The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  Slavery and other forms of bondage, of course, have not been obliterated from the face of the earth. As a result of recent publicity about the trafficking of people for labor and prostitution, one sometimes hears the statistically illiterate and morally obtuse claim that nothing has changed since the 18th century, as if there were no difference between a clandestine practice in a few parts of the world and an authorized practice everywhere in the world. Moreover, modern human trafficking, as heinous as it is, cannot be equated with the horrors of the African slave trade. As David Feingold, who initiated the UNESCO Trafficking Statistics Project in 2003, notes of today’s hotbeds of trafficking:The identification of trafficking with chattel slavery—in particular, the transatlantic slave trade—is tenuous at best. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves were kidnapped or captured in war. They were shipped to the New World into life-long servitude, from which they or their children could rarely escape. In contrast, although some trafficking victims are kidnapped, for most . . . , trafficking is migration gone terribly wrong. Most leave their homes voluntarily—though sometimes coerced by circumstance—in search of a materially better or more exciting life. Along the way, they become enmeshed in a coercive and exploitative situation. However, this situation rarely persists for life; nor . . . do the trafficked become a permanent or hereditary caste.90

  Feingold also notes that the numbers of trafficking victims reported by activist groups and repeated by journalists and nongovernmental organizations are usually pulled out of thin air and inflated for their advocacy value. Nonetheless, even the activists recognize the fantastic progress that has been made. A statement by Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, though it begins with a dubious statistic, puts the issue in perspective: “While the real number of slaves is the largest there has ever been, it is also probably the smallest proportion of the world population ever in slavery. Today, we don’t have to win the legal battle; there’s a law against it in every country. We don’t have to win the economic argument; no economy is dependent on slavery (unlike in the 19th century, when whole industries could have collapsed). And we don’t have to win the moral argument; no one is trying to justify it any more.”91

  The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment brought many violent institutions to a sudden end. Two others had more staying power, and were indulged in large parts of the world for another two centuries: tyranny, and war between major states. Though the first systematic movements to undermine these institutions were nearly strangled in the crib and began to predominate only in our lifetimes, they originated in the grand change in thoughts and sensibilities that make up the Humanitarian Revolution, so I will introduce them here.

  DESPOTISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

  A government, according to the famous characterization by the sociologist Max Weber, is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Governments, then, are institutions that by their very nature are designed to carry out violence. Ideally this violence is held in reserve as a deterrent to criminals and invaders, but for millennia most governments showed no such restraint and indulged in violence exuberantly.

  All of the first complex states were despotisms in the sense of an “exercised right of heads of societies to murder their subjects arbitrarily and with impunity.” 92 Evidence for despotism, Laura Betzig has shown, may be found in the records of the Babylonians, Hebrews, Imperial Romans, Samoans, Fijians, Khmer, Natchez, Aztecs, Incas, and nine African kingdoms. Despots put their power to good Darwinian use by living in luxury and enjoying the services of enormous harems. According to a report from the early days of the British colonization of India, “a party given by the Mogul governor of Surat . . . was rudely interrupted when the host fell into a sudden rage and ordered all the dancing girls to be decapitated on the spot, to the stupefaction of the English guests.”93 They could afford to be stupefied only because the mother country had recently put its own despotism behind it. When Henry VIII got into various of his bad moods, he executed two wives, several of their suspected lovers, many of his own advisors (including Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell), the Bible translator William Tyndale, and tens of thousands of others.

  The power of despots to kill on a whim is the backdrop to stories told throughout the world. The wise King Solomon proposed to resolve a maternity dispute by butchering the baby in question. The backdrop to the Scheherazade story is a Persian king who murdered a new bride every day. The legendary King Narashimhadev in Orissa, India, demanded that exactly twelve hundred artisans build a temple in exactly twelve years or all would be executed. And in Dr. Seuss’s The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, the protagonist is nearly beheaded for being unable to remove his hat in the presence of the king.

  He who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and in most of human history political murder—a challenger killing a leader and taking his place—was the primary mechanism for the transfer of power.94 A political murderer differs from the modern assassin who tries to make a political statement, wants to go down in the history books, or is stark raving mad. Instead he is typically a member of the political elite, kills a leader to take over his position, and counts on his accession to be recognized as legitimate. Kings Saul, David, and Solomon were all targets or perpetrators of murder plots, and Julius Caesar was one of the thirty-four Roman emperors (out of the total of forty-nine that reigned until the division of the empire) who were killed by guards, high officials, or members of their own families. Manuel Eisner has calculated that between 600 and 1800 CE, about one in eight European monarchs was murdered in office, mostly by noblemen, and that a third of the killers took over the throne.95

  Political leaders not only kill each other, but commonly commit mass violence against their citizenries. They may torture them, imprison them, execute them, starve them, or work them to death in pharaonic construction projects. Rummel estimates that governments killed 133 million people before the 20th century, and the total may be as high as 625 million.96 So once raiding and feuding have been brought under control in a society, the greatest opportunity for reducing violence is reducing government violence.

