The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  There are gradients within each of these countries as well: the hinterlands and mountains remained violent long after the urbanized and densely farmed centers had calmed down. Clan warfare was endemic to the Scottish highlands until the 18th century, and to Sardinia, Sicily, Montenegro, and other parts of the Balkans until the 20th.63 It’s no coincidence that the two blood-soaked classics with which I began this book—the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric poems—came from peoples that lived in rugged hills and valleys.

  What about the rest of the world? Though most European countries have kept statistics on homicide for a century or more, the same cannot be said for the other continents. Even today the police-blotter tallies that departments report to Interpol are often unreliable and sometimes incredible. Many governments feel that their degree of success in keeping their citizens from murdering each other is no one else’s business. And in parts of the developing world, warlords dress up their brigandage in the language of political liberation movements, making it hard to draw a line between casualties in a civil war and homicides from organized crime.64

  With those limitations in mind, let’s take a peek at the distribution of homicide in the world today. The most reliable data come from the World Health Organization (WHO), which uses public health records and other sources to estimate the causes of death in as many countries as possible.65 The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has supplemented these data with high and low estimates for every country in the world. Figure 3–9 plots these numbers for 2004 (the year covered in the office’s most recent report) on a map of the world.66 The good news is that the median national homicide rate among the world’s countries in this dataset is 6 per 100,000 per year. The overall homicide rate for the entire world, ignoring the division into countries, was estimated by the WHO in 2000 as 8.8 per 100,000 per year.67 Both estimates compare favorably to the triple-digit values for pre-state societies and the double-digit values for medieval Europe.

  The map shows that Western and Central Europe make up the least violent region in the world today. Among the other states with credible low rates of homicide are those carved out of the British Empire, such as Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, the Maldives, and Bermuda. Another former British colony defies the pattern of English civility; we will examine this strange country in the next section.

  Several Asian countries have low homicide rates as well, particularly those that have adopted Western models, such as Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Also reporting a low homicide rate is China (2.2 per 100,000). Even if we take the data from this secretive state at face value, in the absence of time-series data we have no way of knowing whether it is best explained by millennia of centralized government or by the authoritarian nature of its current regime. Established autocracies (including many Islamic states) keep close tabs on their citizens and punish them surely and severely when they step out of line; that’s why we call them “police states.” Not surprisingly, they tend to have low rates of violent crime. But I can’t resist an anecdote which suggests that China, like Europe, underwent a civilizing process over the long term. Elias noted that knife taboos, which accompanied the reduction of violence in Europe, have been taken one step further in China. For centuries in China, knives have been reserved for the chef in the kitchen, where he cuts the food into bite-sized pieces. Knives are banned from the dining table altogether. “The Europeans are barbarians,” Elias quotes them as saying. “They eat with swords.”68

  FIGURE 3-9, Geography of homicide in the world, 2004

  Sources: Data from UN Office on Drugs and Crime, international homicide statistics 2004 ; see note 66. Estimate for Taiwan from China (Taiwan), Republic of, Department of Statistics, Ministry, of the Interior. 2000.

  What about the other parts of the world? The criminologist Gary LaFree and the sociologist Orlando Patterson have shown that the relationship between crime and democratization is an inverted U. Established democracies are relatively safe places, as are established autocracies, but emerging democracies and semi-democracies (also called anocracies) are often plagued by violent crime and vulnerable to civil war, which sometimes shade into each other.69 The most crime-prone regions in the world today are Russia, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Latin America. Many of them have corrupt police forces and judicial systems which extort bribes out of criminals and victims alike and dole out protection to the highest bidder. Some, like Jamaica (33.7), Mexico (11.1), and Colombia (52.7), are racked by drug-funded militias that operate beyond the reach of the law. Over the past four decades, as drug trafficking has increased, their rates of homicide have soared. Others, like Russia (29.7) and South Africa (69), may have undergone decivilizing processes in the wake of the collapse of their former governments.

  The decivilizing process has also racked many of the countries that switched from tribal ways to colonial rule and then suddenly to independence, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea (15.2). In her article “From Spears to M-16s,” the anthropologist Polly Wiessner examines the historical trajectory of violence among the Enga, a New Guinean tribal people. She begins with an excerpt from the field notes of an anthropologist who worked in their region in 1939:We were now in the heart of the Lai Valley, one of the most beautiful in New Guinea, if not in the world. Everywhere were fine well-laid out garden plots, mostly of sweet potato and groves of casuarinas. Well-cut and graded roads traversed the countryside, and small parks . . . dotted the landscape, which resembled a huge botanical garden.

