The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  My own sensibilities tend toward the concrete, and I suspect there is a simpler hypothesis about the effect of cleanliness on moral sensibilities: people got less repulsive. Humans have a revulsion to filth and bodily secretions, and just as people today may avoid a homeless person who reeks of feces and urine, people in earlier centuries may have been more callous to their neighbors because those neighbors were more disgusting. Worse, people easily slip from visceral disgust to moralistic disgust and treat unsanitary things as contemptibly defiled and sordid.126 Scholars of 20th-century atrocities have wondered how brutality can spring up so easily when one group achieves domination over another. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has pointed to a downward spiral of dehumanization. People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors’ conscience.127 Perhaps this spiral of dehumanization runs the movie of the Civilizing Process backwards. It reverses the historical sweep toward greater cleanliness and dignity that led, over the centuries, to greater respect for people’s well-being.

  Unfortunately the Civilizing Process and the Humanitarian Revolution don’t line up in time in a way that would suggest that one caused the other. The rise of government and commerce and the plummeting of homicide that propelled the Civilizing Process had been under way for several centuries without anyone much caring about the barbarity of punishments, the power of kings, or the violent suppression of heresy. Indeed as states became more powerful, they also got crueler. The use of torture to extract confessions (rather than to punish), for example, was reintroduced in the Middle Ages when many states revived Roman law.128 Something else must have accelerated humanitarian sentiments in the 17th and 18th centuries.

  An alternative explanation is that people become more compassionate as their own lives improve. Payne speculates that “when people grow richer, so that they are better fed, healthier, and more comfortable, they come to value their own lives, and the lives of others, more highly.”129 The hypothesis that life used to be cheap but has become dearer loosely fits within the broad sweep of history. Over the millennia the world has moved away from barbaric practices like human sacrifice and sadistic executions, and over the millennia people have been living longer and in greater comfort. Countries that were at the leading edge of the abolition of cruelty, such as 17th-century England and Holland, were also among the more affluent countries of their time. And today it is in the poorer corners of the world that we continue to find backwaters with slavery, superstitious killing, and other barbaric customs.

  But the life-was-cheap hypothesis also has some problems. Many of the more affluent states of their day, such as the Roman Empire, were hotbeds of sadism, and today harsh punishments like amputations and stonings may be found among the wealthy oil-exporting nations of the Middle East. A bigger problem is that the timing is off. The history of affluence in the modern West is depicted in figure 4–7, in which the economic historian Gregory Clark plots real income per person (calibrated in terms of how much money would be needed to buy a fixed amount of food) in England from 1200 to 2000.

  Affluence began its liftoff only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Before 1800 the mathematics of Malthus prevailed: any advance in producing food only bred more mouths to feed, leaving the population as poor as before. This was true not only in England but all over the world. Between 1200 and 1800 measures of economic well-being, such as income, calories per capita, protein per capita, and number of surviving children per woman, showed no upward trend in any European country. Indeed, they were barely above the levels of hunter-gatherer societies. Only when the Industrial Revolution introduced more efficient manufacturing techniques and built an infrastructure of canals and railroads did European economies start to shoot upward and the populace become more affluent. Yet the humanitarian changes we are trying to explain began in the 17th century and were concentrated in the 18th.

  FIGURE 4–7. Real income per person in England, 1200–2000

  Source: Graph from Clark, 2007a, p. 195.

  Even if we could show that affluence correlated with humanitarian sensibilities, it would be hard to pinpoint the reasons. Money does not just fill the belly and put a roof over one’s head; it also buys better governments, higher rates of literacy, greater mobility, and other goods. Also, it’s not completely obvious that poverty and misery should lead people to enjoy torturing others. One could just as easily make the opposite prediction: if you have firsthand experience of pain and deprivation, you should be unwilling to inflict them on others, whereas if you have lived a cushy life, the suffering of others is less real to you. I will return to the life-was-cheap hypothesis in the final chapter, but for now we must seek other candidates for an exogenous change that made people more compassionate.

  One technology that did show a precocious increase in productivity before the Industrial Revolution was book production. Before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1452, every copy of a book had to be written out by hand. Not only was the process time-consuming—it took thirty-seven persondays to produce the equivalent of a 250-page book—but it was inefficient in materials and energy. Handwriting is harder to read than type is, and so handwritten books had to be larger, using up more paper and making the book more expensive to bind, store, and ship. In the two centuries after Gutenberg, publishing became a high-tech venture, and productivity in printing and papermaking grew more than twentyfold (figure 4–8), faster than the growth rate of the entire British economy during the Industrial Revolution.130

  FIGURE 4–8. Efficiency in book production in England, 1470–1860s

  Source: Graph from Clark, 2007a, p. 253.