  By the 17th and 18th centuries, many countries had begun to cut back on tyranny and political murder.97 Between the early Middle Ages and 1800, Eisner calculates, the European regicide rate declined fivefold, particularly in Western and Northern Europe. A famous example of this change is the fate of the two Stuart kings who locked horns with the English Parliament. In 1649 Charles I was beheaded, but in 1688 his son James II was deposed bloodlessly in the Glorious Revolution. Even after attempting to stage a coup he was merely forced into exile. By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined “despotism” down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers.

  At the same time that governments were gradually becoming less tyrannical, thinkers were seeking a principled way to reel in government violence to the minimum necessary. It began with a conceptual revolution. Instead of taking government for granted as an organic part of the society, or as the local franchise of God’s rule over his kingdom, people began to think of a government as a gadget—a piece of technology invented by humans for the purpose of enhancing their collective welfare. Of course, governments had never been deliberately invented, and they had been in place long before history was recorded, so this way of thinking required a considerable leap of the imagination. Thinkers such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Rousseau, and later Jefferson, Hamilton, James Madison, and John Adams, fantasized about what life was like in a state of nature, and played out thought experiments about what a group of rational actors would come up with to better their lives. The resulting institutions would clearly bear no resemblance to the theocracies and hereditary monarchies of the day. It’s hard to imagine a plausible simulation of rational actors in a state of nature choosing an arrangement that would give them the divine right of kings, “L’état, c’est moi,” or inbred ten-year-olds ascending to the throne. Instead, the government would serve at the pleasure of the people it go
verned. Its power to “keep them all in awe,” as Hobbes put it, was not a license to brutalize its citizens in pursuit of its own interests but only a mandate to implement the agreement “that a man be willing, when others are so too . . . to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.”98

  It’s fair to say that Hobbes himself didn’t think through the problem deeply enough. He imagined that somehow people would vest authority in a sovereign or a committee once and for all at the dawn of time, and thereafter it would embody their interests so perfectly that they would never have reason to question it. One only has to think of a typical American congressman or member of the British royal family (to say nothing of a generalissimo or a commissar) to see how this would be a recipe for disaster. Real-life Leviathans are human beings, with all the greed and foolishness we should expect of a specimen of Homo sapiens. Locke recognized that people in power would be tempted to “exempt themselves from the obedience to the Laws they make, and suit the Law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private Wish, and thereby come to have a distinct Interest from the rest of the Community, contrary to the end of Society and Government.”99 He called for a separation between the legislative and executive branches of government, and for the citizenry to reserve the power to throw out a government that was no longer carrying out its mandate.

  This line of thinking was taken to the next level by the heirs of Hobbes and Locke who hashed out a design for American constitutional government after years of study and debate. They were obsessed with the problem of how a ruling body composed of fallible humans could wield enough force to prevent citizens from preying on each other without arrogating so much that it would become the most destructive predator of all.100 As Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”101 And so Locke’s ideal of the separation of powers was written into the design of the new government, because “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” 102 The result was the division of government into executive, judicial, and legislative branches, the federalist system in which authority was divided between the states and the national government, and periodic elections to force the government to give some attention to the wishes of the populace and to transfer power in an orderly and peaceable way. Perhaps most important, the government was given a circumscribed mission statement—to secure the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of its citizens, with their consent—and, in the form of the Bill of Rights, a set of lines it could not cross in its use of violence against them.

