The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  It wasn’t until the second half of the 17th century that Europeans finally began to lose their zeal for killing people with the wrong supernatural beliefs. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, confirmed the principle that each local prince could decide whether his state would be Protestant or Catholic and that the minority denomination in each one could more or less live in peace. (Pope Innocent X was not a good sport about this: he declared the Peace “null, void, invalid, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”)42 The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions began to run out of steam in the 17th century, declined further in the 18th, and were shut down in 1834 and 1821, respectively.43 England put religious killing behind it after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Though the divisions of Christianity have sporadically continued to skirmish right up to the present (Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and Catholics and Orthodox Christians in the Balkans), today the disputes are more ethnic and political than theological. Beginning in the 1790s, Jews were granted legal equality in the West, first in the United States, France, and the Netherlands, and then, over the following century, in most of the rest of Europe.

  What made Europeans finally decide that it was all right to let their dissenting compatriots risk eternal damnation and, by their bad example, lure others to that fate? Perhaps they were exhausted by the Wars of Religion, but it’s not clear why it took thirty years to exhaust them rather than ten or twenty. One gets a sense that people started to place a higher value on human life. Part of this newfound appreciation was an emotional change: a habit of identifying with the pains and pleasures of others. And another part was an intellectual and moral change: a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives. The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence. Death becomes a mere rite of passage, like puberty or a midlife crisis.

  The gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendancy of skepticism and reason. No one can deny the difference between life and death or the existence of suffering, but it takes indoctrination to hold beliefs about what becomes of an immortal soul after it has parted company from the body. The 17th century is called the Age of Reason, an age when writers began to insist that beliefs be justified by experience and logic. That undermines dogmas about souls and salvation, and it undermines the policy of forcing people to believe unbelievable things at the point of a sword (or a Judas’s Cradle).

  Erasmus and other skeptical philosophers noted that human knowledge was inherently fragile. If our eyes can be fooled by a visual illusion (such as an oar that appears to be broken at the water’s surface, or a cylindrical tower in the distance that appears to be square), why should we trust our beliefs about more vaporous objects?44 Calvin’s burning of Michael Servetus in 1553 prompted a widespread scrutiny of the very idea of religious persecution.45 The French scholar Sebastian Castellio led the charge by calling attention to the absurdity of different people being unshakably certain of the truth of their mutually incompatible beliefs. He also noted the horrific moral consequences of acting on these beliefs.

  Calvin says that he is certain, and [other sects] say that they are; Calvin says that they are wrong and wishes to judge them, and so do they. Who shall be judge? Who made Calvin the arbiter of all the sects, that he alone should kill? He has the Word of God and so have they. If the matter is certain, to whom is it so? To Calvin? But then why does he write so many books about manifest truth? . . . In view of the uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself. Calvin would have to invade France and all other nations, wipe out cities, put all the inhabitants to the sword, sparing neither sex nor age, not even babies and the beasts.46

  The arguments were picked up in the 17th century by, among others, Baruch Spinoza, John Milton (who wrote, “Let truth and falsehood grapple . . . truth is strong”), Isaac Newton, and John Locke. The emergence of modern science proved that deeply held beliefs could be entirely false, and that the world worked by physical laws rather than by divine whims. The Catholic Church did itself no favor by threatening Galileo with torture and committing him to a life sentence of house arrest for espousing what turned out to be correct beliefs about the physical world. And the skeptical mindset, sometimes spiced with humor and common sense, was increasingly allowed to challenge superstition. In Henry IV, Part 1, Glendower boasts, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur replies, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?” Francis Bacon, often credited with the principle that beliefs must be grounded in observation, wrote of a man who was taken to a house of worship and shown a painting of sailors who had escaped shipwreck by paying their holy vows. The man was asked whether this didn’t prove the power of the gods. “Aye,” he answered, “but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?”47

  CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENTS

  The debunking of superstition and dogma removes one of the pretexts for torture, but leaves it available as a punishment for secular crimes and misdemeanors. People in ancient, medieval, and early modern times thought cruel punishments were perfectly reasonable. The whole point of punishing someone is to make him so unhappy that he and others won’t be tempted to engage in the prohibited activity. By that reasoning, the harsher the punishment is, the better it accomplishes what it is designed to do. Also, a state without an effective police and judiciary had to make a little punishment go a long way. It had to make the punishments so memorably brutal that anyone who witnessed them would be terrorized into submission and would spread the word to terrorize others.