  FIGURE 4–9. Number of books in English published per decade, 1475–1800

  Sources: Simons, 2001; graph adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File1477-1799_ESTC_titles_per_decade,_statistics.png:.

  The newly efficient publishing technology set off an explosion in book publication. Figure 4–9 shows that the number of books published per year rose significantly in the 17th century and shot up toward the end of the 18th.

  The books, moreover, were not just playthings for aristocrats and intellectuals. As the literary scholar Suzanne Keen notes, “By the late 18th century, circulating libraries had become widespread in London and provincial towns, and most of what they offered for rent was novels.”131 With more numerous and cheaper books available, people had a greater incentive to read. It’s not easy to estimate the level of literacy in periods before the advent of universal schooling and standardized testing, but historians have used clever proxy measures such as the proportion of people who could sign their marriage registers or court declarations. Figure 4–10 presents a pair of time series from Clark which suggest that during the 17th century in England, rates of literacy doubled, and that by the end of the century a majority of Englishmen had learned to read and write.132

  Literacy was increasing in other parts of Western Europe at the same time. By the late 18th century a majority of French citizens had become literate, and though estimates of literacy don’t appear for other countries until later, they suggest that by the early 19th century a majority of men were literate in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Scotland, Sweden, and Switzerland as well.133 Not only were more people reading, but they were reading in different ways, a development the historian Rolf Engelsing has called the Reading Revolution.134 People began to read secular rather than just religious material, to read to themselves instead of in groups, and to read a wide range of topical media, such as pamphlets and periodicals, rather than rereading a few canonical texts like almanacs, devotional works, and the Bible. As the historian Robert Darnton put it, “The late eighteenth century does seem to represent a turning point, a time when more reading matter became available to a wider public, when one can see the emergence of a mass readership that would grow to giant p
roportions in the nineteenth century with the development of machine-made paper, steam-powered presses, linotype, and nearly universal literacy.”135

  FIGURE 4–10. Literacy rate in England, 1625–1925

  Source: Graph adapted from Clark, 2007a, p. 179.

  And of course people in the 17th and 18th centuries had more to read about. The Scientific Revolution had revealed that everyday experience is a narrow slice of a vast continuum of scales from the microscopic to the astronomical, and that our own abode is a rock orbiting a star rather than the center of creation. The European exploration of the Americas, Oceania, and Africa, and the discovery of sea routes to India and Asia, had opened up new worlds and revealed the existence of exotic peoples with ways of life very different from the readers’ own.

  The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution. The pokey little world of village and clan, accessible through the five senses and informed by a single content provider, the church, gave way to a phantasmagoria of people, places, cultures, and ideas. And for several reasons, the expansion of people’s minds could have added a dose of humanitarianism to their emotions and their beliefs.

  THE RISE OF EMPATHY AND THE REGARD FOR HUMAN LIFE

  The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. As we shall see in chapter 9, though people in all cultures can react sympathetically to kin, friends, and babies, they tend to hold back when it comes to larger circles of neighbors, strangers, foreigners, and other sentient beings. In his book The Expanding Circle, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own.136 An interesting question is what inflated the empathy circle. And a good candidate is the expansion of literacy.

  Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions. As we shall see, “empathy” in the sense of adopting someone’s viewpoint is not the same as “empathy” in the sense of feeling compassion toward the person, but the first can lead to the second by a natural route. Stepping into someone else’s vantage point reminds you that the other fellow has a first-person, present-tense, ongoing stream of consciousness that is very much like your own but not the same as your own. It’s not a big leap to suppose that the habit of reading other people’s words could put one in the habit of entering other people’s minds, including their pleasures and pains. Slipping even for a moment into the perspective of someone who is turning black in a pillory or desperately pushing burning faggots away from her body or convulsing under the two hundredth stroke of the lash may give a person second thoughts as to whether these cruelties should ever be visited upon anyone.

  Adopting other people’s vantage points can alter one’s convictions in other ways. Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm (“That’s the way it’s done”) into an explicit observation (“That’s what our tribe happens to do now”). This self-consciousness is the first step toward asking whether the practice could be done in some other way. Also, learning that over the course of history the first can become last and the last can become first may instill the habit of mind that reminds us, “There but for fortune go I.”

