Opponents of abortion may see the decline in every form of violence but the killing of fetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy. But there is another explanation for the discrepancy. Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness, particularly the ability to suffer and flourish, and have identified consciousness with the activity of the brain. The change is a part of the turning away from religion and custom and toward science and secular philosophy as a source of moral illumination. Just as the legally recognized end of life is now defined by the cessation of brain activity rather than the cessation of a heartbeat, the beginning of life is sensed to depend on the first stirrings of consciousness in the fetus. The current understanding of the neural basis of consciousness ties it to reverberating neural activity between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, which begins at around twenty-six weeks of gestational age.152 More to the point, people conceive of fetuses as less than fully conscious: the psychologists Heather Gray, Kurt Gray, and Daniel Wegner have shown that people think of fetuses as more capable of experience than robots or corpses, but less capable than animals, babies, children, and adults.153 The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualized, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence.
At the same time, we might expect a general distaste for the destruction of any kind of living thing to turn people away from abortion even when they don’t equate it with murder. And that indeed has happened. It’s a little-known fact that rates of abortion are falling throughout the world. Figure 7–16 shows the rates of abortion in the major regions in which data are available (albeit differing widely in quality) in the 1980s, 1996, and 2003.
The decline has been steepest in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, which were said to have had a “culture of abortion.” During the communist era abortions were readily available, but contraceptives, like every other consumer good, were allocated by a central commissar rather than by supply and demand, so they were always in short supply. But abortions have also become less common in China, the United States, and the Asian and Islamic countries in which they are legal. Only in India and Western Europe did abortion rates fail to decline, and those are the regions where the rates were lowest to begin with.
FIGURE 7–16. Abortions in the world, 1980–2003
Sources: 1980s: Henshaw, 1990; 1996 & 2003: Sedgh et al., 2007. “Eastern Europe” comprises Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic & Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia/Serbia-Montenegro, Romania. “Western Europe” comprises Belgium, Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Sweden. “Asia” comprises Singapore, Japan, South Korea (2003 equated with 1996). “Islamic” comprises Tunisia and Turkey.
The causes of much of the decline, to be sure, are practical. Contraception is cheaper and more convenient than abortion, and if it’s readily available it will be the first choice of people with the foresight and self-control to use it. But presumably abortion has a moral dimension even among those who undergo it and among their compatriots who want to keep the option safe and legal. Abortion is seen as something to be minimized, even if it is not criminalized. If so, the trends in abortion offer a sliver of common ground in the rancorous debate between the so-called pro-life and pro-choice factions. The countries that allow abortion have not let an indifference to life put them on a slippery slope to infanticide or other forms of violence. But these same countries increasingly act as if abortion is undesirable, and they may be reducing its incidence as part of the move to protect all living things.
During the long, sad history of violence against children, even when infants survived the day of their birth it was only to endure harsh treatment and cruel punishments in the years to come. Though hunter-gatherers tend to use corporal punishment in moderation, the dominant method of child-rearing in every other society comes right out of Alice in Wonderland: “Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes.”154 The reigning theory of child development was that children were innately depraved and could be socialized only by force. The expression “Spare the rod and spoil the child” has been attributed to an advisor to the king of Assyria in the 7th century BCE and may have been the source of Proverbs 13:24, “He that spareth the rod hateth his son: But he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”155 A medieval French verse advised, “Better to beat your child when small than to see him hanged when grown.” The Puritan minister Cotton Mather (Increase’s son) extended the concern for the child’s well-being to the hereafter: “Better whipt than Damn’d.”156
As with all punishments, human ingenuity rose to the technological challenge of delivering experiences that were as unpleasant as possible. DeMause writes of medieval Europe:That children with devils in them had to be beaten goes without saying. A panoply of beating instruments existed for that purpose, from cat-o’-nine tails and whips to shovels, canes, iron rods, bundles of sticks, the discipline (a whip made of small chains), the goad (shaped like a cobbler’s knife, used to prick the child on the head or hands) and special school instruments like the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters. The beatings described in the sources were almost always severe, involved bruising and bloodying of the body, began in infancy, were usually erotically tinged by being inflicted on bare parts of the body near the genitals and were a regular part of the child’s daily life.157
Severe corporal punishment was common for centuries. One survey found that in the second half of the 18th century, 100 percent of American children were beaten with a stick, whip, or other weapon.158 Children were also liable to punishment by the legal system; a recent biography of Samuel Johnson remarks in passing that a seven-year-old girl in 18th-century England was hanged for stealing a petticoat.159 Even at the turn of the 20th century, German children “were regularly placed on a red-hot iron stove if obstinate, tied to their bedposts for days, thrown into cold water or snow to ‘harden’ them, [and] forced to kneel for hours every day against the wall on a log while the parents ate and read.”160 During toilet training many children were tormented with enemas, and at school they were “beaten until [their] skin smoked.”