  But the practical function of cruel punishments was just a part of their appeal. Spectators enjoyed cruelty, even when it served no judicial purpose. Torturing animals, for example, was good clean fun. In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, “The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.”48 Also popular were dogfights, bull runs, cockfights, public executions of “criminal” animals, and bearbaiting, in which a bear would be chained to a post and dogs would tear it apart or be killed in the effort.

  Even when they were not actively enjoying torture, people showed a chilling insouciance to it. Samuel Pepys, presumably one of the more refined men of his day, made the following entry in his diary for October 13, 1660:Out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. . . . From thence to my Lord’s, and took Captain Cuttance and Mr. Sheply to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters.49

  Pepys’s cold joke about Harrison’s “looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition” referred to his being partly strangled, disemboweled, castrated, and shown his organs being burned before being decapitated.

  Even the less flamboyant penalties that we remember with the euphemism “corporal punishment” were forms of hideous torture. Today many historical tourist traps have stocks and pillories in which children can pose for pictures. Here is a description of an actual pillorying of two men in 18th-century England:One of them being of short stature could not reach the hole made for the admission of the head. The officers of justice nevertheless forced his head through the hole and the poor wretch hung rather than stood. He soon grew black in the face and blood issued from his nostrils, his eyes and his ears. The mob nevertheless attacked him with great fury. The
officers opened the pillory and the poor wretch fell down dead on the stand of the instrument. The other man was so maimed and hurt by what was thrown at him that he lay there without hope of recovery.50

  Another kind of “corporal punishment” was flogging, the common penalty for insolence or dawdling by British sailors and African American slaves. Whips were engineered in countless models that could flay skin, pulverize flesh into mincemeat, or slice through muscle to the bone. Charles Napier recounted that in the late-18th-century British armed forces, sentences of a thousand lashes were not uncommon:I have often seen victims brought out of the hospital three or four times to receive the remainder of the punishment, too severe to be borne without danger of death at one flogging. It was terrible to see the new, tender skin of the scarcely healed back laid bare again to receive the lash. I have seen hundreds of men flogged and have always observed that when the skin is thoroughly cut up or flayed off, the great pain subsides. Men are frequently convulsed and screaming during the time they receive from one lash to three hundred and then they bear the remainder, even to 800 or a thousand without a groan. They will often lie as without life and the drummers appear to be flogging a lump of dead, raw flesh.51

  The word keelhaul is sometimes used to refer to a verbal reprimanding. Its literal sense comes from another punishment in the British navy. A sailor was tied to a rope and pulled around the bottom of the ship’s hull. If he didn’t drown, he would be slashed to ribbons by the encrusted barnacles.

  By the end of the 16th century in England and the Netherlands, imprisonment began to replace torture and mutilation as the penalty for minor crimes. It was not much of an improvement. Prisoners had to pay for food, clothing, and straw, and if they or their families couldn’t pay they did without. Sometimes they had to pay for “easement of irons,” namely being released from spiked iron collars or from bars that pinned their legs to the floor. Vermin, heat and cold, human waste, and scanty and putrid food not only added to the misery but fostered diseases that made prisons de facto death camps. Many prisons were workhouses in which underfed prisoners were forced to rasp wood, break rocks, or climb moving treadwheels for most of their waking hours.52

  The 18th century marked a turning point in the use of institutionalized cruelty in the West. In England reformers and committees criticized the “cruelty, barbarity, and extortion” they found in the country’s prisons.53 Graphic reports of torture-executions began to sear the public’s conscience. According to a description of the execution of Catherine Hayes in 1726, “As soon as the flames reached her, she tried to push away the faggots with her hands but scattered them. The executioner got hold of the rope around her neck and tried to strangle her but the fire reached his hand and burned it so he had to let it go. More faggots were immediately thrown on the fire and in three or four hours she was reduced to ashes.”54

  The bland phrase broken on the wheel cannot come close to capturing the horror of that form of punishment. According to one chronicler, the victim was transformed into a “huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones.”55 In 1762 a sixty-four-year-old French Protestant named Jean Calas was accused of killing his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism; in fact, he had tried to conceal the son’s suicide.56 During an interrogation that attempted to draw out the names of his accomplices, he was subjected to the strappado and water torture, then was broken on the wheel. After being left in agony for two hours, Calas was finally strangled in an act of mercy. Witnesses who heard his protestations of innocence as his bones were being broken were moved by the terrible spectacle. Each blow of the iron club “sounded in the bottom of their souls,” and “torrents of tears were unleashed, too late, from all the eyes present.”57 Voltaire took up the cause, noting the irony that foreigners judged France by its fine literature and beautiful actresses without realizing that it was a cruel nation that followed “atrocious old customs.”58

