The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  But as the 18th century came to a close, capital punishment itself was on death row. Public hangings, which had long been rowdy carnivals, were abolished in England in 1783. The display of corpses on gibbets was abolished in 1834, and by 1861 England’s 222 capital offenses had been reduced to 4.69 During the 19th century many European countries stopped executing people for any crime but murder and high treason, and eventually almost every Western nation abolished capital punishment outright. To get ahead in the story, figure 4–3 shows that of the fifty-three extant European countries today, all but Russia and Belarus have abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes. (A handful keep it on the books for high treason and grave military offenses.) The abolition of capital punishment snowballed after World War II, but the practice had fallen out of favor well before that time. The Netherlands, for example, officially abolished capital punishment in 1982, but hadn’t actually executed anyone since 1860. On average fifty years elapsed between the last execution in a country and the year that it formally abolished capital punishment.

  Today capital punishment is widely seen as a human rights violation. In 2007 the UN General Assembly voted 105–54 (with 29 abstentions) to declare a nonbinding moratorium on the death penalty, a measure that had failed in 1994 and 1999.70 One of the countries that opposed the resolution was the United States. As with most forms of violence, the United States is an outlier among Western democracies (or perhaps I should say “are outliers,” since seventeen states, mostly in the North, have abolished the death penalty as well—four of them within the past two years—and an eighteenth has not carried out an execution in forty-five years).71 But even the American death penalty, for all its notoriety, is more symbolic than real. Figure 4–4 shows that the rate of executions in the United States as a proportion of its population has plummeted since colonial times, and that the steepest drop was in the 17th and 18th centuries, when so many other forms of institutional violence were being scaled back in the West.

  FIGURE 4–3. Time line for the abolition of capital punishment in Europe

  Sources: French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2007; Capital Punishment U.K., 2004; Amnesty International, 2010.

  FIGURE 4–4. Execution rate in the United States, 1640–2010

  Sources: Payne, 2004, p. 130, based on data from Espy & Smykla, 2002. The figures for the decades ending in 2000 and 2010 are from Death Penalty Information Center, 2010b.

  The barely visible swelling in the last two decades reflects the tough-on-crime policies that were a reaction to the homicide boom of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. But in present-day America a “death sentence” is a bit of a fiction, because mandatory legal reviews delay most executions indefinitely, and only a few tenths of a percentage point of the nation’s murderers are ever put to death.72 And the most recent trend points downward: the peak year for executions was 1999, and since then the number of executions per year has been almost halved.73

  At the same time that the rate of capital punishment went down, so did the number of capital crimes. In earlier centuries people could be executed for theft, sodomy, buggery, bestiality, adultery, witchcraft, arson, concealing birth, burglary, slave revolt, counterfeiting, and horse theft. Figure 4–5 shows the proportion of American executions since colonial times that were for crimes other than homicide. In recent decades the only crime other than murder that has led to an execution is “conspiracy to commit murder.” In 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty may not be applied to any crime against an individual “where the victim’s life was not taken” (though the death penalty is still available for a few “crimes against the state” such as espionage, treason, and terrorism).74

  The means of execution has changed as well. Not only has the country long abandoned torture-executions such as burning at the stake, but it has experimented with a succession of “humane” methods, the problem being that the more effectively a method guarantees instant death (say, a few bullets to the brain), the more gruesome it will appear to onlookers, who don’t want to be reminded that violence has been applied to kill a living body. Hence the physicality of ropes and bullets gave way to the invisible agents of gas and electricity, which have been replaced by the quasi-medical procedure of lethal injection under general anesthesia—and even that method has been criticized for being too stressful to the dying prisoner. As Payne has noted,

  In reform after reform lawmakers have moderated the death penalty so that it is now but a vestige of its former self. It is not terrifying, it is not swift, and in its present restricted use, it is not certain (only about one murder in two hundred leads to an execution). What does it mean, then, to say that the United States “has” the death penalty? If the United States had the death penalty in robust, traditional form, we would be executing approximately 10,000 prisoners a year, including scores of perfectly innocent people. The victims would be killed in torture-deaths, and these events would be shown on nationwide television to be viewed by all citizens, including children (at 27 executions a day, this would leave little time for any other television fare). That defenders of capital punishment would be appalled by this prospect shows that even they have felt the leavening effects of the increasing respect for human life.75

  FIGURE 4–5. Executions for crimes other than homicide in the United States, 1650–2002

  Sources: Espy & Smykla, 2002; Death Penalty Information Center, 2010a.

