The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  But any intuition that vegetarianism and humanitarianism go together was shattered in the 20th-century by the treatment of animals under Nazism.266 Hitler and many of his henchmen were vegetarians, not so much out of compassion for animals as from an obsession with purity, a pagan desire to reconnect to the soil, and a reaction to the anthropocentrism and meat rituals of Judaism. In an unsurpassed display of the human capacity for moral compartmentalization, the Nazis, despite their unspeakable experiments on living humans, instituted the strongest laws for the protection of animals in research that Europe had ever seen. Their laws also mandated humane treatment of animals in farms, movie sets, and restaurants, where fish had to be anesthetized and lobsters killed swiftly before they were cooked. Ever since that bizarre chapter in the history of animal rights, advocates of vegetarianism have had to retire one of their oldest arguments: that eating meat makes people aggressive, and abstaining from it makes them peaceful.

  Some of the early expressions of a genuinely ethical concern for animals took place in the Renaissance. Europeans had become curious about vegetarianism when reports came back from India of entire nations that lived without meat. Several writers, including Erasmus and Montaigne, condemned the mistreatment of animals in hunting and butchery, and one of them, Leonardo da Vinci, became a vegetarian himself.

  But it was in the 18th and 19th centuries that arguments for animal rights began to catch on. Part of the impetus was scientific. Descartes’ substance dualism, which considered consciousness a free-floating entity that works separately from the brain, gave way to theories of monism and property dualism that equated, or at least intimately connected, consciousness with brain activity. This early neurobiological thinking had implications for animal welfare. As Voltaire wrote:There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins. You discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering?267

  And as we saw in chapter 4, Jeremy Bentham’s laser-beam analysis of morality led him to pinpoint the issue that should govern our treatment of animals: not whether they can reason or talk, but whether they can suffer. By the early 19th century, the Humanitarian Revolution had been extended from humans to other sentient beings, first targeting the most conspicuous form of sadism toward animals, blood sports, followed by the abuse of beasts of burden, livestock on farms, and laboratory animals. When the first of these measures, a ban on the abuse of horses, was introduced into the British Parliament in 1821, it elicited howls of laughter from MPs who said that it would lead to the protection of dogs and even cats. Within two decades that is exactly what happened. 268 Throughout 19th-century Britain, a blend of humanitarianism and romanticism led to antivivisection leagues, vegetarian movements, and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.269 Biologists’ acceptance of the theory of evolution following the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 made it impossible for them to maintain that consciousness was unique to humans, and by the end of the century in Britain, they had acceded to laws banning vivisection.

  The campaign to protect animals lost momentum during the middle decades of the 20th century. The austerity from the two world wars had created a meat hunger, and the populace was so grateful for the flood of cheap meat from factory farming that it gave little thought to where the meat came from. Also, beginning in the nineteen-teens, behaviorism took over psychology and philosophy and decreed that the very idea of animal experience was a form of unscientific naïveté: the cardinal sin of anthropomorphism. Around the same time the animal welfare movement, like the pacifist movements of the 19th century, developed an image problem and became associated with do-gooders and health food nuts. Even one of the greatest moral voices of the 20th century, George Orwell, was contemptuous of vegetarians:One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.... The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.270

  All this changed in the 1970s.271 The plight of livestock in factory farms was brought to light in Britain in a 1964 book by Ruth Harrison called Animal Machines. Other public figures soon took up the cause. Brigid Brophy has been credited with the term animal rights, which she deliberately coined by analogy: she wanted to associate “the case for non-human animals with that clutch of egalitarian or libertarian ideas which have sporadically, though quite often with impressively actual political results, come to the rescue of other oppressed classes, such as slaves or homosexuals or women.” 272

  The real turning point was the philosopher Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation, the so-called bible of the animal rights movement. 273 The sobriquet is doubly ironic because Singer is a secularist and a utilitarian, and utilitarians have been skeptical of natural rights ever since Bentham called the idea “nonsense on stilts.” But following Bentham, Singer laid out a razor-sharp argument for a full consideration of the interests of animals, while not necessarily granting them “rights.” The argument begins with the realization that it is consciousness rather than intelligence or species membership that makes a being worthy of moral consideration. It follows that we should not inflict avoidable pain on animals any more than we should inflict it on young children or the mentally handicapped. And a corollary is that we should all be vegetarians. Humans can thrive on a modern vegetarian diet, and animals’ interests in a life free of pain and premature death surely outweigh the marginal increase in pleasure we get from eating their flesh. The fact that humans “naturally” eat meat, whether by cultural tradition, biological evolution, or both, is morally irrelevant.