  The power of literacy to lift readers out of their parochial stations is not confined to factual writing. We have already seen how satirical fiction, which transports readers into a hypothetical world from which they can observe the follies of their own, may be an effective way to change people’s sensibilities without haranguing or sermonizing.

  Realistic fiction, for its part, may expand readers’ circle of empathy by seducing them into thinking and feeling like people very different from themselves. Literature students are taught that the 18th century was a turning point in the history of the novel. It became a form of mass entertainment, and by the end of the century almost a hundred new novels were published in England and France every year.137 And unlike earlier epics which recounted the exploits of heroes, aristocrats, or saints, the novels brought to life the aspirations and losses of ordinary people.

  Lynn Hunt points out that the heyday of the Humanitarian Revolution, the late 18th century, was also the heyday of the epistolary novel. In this genre the story unfolds in a character’s own words, exposing the character’s thoughts and feelings in real time rather than describing them from the distancing perspective of a disembodied narrator. In the middle of the century three melodramatic novels named after female protagonists became unlikely bestsellers: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), and Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Hélöise (1761). Grown men burst into tears while experiencing the forbidden loves, intolerable arranged marriages, and cruel twists of fate in the lives of undistinguished women (including servants) with whom they had nothing in common. A retired military officer, writing to Rousseau, gushed:You have driven me crazy about her. Imagine then the tears that her death must have wrung from me. . . . Never have I wept such delicious tears. That reading created such a powerful effect on me that I believe I would have gladly died during that supreme moment.138

  The philosophes of the Enlightenment extolled the way novels engaged a reader’s identification with and sympathetic concern for others. In his eulogy for Richardson, Diderot wrote:One takes, despite all precautions, a role in his works, you are thrown into conversation, you approve, you blame, you admire, you become irritated, you feel indignant. How many times did I not surprise myself, as it happens to children who have been taken to the theater for the first time, crying: “Don’t believe it, he is deceiving you.”. . . His characters are taken from ordinary society . . . the passions he depicts are those I feel in myself.139

  The clergy, of course, denounced these novels and placed several on the Index of Forbidden Books. One Catholic cleric wrote, “Open these works and you will see in almost all of them the rights of divine and human justice violated, parents’ authority over their children scorned, the sacred bonds of marriage and friendship broken.”140

  Hunt suggests a causal chain: reading epistolary novels about characters unlike oneself exercises the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes, which turns one against cruel punishments and other abuses of human rights. As usual, it is hard to rule out alternative explanations for the correlation. Perhaps people became more empathic for other reasons, which simultaneously made them receptive to epistolary novels and concerned with others’ mistreatment.

  But the full-strength causal hypothesis may be more than a fantasy of English teachers. The ordering of events is in the right direction: technological advances in publishing, the mass production of books, the expansion of literacy, and the popularity of the novel all preceded the major humanitarian reforms of the 18th century. And in some cases a bestselling novel or memoir demonstrably exposed a wide range of readers to the suffering of a forgotten class of victims and led to a change in policy. Around the same time that Uncle Tom’s Cabin mobilized abolitionist sentiment in the United States, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1839) opened people’s eyes to the mistreatment of children in British workhouses and orphanages, and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840) and Herman Melville’s White Jacket helped end the flogging of sailors. In the past century Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, George Orwell’s 1984, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Alex Haley’s Roots, Anchee Min’s Red Azalea, Azar Naf
isi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (a novel that features female genital mutilation) all raised public awareness of the suffering of people who might otherwise have been ignored.141 Cinema and television reached even larger audiences and offered experiences that were even more immediate. In chapter 9 we will learn of experiments that confirm that fictional narratives can evoke people’s empathy and prick them to action.

  Whether or not novels in general, or epistolary novels in particular, were the critical genre in expanding empathy, the explosion of reading may have contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution by getting people into the habit of straying from their parochial vantage points. And it may have contributed in a second way: by creating a hothouse for new ideas about moral values and the social order.

  THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS AND ENLIGHTENMENT HUMANISM

  In David Lodge’s 1988 novel Small World, a professor explains why he believes that the elite university has become obsolete:Information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people.... There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years . . . : jet travel, direct-dialing telephones and the Xerox machine.... As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters—the global campus.142