Yet the United States, too, has been swept by the historical current, and capital punishment is on the way out despite its continuing popular appeal (with 61 percent in favor in 2015).38 Seven states have repealed the death penalty in the past decade, an additional sixteen have moratoria, and thirty have not executed anyone in five years. Even Texas executed only seven prisoners in 2016, compared with forty in 2000. Figure 14-4 shows the steady decline of the use of the death penalty in the United States, with what may be a final slide to zero visible in the rightmost segment. And true to the pattern in Europe, as the practice becomes obsolescent, public opinion straggles behind: in 2016, popular support for the death penalty slipped just below 50 percent for the first time in almost fifty years.39
Figure 14-4: Executions, US, 1780–2016
Sources: Death Penalty Information Center 2017. Population estimates from US Census Bureau 2017. The arrow points to 2010, the last year plotted in fig. 4–4 of Pinker 2011.
How can the United States be doing away with capital punishment almost despite itself? Here we see another path along which moral progress can take place. Though the American political system is more populist than those of its Western peers, it still falls short of being a direct participatory democracy like ancient Athens (which, pointedly, put Socrates to death). With the historical expansion of sympathy and reason, even the staunchest fans of capital punishment have lost their stomach for lynch mobs, hanging judges, and rowdy public executions, and insist that the practice be carried out with a modicum of dignity and care. That requires an intricate apparatus of death and a team of mechanics to run and repair it. As the machine wears out and the mechanics refuse to maintain it, it becomes increasingly unwieldy and invites being scrapped.40 The American death penalty is not so much being abolished as falling apart, piece by piece.
First, advances in forensic science, particularly DNA fingerprinting, have shown that innocent people have almost certainly been put to death, a scenario that unnerves even ardent supporters of the death penalty. Second, the grisly business of snuffing out a life has evolved from the gory sadism of crucifixion and disembowelment, to the quick but still graphic ropes, bullets, and blades, to the invisible agents of gas and electricity, to the pseudo-medical procedure of lethal injection. But doctors refuse to administer it, pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply the drugs, and witnesses are disturbed by the death throes during botched attempts. Third, the chief alternative to the death penalty, life in prison, has become more reliable as escape-proof and riot-proof penitentiaries have been perfected. Fourth, as the rate of violent crime has plummeted (chapter 12), people feel less need for draconian remedies. Fifth, because the death penalty is seen as such a momentous undertaking, the summary executions of earlier eras have given way to a drawn-out legal ordeal. The sentencing phase after a guilty verdict is tantamount to a second trial, and a death sentence triggers a lengthy process of reviews and appeals—so lengthy that most death-row prisoners die of natural causes. Meanwhile, the billable hours from expensive lawyers cost the state eight times as much as life in prison. Sixth, social disparities in death sentences, with poor and black defendants disproportionately being put to death (“Those without the capital get the punishment”), have weighed increasingly on the nation’s conscience. Finally, the Supreme Court, which is repeatedly tasked with formulating a consistent rationale for this crazy quilt, has struggled to rationalize the practice, and has chipped away at it piece by piece. In recent years it has ruled that states may not execute juveniles, people with intellectual disabilities, or perpetrators of crimes other than murder, and it came close to ruling against the hit-and-miss method of lethal injection. Court watchers believe it is only a matter of time before the Justices are forced to confront the caprice of the whole macabre practice head on, invoke “evolving standards of decency,” and strike it down as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment once and for all.
The uncanny assemblage of scientific, institutional, legal, and social forces all pushing to strip government of its power to kill makes it seem as if there really is a mysterious arc bending toward justice. More prosaically, we are seeing a moral principle—Life is sacred, so killing is onerous—become distributed across a wide range of actors and institutions that have to cooperate to make the death penalty possible. As these actors and institutions implement the principle more consistently and thoroughly, they inexorably push the country away from the impulse to avenge a life with a life. The pathways are manifold and tortuous, the effects are slow and then sudden, but in the fullness of time an idea from the Enlightenment can transform the world.
CHAPTER 15
EQUAL RIGHTS
Humans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans as means to an end or nuisances to be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race or creed seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom, and sexuality of women.1 People translate their discomfort with sexual nonconformity into moralistic condemnation.2 We call these phenomena racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they have been rampant, to varying degrees, in most cultures throughout history. The disavowal of these evils is a large part of what we call civil rights or equal rights. The historical expansion of these rights—the stories of Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall—is a stirring chapter in the story of human progress.3
The rights of racial minorities, women, and gay people continue to advance, each recently emblazoned on a milestone. The year 2017 saw the completion of two terms in office by the first African American president, an achievement movingly captured by First Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” Barack Obama was succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a presidential election, less than a century after American women were even allowed to vote; she won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were it not for peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that election year. In a parallel universe very similar to this one until November 8, 2016, the world’s three most influential nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women.4 And in 2015, just a dozen years after it ruled that homosexual activity may not be criminalized, the Supreme Court guaranteed the right of marriage to same-sex couples.
But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come. An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society—which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing after decades of struggle.
Like other forms of progressophobia, the denial of advances in rights has been abetted by sensational headlines. A string of highly publicized killings by American police officers of unarmed African American suspects, some of them caught on smartphone videos, has led to a sense that the country is suffering an epidemic of racist attacks by police on black men. Media coverage of athletes who have assaulted their wives or girlfriends, and of episodes of rape on college campuses, has suggested to many that we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. And one of the most heinous crimes in American history took place in 2016 when Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding another fifty-three.
The belief in an absence of progress has been fortified by the recent history of the universe we do live in, where Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton was the beneficiary of the American electoral system in 2016. During his campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim insults that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy followers he encouraged at his rallies were even more offensive. Some commentators wo
rried that his victory represented a turning point in the nation’s progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that we had never made progress in the first place.