The harsh treatment was not unique to Europe. The beating of children has been recorded in ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome, China, and Aztec Mexico, whose punishments included “sticking the child with thorns, having their hands tied and then being stuck with pointed agave leaves, whippings, and even being held over a fire of dried axi peppers and being made to inhale the acrid smoke.”161 DeMause notes that well into the 20th century, Japanese children were subjected to “beating and burning of incense on the skin as routine punishments, cruel bowel training with constant enemas, . . . kicking, hanging by the feet, giving cold showers, strangling, driving a needle into the body, cutting off a finger joint.”162 (A psychoanalyst as well as a historian, deMause had plenty of material with which to explain the atrocities of World War II.)
Children were subjected to psychological torture as well. Much of their entertainment was filled with reminders that they might be abandoned by parents, abused by stepparents, or mutilated by ogres and wild animals. Grimm’s fairy tales were just a few of the advisories that may be found in children’s literature of the misfortunes that can befall a careless or disobedient child. English babies, for example, were soothed to sleep with a lullaby about Napoleon:Baby, baby, if he hears you,
As he gallops past the house,
Limb from limb at once he’ll tear you,
Just as pussy tears a mouse.
And he’ll beat you, beat you, beat you,
And he’ll beat you all to pap,
And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you,
Every morsel, snap, snap, snap.163
A recurring archetype in children’s verse is the child who commits a minor slipup or is unjustly blamed for one, whereupon his
stepmother butchers him and serves him for dinner to his unwitting father. In a Yiddish version, the victim of one such injustice sings posthumously to his sister:Murdered by my mother,
Eaten by my father.
And Sheyndele, when they were done
Sucked the marrow from my bones
And threw them out the window.164
Why would any parents torture, starve, neglect, and terrify their own children? One might naïvely think that parents would have evolved to nurture their children without stinting, since having viable offspring is the be-all and endall of natural selection. Children too ought to submit to their parents’ guidance without resistance, since it is offered for their own good. The naïve view predicts a harmony between parent and child, since each “wants” the same thing—for the child to grow up healthy and strong enough to have children of its own.
It was Trivers who first noticed that the theory of natural selection predicts no such thing.165 Some degree of conflict between parent and offspring is rooted in the evolutionary genetics of the family. Parents have to apportion their investment (in resources, time, and risk) across all their children, born and unborn. All things being equal, every offspring is equally valuable, though each benefits from parental investment more when it is young and helpless than when it can fend for itself. The child sees things differently. Though an offspring has an interest in its siblings’ welfare, since it shares half its genes with each full sib, it shares all of its genes with itself, so it has a disproportionate interest in its own welfare. The tension between what a parent wants (an equitable allocation of its worldly efforts to all its children) and what a child wants (a lopsided benefit to itself compared to its siblings) is called parent-offspring conflict. Though the stakes of the conflict are the parents’ investment in a child and its siblings, those siblings need not yet exist: a parent must also conserve strength for future children and grandchildren. Indeed, the first dilemma of parenthood—whether to keep a newborn—is just a special case of parent-offspring conflict.
The theory of parent-offspring conflict says nothing about how much investment an offspring should want or how much a parent should be prepared to give. It says only that however much parents are willing to give, the offspring wants a bit more. Children cry when they are in need of help, and parents cannot ignore the cries. But children are expected to cry a bit louder and longer than their objective need calls for. Parents discipline children to keep them out of danger, and socialize them to be effective members of their community. But parents are expected to discipline children a bit more for their own convenience, and to socialize them to be a bit more accommodating to their siblings and kin, than the levels that would be in the interests of the children themselves. As always, the teleological terms in the explanation—“wants,” “interests,” “for”—don’t refer to literal desires in the minds of people, but are shorthand for the evolutionary pressures that shaped those minds.
Parent-offspring conflict explains why child-rearing is always a battle of wills. What it does not explain is why that battle should be fought with rods and birches in one era and lectures and time-outs in another. In retrospect, it’s hard to avoid sorrow for the millennia of children who have needlessly suffered at the hands of their caregivers. Unlike the tragedy of war, where each side has to be as fierce as its adversary, the violence of child-rearing is entirely one-sided. The children who were whipped and burned in the past were no naughtier than the children of today, and they ended up no better behaved as adults. On the contrary, we have seen that the rate of impulsive violence of yesterday’s adults was far higher than today’s. What led the parents of our era to the discovery that they could socialize their children with a fraction of the brute force that was used by their ancestors?
