The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  Critics of Elias have pointed out that all societies have standards of propriety about sexuality and excretion which presumably grow out of innate emotions surrounding purity, disgust, and shame.28 As we will see, the degree to which societies moralize these emotions is a major dimension of variation across cultures. Though medieval Europe certainly did not lack norms of propriety altogether, it seems to have lain at the far end of the envelope of cultural possibilities.

  To his credit, Elias leapfrogged academic fashion in not claiming that early modern Europeans “invented” or “constructed” self-control. He claimed only that they toned up a mental faculty that had always been a part of human nature but which the medievals had underused. He repeatedly drove the point home with the pronouncement “There is no zero point.”29 As we shall see in chapter 9, exactly how people dial their capacity for self-control up or down is an interesting topic in psychology. One possibility is that self-control is like a muscle, so that if you exercise it with table manners it will be stronger across the board and more effective when you have to stop yourself from killing the person who just insulted you. Another possibility is that a particular setting of the self-control dial is a social norm, like how close you can stand to another person or how much of your body has to be covered in public. A third is that self-control can be adjusted adaptively according to its costs and benefits in the local environment. Self-control, after all, is not an unmitigated good. The problem with having too much self-control is that an aggressor can use it to his advantage, anticipating that you may hold back from retaliating because it’s too late to do any good. But if he had reason to believe that you would lash out reflexively, consequences be damned, he might treat you with more respect in the first place. In that case people might adjust a self-control slider according to the dangerousness of those around them.

  At this point in the story, the theory of the Civilizing Process is incomplete, because it appeals to a process that is endogenous to the phenomenon it is trying to explain. A decline in violent behavior, it says, coincided with a decline in impulsiveness, honor, sexual license, incivility, and boorishness at the dinner table. But this just entangles us in a web of psychological processes. It hardly counts as an explanation to say that people behaved less violently because they learned to inhibit their violent impulses. Nor can we feel confident that people’s impulsiveness changed first and that a reduction in violence was the result, rather than the other way around.

  But Elias did propose an exogenous trigger to get the whole thing started, indeed, two triggers. The first was the consolidation of a genuine Leviathan after centuries of anarchy in Europe’s feudal patchwork of baronies and fiefs. Centralized monarchies gained in strength, brought the warring knights under their control, and extended their tentacles into the outer reaches of their kingdoms. According to the military historian Quincy Wright, Europe had five thousand independent political units (mainly baronies and principalities) in the 15th century, five hundred at the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17th, two hundred at the time of Napoleon in the early 19th, and fewer than thirty in 1953.30

  The consolidation of political units was in part a natural process of agglomeration in which a moderately powerful warlord swallowed his neighbors and became a still more powerful warlord. But the process was accelerated by what historians call the military revolution: the appearance of gunpowder weapons, standing armies, and other expensive technologies of war that could only be supported by a large bureaucracy and revenue base.31 A guy on a horse with a sword and a ragtag band of peasants was no match for the massed infantry and artillery that a genuine state could put on the battlefield. As the sociologist Charles Tilly put it, “States make war and vice-versa.” 32

  Turf battles among knights were a nuisance to the increasingly powerful kings, because regardless of which side prevailed, peasants were killed and productive capacity was destroyed that from the kings’ point of view would be better off stoking their revenues and armies. And once they got into the peace business—“the king’s peace,” as it was called—they had an incentive to do it right. For a knight to lay down his arms and let the state deter his enemies was a risky move, because his enemies could see it as a sign of weakness. The state had to keep up its end of the bargain, lest everyone lose faith in its peacekeeping powers and resume their raids and vendettas.33

  Feuding among knights and peasants was not just a nuisance but a lost opportunity. During Norman rule in England, some genius recognized the lucrative possibilities in nationalizing justice. For centuries the legal system had treated homicide as a tort: in lieu of vengeance, the victim’s family would demand a payment from the killer’s family, known as blood money or wergild (“man-payment”; the wer is the same prefix as in werewolf, “man-wolf”). King Henry I redefined homicide as an offense against the state and its metonym, the crown. Murder cases were no longer John Doe vs. Richard Roe, but The Crown vs. John Doe (or later, in the United States, The People vs. John Doe or The State of Michigan vs. John Doe). The brilliance of the plan was that the wergild (often the offender’s entire assets, together with additional money rounded up from his family) went to the king instead of to the family of the victim. Justice was administered by roving courts that would periodically visit a locale and hear the accumulated cases. To ensure that all homicides were presented to the courts, each death was investigated by a local agent of the crown: the coroner. 34

  Once Leviathan was in charge, the rules of the game changed. A man’s ticket to fortune was no longer being the baddest knight in the area but making a pilgrimage to the king’s court and currying favor with him and his entourage. The court, basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons, but sought responsible custodians to run its provinces. The nobles had to change their marketing. They had to cultivate their manners, so as not to offend the king’s minions, and their empathy, to understand what they wanted. The manners appropriate for the court came to be called “courtly” manners or “courtesy.” The etiquette guides, with their advice on where to place one’s nasal mucus, originated as manuals for how to behave in the king’s court. Elias traces the centuries-long sequence in which courtesy percolated down from aristocrats dealing with the court to the elite bourgeoisie dealing with the aristocrats, and from them to the rest of the middle class. He summed up his theory, which linked the centralization of state power to a psychological change in the populace, with a slogan: Warriors to courtiers.