  Yet another innovation of the American system was its explicit recognition of the pacifying effects of positive-sum cooperation. The ideal of gentle commerce was implemented in the Commerce, Contract, and Takings clauses of the Constitution, which prevented the government from getting too much in the way of reciprocal exchanges among its citizens.103

  The forms of democracy that were tried out in the 18th century were what you might expect of the 1.0 release of a complex new technology. The English implementation was weak tea, the French implementation an unmitigated disaster, and the American implementation had a flaw that is best captured in the actor Ice-T’s impression of Thomas Jefferson reviewing a draft of the Constitution: “Let’s see: freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom of the press; you can own niggers . . . Looks good to me!” But the value of the early designs for democracy was their upgradability. Not only did they carve out zones, however restricted, that were free of inquisitions, cruel punishments, and despotic authority, but they contained the means of their own expansion. The statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” however hypocritical at the time, was a built-in rightswidener that could be invoked to end slavery four score and seven years later and other forms of racial coercion a century after that. The idea of democracy, once loosed on the world, would eventually infect larger and larger portions of it, and as we shall see, would turn out to be one of the greatest violence-reduction technologies since the appearance of government itself.

  MAJOR WAR

  For most of human history, the justification for war was pithily captured by Julius Caesar: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” Conquest was what governments did. Empires rose, empires fell, entire populations were annihilated or enslaved, and no one seemed to think there was anything wrong with it. The historical figures who earned the honorific “So-and-So the Great” were not great artists, scholars, doctors, or inventors, people who enhanced human happiness or wisdom. They were dictators who conquered large swaths of territory and the people in them. If Hitler’s luck had held out a bit longer, he probably would have gone down in history as Adolf the Great. Even today the standard histories of war teach the reader a great deal about horses and armor and gunpowder but give only the vaguest sense that immense numbers of people were killed and maimed in these extravaganzas.

  At the same time, there have always been eyes that zoom in to the scale of the individual women and men affected by war and that have seen its moral dimension. In the 5th century BCE the Chinese philosopher Mozi, the founder of a rival religion to Confucianism and Taoism, noted:To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize, and yet when it comes to the greatest crime—waging war on another state—they praise it! . . .

  If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white.... So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all—the waging of war on another state—but actually praise it—cannot distinguish right and wrong.104

  The occasional Western seer too paid homage to the ideal of peace. The prophet Isaiah expressed the hope that “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”105 Jesus preached, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.”106 Though Christianity began as a pacifist movement, things went downhill in 312 CE when the Roman ruler Constantine had a vision of a flaming cross in the sky with the words “In this sign thou shalt conquer” and converted the Roman Empire to this militant version of the faith.

  Periodic expressions of pacifism or war-weariness over the next millennium did nothing to stop the nearly constant state of warfare. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the premises of international law during the Middle Ages were as follows: “In the absence of an agreed state of truce or peace, war was the basic state of international relations even between independent Christian communities; (2) Unless exceptions were made by means of individual safe conduct or treaty, rulers saw themselves entitled to treat foreigners at their absolute discretion; (3) The high seas were no-man’s-land, where anyone might do as he pleased.”107 In the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, wars broke out between European countries at a rate of about three new wars a year.108

  The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, “War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. War means tears to thousands of mothers’ eyes, when their sons go to fight and lose their lives.” But for most of history this argument has not caught on, for two reasons.

  One is the other-guy problem. If a nation decides not to learn war anymore, but its neighbor continues to do so, its pruning hooks will be no match for the neighbor’s spears, and it may find itself at the wrong end of an invading army. This was the fate of Carthage against the Romans, India against Muslim invaders, the Cathars against the French and the Catholic Church, and the various countries stuck be
tween Germany and Russia at many times in their history.

  Pacifism is also vulnerable to militaristic forces within a country. When a country is embroiled in a war or on the verge of one, its leaders have trouble distinguishing a pacifist from a coward or a traitor. The Anabaptists are one of many pacifist sects that have been persecuted throughout history.109

  To gain traction, antiwar sentiments have to infect many constituencies at the same time. And they have to be grounded in economic and political institutions, so that the war-averse outlook doesn’t depend on everyone’s deciding to become and stay virtuous. It was in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment that pacifism evolved from a pious but ineffectual sentiment to a movement with a practicable agenda.

  One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire. A moralizer can be mocked, a polemicist can be silenced, but a satirist can get the same point across through stealth. By luring an audience into taking the perspective of an outsider—a fool, a foreigner, a traveler—a satirist can make them appreciate the hypocrisy of their own society and the flaws in human nature that foster it. If the audience gets the joke, if the readers or viewers lose themselves in the work, they have tacitly acceded to the author’s deconstruction of a norm without anyone having had to rebuff it in so many words. Shakespeare’s Falstaff, for example, delivers the finest analysis ever expressed of the concept of honor, the source of so much violence over the course of human history. Prince Hal has urged him into battle, saying “Thou owest God a death.” Falstaff muses:’Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air—a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism.110