The first nudge was ideological, and like so many other humanitarian reforms it originated in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. Children’s tactics in parent-offspring conflict have led parents in every era to call them little devils. During the ascendancy of Christianity, that intuition was ratified by a religious belief in innate depravity and original sin. A German preacher in the 1520s, for instance, sermonized that children harbored wishes for “adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness, idol worship, belief in magic, hostility, quarreling, passion, anger, strife, dissension, factiousness, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony,” and he was just getting started.166 The expression “beat the devil out of him” was more than a figure of speech! Also, a fatalism about the unfolding of life made child development a matter of fate or divine will rather than the responsibility of parents and teachers.
One paradigm shift came from John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education , which was published in 1693 and quickly went viral.167 Locke suggested that a child was “only as white Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases”—a doctrine also called the tabula rasa (scraped tablet) or blank slate. Locke wrote that the education of children could make “a great difference in mankind,” and he encouraged teachers to be sympathetic toward their pupils and to try to take their viewpoints. Tutors should carefully observe the “change in temper” in their students and should help them enjoy their studies. And teachers should not expect young children to show the same “carriage, seriousness, or application” as older ones. On the contrary, “they must be permitted . . . the foolish and childish actions suitable to their years.”168
The idea that the way children are treated determines the kinds of adults they grow into is conventional wisdom today, but it was news at the time. Several of Locke’s contemporaries and successors turned to metaphor to remind people about the formative years of life. John Milton wrote, “The childhood shows the man as morning shows the day.” Alexander Pope elevated the correlation to causation: “Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” And William Wordsworth inverted the metaphor of childhood itself: “The child is father of the man.” The new understanding required people to rethink the moral and practical implications of the treatment of children. Beating a child was no longer an exorcism of malign forces possessing a child, or even a technique of behavior modification designed to reduce the frequency of bratty behavior in the present. It shaped the kind of person that the child would grow into, so its consequences, foreseen and unforeseen, would alter the makeup of civilization in the future.
Another gestalt shift came from Rousseau, who replaced the Christian notion of original sin with the romantic notion of original innocence. In his 1762 treatise Émile, or On Education, Rousseau wrote, “Everything is good as it leaves the hand of the Author of things, and everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Foreshadowing the theories of the 20th-century psychologist Jean Piaget, Rousseau divided childhood into a succession of stages centered on Instinct, Sensations, and Ideas. He argued that young children have not yet reached the Age of Ideas, and so should not be expected to reason in the ways of adults. Rather than drilling youngsters in the rules of good and evil, adults should allow children to interact with nature and learn from their experiences. If in the course of exploring the world they damaged things, it was not from an intention to do harm but from their own innocence. “Respect childhood,” he implored, and “leave nature to act for a long time before you get involved with acting in its place.”169 The 19th-century Romantic movement inspired by Rousseau saw childhood as a period of wisdom, purity, and creativity, a stage that children should be left to enjoy rather than be disciplined out of. The sensibility is familiar today but was radical at the time.
During the Enlightenment, elite opinion began to incorporate the childfriendly doctrines of the blank slate and original innocence. But historians of childhood place the turning point in the actual treatment of children considerably later, in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century.170 The economist Viviana Zelizer has suggested that the era from the 1870s to the 1930s saw a “sacralization” of childhood among middle- and upper-class parents in the West. That was when children attained the status we now grant the
m: “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”171 The era was inaugurated in England when a “baby-farming” scandal led to the formation of the Infant Protection Society in 1870 and to the Infant Life Protection Acts of 1872 and 1897. Around the same time, pasteurization and sterilized bottles meant that fewer infants were outsourced to infanticidal wet nurses. Though the Industrial Revolution originally moved children from backbreaking labor on farms to backbreaking labor in mills and factories, legal reforms increasingly restricted child labor. At the same time, the affluence that flowed from the maturing Industrial Revolution drove rates of infant mortality downward, reduced the need for child labor, and provided a tax stream that could support social services. More children went to school, which soon became compulsory and free. To deal with the packs of urchins, ragamuffins, and artful dodgers who roamed city streets, child welfare agencies founded kindergartens, orphanages, reform schools, fresh-air camps, and boys’ and girls’ clubs.172 Stories for children were written to give them pleasure rather than to terrorize them or moralize to them. The Child Study movement aimed for a scientific approach to human development and began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child-rearing experts.
We have seen that during periods of humanitarian reform, a recognition of the rights of one group can lead to a recognition of others by analogy, as when the despotism of kings was analogized to the despotism of husbands, and when two centuries later the civil rights movement inspired the women’s rights movement. The protection of abused children also benefited from an analogy—in this case, believe it or not, with animals.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 64