The goal of this chapter is to plumb the depths of the current that carries equal rights along. Is it an illusion, a turbulent whirlpool atop a stagnant pond? Does it easily change direction and flow backwards? Or does justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a mighty stream?5 I’ll end with a coda about progress in the rights of the most easily victimized sector of humanity, children.
* * *
By now you should be skeptical about reading history from the headlines, and that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.6 (American police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue.) A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing. And to this day it is unclear whether the Orlando nightclub massacre was committed out of homophobia, sympathy for ISIS, or the drive for posthumous notoriety that motivates most rampage shooters.
Better first drafts of history can be gleaned from data on values and from vital statistics. The Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have undergone a “fundamental shift” toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly widespread prejudices sinking into oblivion.7 The shift is visible in figure 15-1, which plots reactions to three survey statements that are representative of many others.
Figure 15-1: Racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions, US, 1987–2012
Source: Pew Research Center 2012b. The arrows point to the most recent years plotted in Pinker 2011 for similar questions: Blacks, 1997 (fig. 7–7); Women, 1995 (fig. 7–11); Homosexuals, 2009 (fig. 7–24).
Other surveys show the same shifts.8 Not only has the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before it.9 As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as they age, so the Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less prejudiced than the national average, tell us which way the country is going.10
Of course one can wonder whether figure 15-1 displays a decline in prejudice or simply a decline in the social acceptability of prejudice, with fewer people willing to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster. The problem has long haunted social scientists, but recently the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has discovered an indicator of attitudes that is the closest we’ve come to a digital truth serum.11 In the privacy of their keyboards and screens, people query Google with every curiosity, anxiety, and guilty pleasure you can imagine, together with many you can’t imagine. (Common searches include “How to make my penis bigger” and “My vagina smells like fish.”) Google has amassed big data on the strings that people search for in different months and regions (though not the identity of the searchers), together with tools for analyzing them. Stephens-Davidowitz discovered that searches for the word nigger (mostly in pursuit of racist jokes) correlate with other indicators of racial prejudice across regions, such as vote totals for Barack Obama in 2008 that were lower than expected for a Democrat.12 He suggests that these searches can serve as an unobtrusive indicator of private racism.
Let’s use them to track recent trends in racism, and while we’re at it, private sexism and homophobia as well. Well into my adolescence, jokes featuring dumb Poles, ditzy dames, and lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals were common in network television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo in mainstream media. But do bigoted jokes remain a private indulgence, or have private attitudes changed so much that people feel offended, sullied, or bored by them? Figure 15-2 shows the results. The curves suggest that Americans are not just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than they used to be; they privately don’t find it as amusing.13 And contrary to the fear that the rise of Trump reflects (or emboldens) prejudice, the curves continue their decline through his period of notoriety in 2015–2016 and inauguration in early 2017.
Stephens-Davidowitz has pointed out to me that these curves probably underestimate the decline in prejudice because of a shift in who’s Googling. When the records began in 2004, Googlers were mostly young and urban. Older and rural people tend to be latecomers to technology, and if they are the ones who are likelier to search for the offensive terms, that would inflate the proportion in later years and conceal the extent of the decline in bigotry. Google doesn’t record the searchers’ ages or levels of education, but it does record where the searches come from. In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and less-educated populations. Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for “nigger jokes” and thirty times as likely to search for “fag jokes.” (“Google AdWords,” he told me apologetically, “doesn’t give data on ‘bitch jokes.’”) Stephens-Davidowitz also got his hands on a trove of search data from AOL, which, unlike Google, tracks the searches made by individuals (though not, of course, their identities). These threads confirmed that racists may be a dwindling breed: someone who searches for “nigger” is likely to search for other topics that appeal to senior citizens, such as “social security” and “Frank Sinatra.” The main exception was a sliver of teenagers who also searched for bestiality, decapitation videos, and child pornography—anything you’re not supposed to search for. But aside from these transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less prejudiced cohorts.
Figure 15-2: Racist, sexist, and homophobic Web searches, US, 2004–2017
Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends), searches for “nigger jokes,” “bitch jokes,” and “fag jokes,” United States, 2004–2017, relative to total search volume. Data (accessed Jan. 22, 2017) are by month, expressed as a percentage of the peak month for each search term, then averaged over the months of each year, and smoothed.
Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as “political correctness.” Today they can find each other on the Internet and coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.
* * *
Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion bellwethers but in data on people’s lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).15 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.16 As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in children’s readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the racial gap in happiness.17
Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since the FBI started amalgamating reports on ha
te crimes in 1996, as figure 15-1 shows. (Very few of these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.)18 The slight uptick in 2015 (the most recent year available) cannot be blamed on Trump, since it parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2), and hate crimes track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by politicians.19
Figure 15-3 shows that hate crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become rampant in America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following other Islamist terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.20 At the time of this writing, FBI data from 2016 are not available, so it’s premature to accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes that year. The claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers; some of the incidents were ironic hoaxes, and many were boorish outbursts rather than actual crimes.21 Aside from post-terrorist and crime-related blips, the trend in hate crimes is downward.
Figure 15-3: Hate crimes, US, 1996–2015
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016b. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–4 of Pinker 2011.
Women’s status, too, is ascendant. As recently as my childhood, American women in most states could not take out a loan or credit card in their own names, had to look for jobs in the HELP WANTED—FEMALE section of the classified ads, and could not press charges of rape against their husbands.22 Today, women make up 47 percent of the labor force and a majority of university students.23 Violence against women is best measured by victimization surveys, because they circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police; these instruments show that rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past (figure 15-4).24 Too many of these crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by the fact that a heightened concern about violence against women is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress—which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still.
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