  She compares it to her own diary entry from 2004:The Lai Valley is a virtual wasteland—as the Enga say, “cared for by the birds, snakes, and rats.” Houses are burned to ash, sweet potato gardens overgrown with weeds, and trees razed to jagged stumps. In the high forest, warfare rages on, fought by “Rambos” with shotguns and high-powered rifles taking the lives of many. By the roadside where markets bustled just a few years before, there is an eerie emptiness. 70

  The Enga were never what you could call a peaceable people. One of their tribes, the Mae Enga, are represented by a bar in figure 2–3: it shows that they killed each other in warfare at an annual rate of about 300 per 100,000, dwarfing the worst rates we have been discussing in this chapter. All the usual Hobbesian dynamics played out: rape and adultery, theft of pigs and land, insults, and of course, revenge, revenge, and more revenge. Still, the Enga were conscious of the waste of war, and some of the tribes took steps, intermittently successful, to contain it. For example, they developed Geneva-like norms that outlawed war crimes such as mutilating bodies or killing negotiators. And though they sometimes were drawn into destructive wars with other villages and tribes, they worked to control the violence within their own communities. Every human society is faced with a conflict of interest between the younger men, who seek dominance (and ultimately mating opportunities) for themselves, and the older men, who seek to minimize internecine damage within their extended families and clans. The Enga elders forced obstreperous young men into “bachelor cults,” which encouraged them to control their vengeful impulses with the help of proverbs like “The blood of a man does not wash off easily” and “You live long if you plan the death of a pig, but not if you plan the death of a person.”71 And consonant with the other civilizing elements in their culture, they had norms of propriety and cleanliness, which Wiessner described to me in an e-mail:The Enga cover themselves with raincapes when they defecate, so as not to offend anybody, even the sun. For a man to stand by the road, turn his back and pee is unthinkably crude. They wash their hands meticulously before they cook food; they are extremely modest about covering genitals, and so on. Not so great with snot.

  Most important, the Enga took well to the Pax Australiana beginning in the late 1930s. Over the span of two decades warfare plummeted, and many of the Enga were relieved to set aside violence to settle their disputes and “fight in courts” instead of on the battlefield.

  When Papua New Guinea gained independence in 1975, violence among the Enga shot back up. Government officials dole
d out land and perks to their clansmen, provoking intimidation and revenge from the clans left in the cold. Young men left the bachelor cults for schools that prepared them for nonexistent jobs, then joined “Raskol” criminal gangs that were unrestrained by elders and the norms they had imposed. They were attracted by alcohol, drugs, nightclubs, gambling, and firearms (including M-16s and AK-47s) and went on rampages of rape, plunder, and arson, not unlike the knights of medieval Europe. The state was weak: its police were untrained and outgunned, and its corrupt bureaucracy was incapable of maintaining order. In short, the governance vacuum left by instant decolonization put the Papuans through a decivilizing process that left them with neither traditional norms nor modern third-party enforcement. Similar degenerations have occurred in other former colonies in the developing world, forming eddies in the global flow toward lower rates of homicide.

  It’s easy for a Westerner to think that violence in lawless parts of the world is intractable and permanent. But at various times in history communities have gotten so fed up with the bloodshed that they have launched what criminologists call a civilizing offensive.72 Unlike the unplanned reductions in homicide that came about as a by-product of the consolidation of states and the promotion of commerce, a civilizing offensive is a deliberate effort by sectors of a community (often women, elders, or clergy) to tame the Rambos and Raskols and restore civilized life. Wiessner reports on a civilizing offensive in the Enga province in the 2000s.73 Church leaders tried to lure young men from the thrill of gang life with exuberant sports, music, and prayer, and to substitute an ethic of forgiveness for the ethic of revenge. Tribal elders, using the cell phones that had been introduced in 2007, developed rapid response units to apprise one another of disputes and rush to the trouble spot before the fighting got out of control. They reined in the most uncontrollable firebrands in their own clans, sometimes with brutal public executions. Community governments were set up to restrict gambling, drinking, and prostitution. And a newer generation was receptive to these efforts, having seen that “the lives of Rambos are short and lead nowhere.” Wiessner quantified the results: after having increased for decades, the number of killings declined significantly from the first half of the 2000s to the second. As we shall see, it was not the only time and place in which a civilizing offensive has paid off.

  VIOLENCE IN THESE UNITED STATES

  Violence is as American as cherry pie.

  —H. Rap Brown

  The Black Panther spokesman may have mixed up his fruits, but he did express a statistically valid generalization about the United States. Among Western democracies, the United States leaps out of the homicide statistics. Instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world. Not only has the homicide rate for the United States not wafted down to the levels enjoyed by every European and Commonwealth democracy, but it showed no overall decline during the 20th century, as we see in figure 3–10. (For the 20th-century graphs, I will use a linear rather than a logarithmic scale.)

  FIGURE 3–10. Homicide rates in the United States and England, 1900–2000

  Sources: Graph from Monkkonen, 2001, pp. 171, 185–88; see also Zahn & McCall, 1999, p. 12. Note that Monkkonen’s U.S. data differ slightly from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports data plotted in figure 3–18 and cited in this chapter.