  One can imagine that in the 18th century the idea of abolishing capital punishment would have seemed reckless. Undeterred by the fear of a grisly execution, one might have thought, people would not hesitate to murder for profit or revenge. Yet today we know that abolition, far from reversing the centuries-long decline of homicide, proceeded in tandem with it, and that the countries of modern Western Europe, none of which execute people, have the lowest homicide rates in the world. It is one of many cases in which institutionalized violence was once seen as indispensable to the functioning of a society, yet once it was abolished, the society managed to get along perfectly well without it.

  SLAVERY

  For most of the history of civilization, the practice of slavery was the rule rather than the exception. It was upheld in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and was justified by Plato and Aristotle as a natural institution that was essential to civilized society. So-called democratic Athens in the time of Pericles enslaved 35 percent of its population, as did the Roman Republic. Slaves have always been a major booty in wartime, and stateless people of all races were vulnerable to capture.76 The word slave comes from Slav, because, as the dictionary informs us, “Slavic peoples were widely captured and enslaved during the Middle Ages.” States and armed forces, when they were not used as enslaving devices, were used as enslavement-prevention devices, as we are reminded by the lyric “Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves. Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.” Well before Africans were enslaved by Europeans, they were enslaved by other Africans, as well as by Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East. Some of those states did not abolish legal slavery until recently: Qatar in 1952 ; Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962; Mauritania in 1980.77

  For captives in war, slavery was often a better fate than the alternative, massacre, and in many societies slavery shaded into milder forms of servitude, employment, military service, and occupational guilds. But violence is inherent to the definition of slavery—if a person did all the work of a slave but had the option of quitting at any time without being physically restrained or punished, we would not call him a slave—and this violence was often a regular part of a slave’s life. Exodus 21:20–21 decrees, “When a slave-owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives for a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property.” Slaves’ lack of ownership of their own bodies left even the better-treated ones vulnerable to vicious exploitation. Women in harems were perpetual rape victims, and the men who guarded them, eunuchs, had their tes
ticles—or in the case of black eunuchs, their entire genitalia—hacked off with a knife and cauterized with boiling butter so they would not bleed to death from the wound.

  The African slave trade in particular was among the most brutal chapters in human history. Between the 16th and 19th centuries at least 1.5 million Africans died in transatlantic slave ships, chained together in stifling, filth-ridden holds, and as one observer noted, “those who remain to meet the shore present a picture of wretchedness language cannot express.”78 Millions more perished in forced marches through jungles and deserts to slave markets on the coast or in the Middle East. Slave traders treated their cargo according to the business model of ice merchants, who accept that a certain proportion of their goods will be lost in transport. At least 17 million Africans, and perhaps as many as 65 million, died in the slave trade.79 The slave trade not only killed people in transit, but by providing a continuous stream of bodies, it encouraged slaveholders to work their slaves to death and replace them with new ones. But even the slaves who were kept in relatively good health lived in the shadow of flogging, rape, mutilation, forced separation from family members, and summary execution.

  Slaveholders in many times have manumitted their slaves, often in their wills, as they became personally close to them. In some places, such as Europe in the Middle Ages, slavery gave way to serfdom and sharecropping when it became cheaper to tax people than to keep them in bondage, or when weak states could not enforce a slave owner’s property rights. But a mass movement against chattel slavery as an institution arose for the first time in the 18th century and rapidly pushed it to near extinction.

  Why did people eventually forswear the ultimate labor-saving device? Historians have long debated the extent to which the abolition of slavery was driven by economics or by humanitarian concerns. At one time the economic explanation seemed compelling. In 1776 Adam Smith reasoned that slavery must be less efficient than paid employment because only the latter was a positive-sum game:The work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.80

  The political scientist John Mueller points out, “Smith’s view garnered adherents, but not, as it happens, among slaveowners. That is, either Smith was wrong, or slaveholders were bad businessmen.”81 Some economists, such as Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, have concluded that Smith was at least partly wrong in the case of the antebellum South, which had a reasonably efficient economy for the time.82 And southern slavery, of course, did not gradually give way to more cost-effective production techniques but had to be obliterated by war and by law.