  The second exogenous change during the later Middle Ages was an economic revolution. The economic base of the feudal system was land and the peasants who worked it. As real estate agents like to say, land is the one thing they can’t make more of. In an economy based on land, if someone wants to improve his standard of living, or for that matter maintain it during a Malthusian population expansion, his primary option is to conquer the neighboring lot. In the language of game theory, competition for land is zero-sum: one player’s gain is another player’s loss.

  The zero-sum nature of the medieval economy was reinforced by a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources. As Tuchman explains:The Christian attitude toward commerce . . . held that money was evil, that according to St. Augustine “Business is in itself an evil,” that profit beyond a minimum necessary to support the dealer was avarice, that to make money out of money by charging interest on a loan was the sin of usury, that buying goods wholesale and selling them unchanged at a higher retail price was immoral and condemned by canon law, that, in short, St. Jerome’s dictum was final: “A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please God.” 35

  As my grandfather would have put it, “Goyische kopp!”—gentile head. Jews were brought in as moneylenders and middlemen but were just as often persecuted and expelled. The era’s economic backwardness was enforced by laws which decreed that prices should be fixed at a “just” level reflecting the cost
of the raw material and the value of the labor added to it. “To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else,” Tuchman explains, “commercial law prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and under-age children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others.”36 This is a recipe for a zero-sum game, and leaves predation as the only way people could add to their wealth.

  A positive-sum game is a scenario in which agents have choices that can improve the lots of both of them at the same time. A classic positive-sum game in everyday life is the exchange of favors, where each person can confer a large benefit to another at a small cost to himself or herself. Examples include primates who remove ticks from each other’s backs, hunters who share meat whenever one of them has felled an animal that is too big for him to consume on the spot, and parents who take turns keeping each other’s children out of trouble. As we shall see in chapter 8, a key insight of evolutionary psychology is that human cooperation and the social emotions that support it, such as sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, and anger, were selected because they allow people to flourish in positive-sum games. 37

  A classic positive-sum game in economic life is the trading of surpluses. If a farmer has more grain than he can eat, and a herder has more milk than he can drink, both of them come out ahead if they trade some wheat for some milk. As they say, everybody wins. Of course, an exchange at a single moment in time only pays when there is a division of labor. There would be no point in one farmer giving a bushel of wheat to another farmer and receiving a bushel of wheat in return. A fundamental insight of modern economics is that the key to the creation of wealth is a division of labor, in which specialists learn to produce a commodity with increasing cost-effectiveness and have the means to exchange their specialized products efficiently. One infrastructure that allows efficient exchange is transportation, which makes it possible for producers to trade their surpluses even when they are separated by distance. Another is money, interest, and middlemen, which allow producers to exchange many kinds of surpluses with many other producers at many points in time.

  Positive-sum games also change the incentives for violence. If you’re trading favors or surpluses with someone, your trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead. You have an incentive, moreover, to anticipate what he wants, the better to supply it to him in exchange for what you want. Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold businesspeople in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy. 38 A good businessperson has to keep the customers satisfied or a competitor will woo them away, and the more customers he attracts, the richer he will be. This idea, which came to be called doux commerce (gentle commerce), was expressed by the economist Samuel Ricard in 1704:Commerce attaches [people] to one another through mutual utility.... Through commerce, man learns to deliberate, to be honest, to acquire manners, to be prudent and reserved in both talk and action. Sensing the necessity to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least his demeanor exhibits decency and seriousness so as not to arouse any adverse judgment on the part of present and future acquaintances.39

  And this brings us to the second exogenous change. Elias noted that in the late Middle Ages people began to unmire themselves from technological and economic stagnation. Money increasingly replaced barter, aided by the larger national territories in which a currency could be recognized. The building of roads, neglected since Roman times, resumed, allowing the transport of goods to the hinterlands of the country and not just along its coasts and navigable rivers. Horse transport became more efficient with the use of horseshoes that protected hooves from paving stones and yokes that didn’t choke the poor horse when it pulled a heavy load. Wheeled carts, compasses, clocks, spinning wheels, treadle looms, windmills, and water mills were also perfected in the later Middle Ages. And the specialized expertise needed to implement these technologies was cultivated in an expanding stratum of craftsmen. The advances encouraged the division of labor, increased surpluses, and lubricated the machinery of exchange. Life presented people with more positive-sum games and reduced the attractiveness of zero-sum plunder. To take advantage of the opportunities, people had to plan for the future, control their impulses, take other people’s perspectives, and exercise the other social and cognitive skills needed to prosper in social networks.