  Other prominent writers also began to inveigh against sadistic punishments. Some, like Voltaire, used the language of shaming, calling the practices barbaric, savage, cruel, primitive, cannibalistic, and atrocious. Others, like Montesquieu, pointed out the hypocrisy of Christians’ bemoaning their cruel treatment at the hands of Romans, Japanese, and Muslims, yet inflicting the same cruelty themselves.59 Still others, like the American physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush, appealed to the common humanity of readers and the people who were targets of punishment. In 1787 he noted that “the men, or perhaps the women, whose persons we detest, possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations. They are bone of their bone.” And, he added, if we consider their misery without emotion or sympathy, then “the principle of sympathy . . . will cease to act altogether; and will soon lose its place in the human breast.”60 The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them, and “the reformation of a criminal can never be effected by a public punishment.”61 The English lawyer William Eden also noted the brutalizing effect of cruel punishments, writing in 1771, “We leave each other to rot like scare-crows in the hedges; and our gibbets are crowded with human carcasses. May it not be doubted, whether a forced familiarity with such objects can have any other effect, than to blunt the sentiments, and destroy the benevolent prejudices of the people?”62

  Most influential of all was the Milanese economist and social scientist Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 bestseller On Crimes and Punishments influenced every major political thinker in the literate world, including Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. 63 Beccaria began from first principles, namely that the goal of a system of justice is to attain “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (a phrase later adopted by Jeremy Bentham as the motto of utilitarianism). The only legitimate use of punishment, then, is to deter people from inflicting greater harm on others than the harm inflicted on them. It follows that a punishment should be proportional to the harm of the crime—not to balance some mysterious cosmic scale of justice but to set up the right incentive structure: “If an equal punishment be ordained for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, there is nothing to deter men from committing the greater as often as it is attended with greater advantage.” A clearheaded view of criminal justice also entails that the certainty and promptness of a punishment are more important than its severity, that criminal trials should be public and based on evidence, and that the death penalty is unnecessary as a deterrent and not among the powers that should be granted to a state.

  Beccaria’s essay didn’t impress everyone. It was placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books, and vigorously contested by the legal and religious scholar Pierre-François Muyart de Vouglans. Muyart mocked Beccaria’s bleeding-heart sensibility, accused him of recklessly undermining a time-tested system, and argued that strong punishments were needed to counteract man’s innate depravity, beginning with his original sin.64

  But Beccaria’s ideas carried the day, and within a few decades punitive torture was abolished in every major Western country, including the newly independent United States in its famous prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments” in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Though it is impossible to plot the decline of torture precisely (because many countries outlawed different uses at different times), the cumulative graph in figure 4–2 shows when fifteen major European countries, together with the United States, explicitly abolished the major forms of judicial torture practiced there.

  I have demarcated the 18th century on this and the other graphs in this chapter to highlight the many humanitarian reforms that were launched in this remarkable slice of history. Another was the prevention of cruelty to animals. In 1789 Jeremy Bentham articulated the rationale for animal rights in a passage that continues to be the watchword of animal protection movements today: “The question is not Can they reaso
n? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Beginning in 1800, the first laws against bearbaiting were introduced into Parliament. In 1822 it passed the Ill-Treatment of Cattle Act and in 1835 extended its protections to bulls, bears, dogs, and cats.65 Like many humanitarian movements that originated in the Enlightenment, opposition to animal cruelty found a second wind during the Rights Revolutions of the second half of the 20th century, culminating in the banning of the last legal blood sport in Britain, the foxhunt, in 2005.

  FIGURE 4–2. Time line for the abolition of judicial torture

  Sources: Hunt, 2007, pp. 76, 179; Mannix, 1964, pp. 137–38.

  CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

  When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering. But execution is still a form of extreme violence, especially when it is applied as frivolously as most states did for most of human history. In biblical, medieval, and early modern times, scores of trivial affronts and infractions were punishable by death, including sodomy, gossiping, stealing cabbages, picking up sticks on the Sabbath, talking back to parents, and criticizing the royal garden.66 During the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, there were more than ten executions in London every week. By 1822 England had 222 capital offenses on the books, including poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren, and cutting down a tree. And with an average trial length at the time of eight and a half minutes, it is certain that many of the people sent to the gallows were innocent.67 Rummel estimates that between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68