  It took guns and laws to end slavery in much of the rest of the world as well. Britain, once among the most exuberant slave-trading nations, outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833. By the 1840s it was jawboning other countries to end their participation in the slave trade, backed up by economic sanctions and by almost a quarter of the Royal Navy.83

  Most historians have concluded that Britain’s policing of the abolition of slavery was driven by humanitarian motives.84 Locke undermined the moral basis for slavery in his 1689 work Two Treatises on Government, and though he and many of his intellectual descendants hypocritically profited from the institution, their advocacy of liberty, equality, and the universal rights of man let a genie out of the bottle and made it increasingly awkward for anyone to justify the practice. Many of the Enlightenment writers who inveighed against torture on humanitarian grounds, such as Jacques-Pierre Brisson in France, applied the same logic to oppose slavery. They were joined by Quakers, who founded the influential Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, and by preachers, scholars, free blacks, former slaves, and politicians.85

  At the same time, many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible’s approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own. But these rationalizations withered under intellectual and moral scrutiny. The intellectual argument held that it was indefensible to allow one person to own another, arbitrarily excluding him from the community of decision-makers whose interests were negotiated in the social contract. As Jefferson put it, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately.”86 The moral revulsion was stimulated by first-person accounts of what it was like to be a slave. Some were autobiographies, like The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the African, Written by Himself (1789) and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Even more influential was a work of fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852). The novel depicted a wrenching episode in which mothers were separated from their children, and another in which the kindly Tom was beaten to death for refusing to flog other slaves. The book sold three hundred thousand copies and was a catalyst for the abolitionist movement. According to legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he said, “So you’re the little woman who started this great war.”

  In 1865, after the most destructive war in American history, slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Many countries had abolished it before that time, and France had the dubious distinction of abolishing it twice, first in the wake of the French Revolution in 1794 and again, after Napoleon had restored it in 1802, during the Second Republic in 1848. The rest of the world quickly followed suit. Many encyclopedias provide time lines of the abolition of slavery, which differ slightly in how they delineate territories and what they count as “abolition,” but they all show the same pattern: an explosion of abolition proclamations beginning in the late 18th century. Figure 4–6 shows the cumulative number of nations and colonies that have formally abolished slavery since 1575.

  Closely related to slavery is the practice of debt bondage. Beginning in biblical and classical times, people who defaulted on their loans could be enslaved, imprisoned, or executed.87 The word draconian comes from the Greek lawgiver Draco, who in 621 BCE codified laws governing the enslavement of debtors. Shylock’s right to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is another reminder of the practice. By the 16th century defaulters were no longer enslaved or executed, but they filled up debtors’ prisons by the thousands. Sometimes they were charged for food, despite being broke, and had to survive on what they could beg from passersby through the windows of the jail. In early-19th-century America, thousands of people, including many women, languished in debtors’ prisons, half of them for debts of less than ten dollars. In the 1830s a reform movement sprang up which, like the antislavery movement, appealed to both reason and emotion. A congressional committee argued that it ran contrary to the principles of justice “to give the creditor, in any case whatever, power over the body of his debtor.” The committee also noted that “if all the victims of oppression were presented to our view in one congregated mass, with all the train of wives, children, and friends, involved in the same ruin, they would exhibit a spectacle at which humanity would shudder.”88 Debt bondage was abolished by almost every American state between 1820 and 1840, and by most European governments in the 1860s and 1870s.

  FIGURE 4–6. Time line for the abolition of slavery

  Source: The most comprehensive list of abolitions I have found is “Abolition of slavery timeline,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline, retrieved Aug. 18, 2009. Included are all entries from “Modern Timeline” that mention formal abolition of slavery in a political jurisdiction.

  The history of our treatment of debtors, Payne notes, illustrates the mysterious process in which vio
lence has declined in every sphere of life. Western societies have gone from enslaving and executing debtors to imprisoning them and then to seizing their assets to repay the debt. Even the seizure of assets, he points out, is a kind of violence: “When John buys groceries on credit and later refuses to pay for them, he has not used force. If the grocer goes to court and gets the police to seize John’s car or bank account, the grocer and police are the ones who are initiating the use of force.”89 And because it is a form of violence, even if people don’t usually think of it that way, this practice too has been in decline. The trend in bankruptcy law has been away from punishing debtors or squeezing assets out of them and toward giving them the opportunity of a fresh start. In many states a debtor’s house, car, retirement accounts, and spouse’s assets are protected, and when a person or company declares bankruptcy, they can write off many debts with impunity. In the old days of debtors’ prisons, people might have predicted that this lenience would spell the demise of capitalism, which depends on the repayment of loans. But the commercial ecosystem evolved workarounds for this loss of leverage. Credit checks, credit ratings, loan insurance, and credit cards are just some of the ways that economic life continued after borrowers could no longer be deterred by the threat of legal coercion. An entire category of violence evaporated, and mechanisms that carried out the same function materialized, without anyone realizing that that was what was happening.