  The two triggers of the Civilizing Process—the Leviathan and gentle commerce—are related. The positive-sum cooperation of commerce flourishes best inside a big tent presided over by a Leviathan. Not only is a state well suited to provide the public goods that serve as infrastructure for economic cooperation, such as money and roads, but it can put a thumb on the scale on which players weigh the relative payoffs of raiding and trading. Suppose a knight can either plunder ten bushels of grain from his neighbor or, by expending the same amount of time and energy, raise the money to buy five bushels from him. The theft option looks pretty good. But if the knight anticipates that the state will fine him six bushels for the theft, he’d be left with only four, so he’s better off with honest toil. Not only do the Leviathan’s incentives make commerce more attractive, but commerce makes the job of the Leviathan easier. If the honest alternative of buying the grain hadn’t been available, the state would have had to threaten to squeeze ten bushels out of the knight to deter him from plundering, which is harder to enforce than squeezing five bushels out of him. Of course, in reality the state’s sanctions may be the threat of physical punishment rather than a fine, but the principle is the same: it’s easier to deter people from crime if the lawful alternative is more appealing.

  The two civilizing forces, then, reinforce each other, and Elias considered them to be part of a single process. The centralization of state control and its monopolization of violence, the growth of craft guilds and bureaucracies, the replacement of barter with money, the development of technology, the enhancement of trade, the growing webs of dependency among far-flung individuals, all fit into an organic whole. And to prosper within that whole, one had to cultivate faculties of empathy and self-control until they became, as he put it, second nature.

  Indeed the “organic” analogy is not far-fetched. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have argued that an evolutionary dynamic similar to the Civilizing Process drove the major transitions in the history of life. These transitions were the successive emergence of genes, chromosomes, bacteria, cells with nuclei, organisms, sexually reproducing organisms, and animal societies.40 In each transition, entities with the capacity to be either selfish or cooperative tended toward cooperation when they could be subsumed into a larger whole. They specialized, exchanged benefits, and developed safeguards to prevent one of them from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole. The journalist Robert Wright sketches a similar arc in his book Nonzero, an allusion to positive-sum games, and extends it to the history of human societies.41 In the final chapter of this book I will take a closer look at overarching theories of the decline of violence.

  The theory of the Civilizing Process passed a stringent test for a scientific hypothesis: it made a surprising prediction that turned out to be true. Back in 1939 Elias had no access to the statistics of homicide; he worked from narrative histories and old books of etiquette. When Gurr, Eisner, Cockburn, and others surprised the world of criminology with their graphs showing a decline in killings, Elias had the only theory that anticipated it. But with everything else we have learned about violence in recent decades, how well does the theory fare?

  Elias himself was haunted by the not-so-civilized behavior of his native Germany during World War II, and he labored to explain that “decivilizing process” within the framework of his theory.42 He discussed the fitful history of German unification and the resulting lack of trust in a legitimate central authority. He documented the persistence of a militaristic
culture of honor among its elites, the breakdown of a state monopoly on violence with the rise of communist and fascist militias, and a resulting contraction of empathy for groups perceived to be outsiders, particularly the Jews. It would be a stretch to say that he rescued his theory with these analyses, but perhaps he shouldn’t have tried. The horrors of the Nazi era did not consist in an upsurge in feuding among warlords or of citizens stabbing each other over the dinner table, but in violence whose scale, nature, and causes are altogether different. In fact in Germany during the Nazi years the declining trend for one-on-one homicides continued (see, for example, figure3–19).43 In chapter 8 we will see how the compartmentalization of the moral sense, and the distribution of belief and enforcement among different sectors of a population, can lead to ideologically driven wars and genocides even in otherwise civilized societies.

  Eisner pointed out another complication for the theory of the Civilizing Eisner pointed out another complication for the theory of the Civilizing Process: the decline of violence in Europe and the rise of centralized states did not always proceed in lockstep.44 Belgium and the Netherlands were at the forefront of the decline, yet they lacked strong centralized governments. When Sweden joined the trend, it wasn’t on the heels of an expansion in state power either. Conversely, the Italian states were in the rearguard of the decline in violence, yet their governments wielded an enormous bureaucracy and police force. Nor did cruel punishments, the enforcement method of choice among early modern monarchs, reduce violence in the areas where they were carried out with the most relish.