  The American homicide rate crept up until 1933, nose-dived in the 1930s and 1940s, remained low in the 1950s, and then was launched skyward in 1962, bouncing around in the stratosphere in the 1970s and 1980s before returning to earth starting in 1992. The upsurge in the 1960s was shared with every other Western democracy, and I’ll return to it in the next section. But why did the United States start the century with homicide rates so much higher than England’s, and never close the gap? Could it be a counterexample to the generalization that countries with good governments and good economies enjoy a civilizing process that pushes their rate of violence downward? And if so, what is unusual about the United States? In newspaper commentaries one often reads pseudo-explanations like this: “Why is America more violent? It’s our cultural predisposition to violence.” 74 How can we find our way out of this logical circle? It’s not just that America is gun-happy. Even if you subtract all the killings with firearms and count only the ones with rope, knives, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, and so on, Americans commit murders at a higher rate than Europeans.75

  Europeans have always thought America is uncivilized, but that is only partly true. A key to understanding American homicide is to remember that the United States was originally a plural noun, as in these United States. When it comes to violence, the United States is not a country; it’s three countries. Figure 3–11 is a map that plots the 2007 homicide rates for the fifty states, using the same shading scheme as the world map in figure 3–9.

  FIGURE 3-11. Geography of homicide in the United States, 2007

  Source: Data from U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007, table4. Crime in the United States by Region, Geographical Division, and State, 2006-7

  The shading shows that some of the United States are not so different from Europe after all. They include the aptly named New England states, and a band of northern states stretching toward the Pacific (Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, and the Pacific Northwest states), together with Utah. The band reflects not a common climate, since Oregon’s is nothing like Vermont’s, but rather the historical routes of migration, which tended to go from east to west. This ribbon of peaceable states, with homicide rates of less than 3 per 100,000 per year, sits at the top of a gradient of increasing homicide from north to south. At the southern end we find states like Arizona (7.4) and Alabama (8.9), which compare unfavorably to Uruguay (5.3), Jordan (6.9), and Grenada (4.9). We also find Louisiana (14.2), whose rate is close to that of Papua New Guinea (15.2).76

  A second contrast is less visible on the map. Louisiana’s homicide rate is higher than those of the other southern states, and the District of Columbia (a barely visible black speck) is off the scale at 30.8, in the range of the most dangerous Central American and southern African countries. These jurisdictions are outliers mainly because they have a high proportion of African Americans. The current black-white difference in homicide rates within the United States is stark. Between 1976 and 2005 the average homicide rate for white Americans was 4.8, while the average rate for black Americans was 36.9.77It’s not just that blacks get arrested and convicted more often, which would suggest that the race gap might be an artifact of racial profiling. The same gap appears in anonymous surveys in which victims identify the race of their attackers, and in surveys in which people of both races recount their own history of violent offenses.78 By the way, though the southern states have a higher percentage of African Americans than the northern states, the North-South difference is not a by-product of the white-black difference. Southern whites are more violent than northern whites, and southern blacks are more violent than northern blacks.79

  So while northern Americans and white Americans are somewhat more violent than Western Europeans (whose median homicide rate is 1.4), the gap between them is far smaller than it is for the country as a whole. And a little digging shows that the United States did undergo a state-driven civilizing process, though different regions underwent it at different times and to different degrees. Digging is necessary because for a long time the United States was a backwards country when it came to keeping track of homicide. Most homicides are prosecuted by individual states, not by the federal government, and good nationwide statistics weren’t compiled until the 1930s. Also, until recently “the United States” was a moving target. The lower forty-eight were not fully assembled until 1912, and many states were periodically infused with a shot of immigrants who changed the demographic profile until they coalesced in the melting pot. For these reasons, historians of American violence have had to make do with shorter time series from smaller jurisdictions. In Am
erican Homicide Randolph Roth has recently assembled an enormous number of small-scale datasets for the three centuries of American history before the national statistics were compiled. Though most of the trends are roller coasters rather than toboggan runs, they do show how different parts of the country became civilized as the anarchy of the frontier gave way—in part—to state control.

  FIGURE 3–12. Homicide rates in England, 1300–1925, and New England, 1630–1914

  Sources: Data for England: Eisner, 2003. Data for New England: 1630–37, Roth, 2001, p. 55; 1650–1800: Roth, 2001, p. 56; 1914: Roth, 2009, p. 388. Roth’s estimates have been multiplied by 0.65 to convert the rate from per-adults to per-people; see Roth, 2009, p. 495. Data representing a range of years are plotted at the midpoint of the range.

  Figure 3–12 superimposes Roth’s data from New England on Eisner’s compilation of homicide rates from England. The sky-high point for colonial New England represents Roth’s Elias-friendly observation that “the era of frontier violence, during which the homicide rate stood at over 100 per 100,000 adults per year, ended in 1637 when English colonists and their Native American allies established their hegemony over New England.” After this consolidation of state control, the curves for old England and New England coincide uncannily.