generals or the war itself.

A sense of shared humanity, of camaraderie almost, crept in across enemy lines.

Even though those truces were often fragile and broken by orders from above.

They still show this incredible, inherent capacity we have for finding common ground and building cooperation, even in the most hellish circumstances imaginable.

It feels hard sometimes today to imagine that kind of truth happening with groups committing atrocities we see online.

It does.

But then Sapolsky reminds us of that intense, almost total hatred between Americans and Japanese during World War II.

The dehumanizing propaganda, soldiers taking body parts as souvenirs.

And then, decades later, you have Zengi Abe and Richard Fisk finding reconciliation.

Time and contact can do extraordinary things to even the fiercest hatreds.

So wrapping this up, what's the big picture from Sapolsky's War and Peace?

It's been quite a journey.

It really has.

We've seen compelling evidence that, yes, despite all our biological baggage, humanity has made real strides.

We've curbed some of our worst impulses, fostered some of our best.

It's not linear.

It's not perfect.

But the trend is there.

And we've explored concrete ways this happens, moving, trading, the complex role of religion, the careful management of intergroup contact, and those intricate dynamics of reputation and punishment that underpin cooperation.

Plus, we've found that emotional support, right, in the stunning flexibility of baboon culture, in the world -changing impact of individuals like Bouazizi, Abe, Thompson, even in the messy, relatable struggle of John Newton, it gives you hope, seeing that capacity for change.

And maybe most movingly, that collective power.

Ordinary people, soldiers in the trenches, finding ways to assert their shared humanity against the machinery of war.

Sapolsky ends by championing peaceology, a science dedicated to understanding how peace happens and how we can make it happen more often.

Recognizing our irrationalities, yes, but also our deep -seated aversion to killing up close, our capacity for empathy alongside our capacity for hate.

It does make you wonder, looking back now, past hatreds often seem so baffling, almost irrational.

What current hatreds do you think will future generations look back on and just struggle to comprehend?

That's a powerful question.

And maybe, flipping Santiana's famous line, those who don't remember the surprising truces of World War I, or the moral courage of a Hugh Thompson or a Zengi Abe, or who don't recognize that science can actually teach us how to make those moments more likely.

Maybe they're condemned to be less likely to repeat those reasons for hope.

A sobering thought to end on.

Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into Sapolsky.

We hope it gave you a lot to think about regarding our complex, contradictory, but maybe ultimately hopeful human nature.

And a warm thank you from the whole Last Minute Lecture team for diving deep with us today.