  Like Brophy, Singer made every effort to analogize the animal welfare movement to the other Rights Revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. The analogy began with his title, an allusion to colonial liberation, women’s liberation, and gay liberation, and it continued with his popularization of the term speciesism, a sibling of racism and sexism. Singer quoted an 18th-century critic of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft who argued that if she was right about women, we would also have to grant rights to “brutes.” The critic had intended it as a reductio ad absurdum, but Singer argued that it was a sound deduction. For Singer, these analogies are far more than rhetorical techniques. In another book, The Expanding Circle, he advanced a theory of moral progress in which human beings were endowed by natural selection with a kernel of empathy toward kin and allies, and have gradually extended it to wider and wider circles of living things, from family and village to clan, tribe, nation, species, and all of sentient life.274 The book you are reading owes much to this insight.

  Singer’s moral arguments were not the only forces that made people sympathetic to animals. In the 1970s it was a good thing to be a socialist, fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist, and feminist, sometimes all at the same time. The compassion-based argument for vegetarianism was soon fortified with other arguments: that meat was fattening, toxic, and artery-hardening; that growing crops to feed animals rather than people was a waste of land and food; and that the effluvia of farm animals was a major pollutant, particularly methane, the greenhouse gas that comes out of both ends of a cow.

  Whether you call it animal liberation, animal rights, animal welfare, or the animal movement, the decades since 1975 in Western culture have seen a growing intolerance of violence toward animals. Changes are visible in at least half a dozen ways.

  I’ve already mentioned the first: the protection of animals in laboratories. Not only are live animals now protected from being hurt,
stressed, or killed in the conduct of science, but in high school biology labs the venerable custom of dissecting pickled frogs has gone the way of inkwells and slide rules. (In some schools it has been replaced by V-Frog, a virtual reality dissection program.) 275 And in commercial laboratories the routine use of animals to test cosmetics and household products has come under fire. Since the 1940s, following reports of women being blinded by mascara containing coal tar, many household products have been tested for safety with the infamous Draize procedure, which applies a compound to the eyes of rabbits and looks for signs of damage. Until the 1980s few people had heard of the Draize test, and until the 1990s few would have recognized the term cruelty-free, the designation for products that avoid it. Today the term is emblazoned on thousands of consumer goods and has become familiar enough that the label “cruelty-free condoms” does not raise an eyebrow. Animal testing in consumer product labs continues, but has been increasingly regulated and reduced.

  Another conspicuous change is the outlawing of blood sports. I have already mentioned that since 2005 the British aristocracy has had to retire its bugles and bloodhounds, and in 2008 Louisiana became the last American state to ban cockfights, a sport that had been popular throughout the world for centuries. Like many prohibited vices, the practice continues, particularly among immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia, but it has long been in decline in the United States and has been outlawed in many other countries as well.276

  Even the proud bullfight has been threatened. In 2004 the city of Barcelona outlawed the deadly contests between matador and beast, and in 2010 the ban was extended to the entire region of Catalonia. The state-run Spanish television network had already ended live coverage of bullfights because they were deemed too violent for children.277 The European Parliament has considered a continent-wide ban as well. Like formal dueling and other violent customs sanctified by pomp and ceremony, bullfighting may eventually bite the dust, not because compassion condemns it or governments outlaw it, but because detraction will not suffer it. In his 1932 book Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway explained the primal appeal of the bullfight:[The matador] must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Once you accept the rule of death, “Thou shalt not kill” is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bull-fight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.

  Thirty years later, Tom Lehrer described his experience of a bullfight a bit differently. “There is surely nothing more beautiful in this world,” he exclaimed, “than the sight of a lone man facing singlehandedly a half a ton of angry pot roast.” In the climactic verse of his ballad, he sang:I cheered at the bandilleros’ display,

  As they stuck the bull in their own clever way,

  For I hadn’t had so much fun since the day

  My brother’s dog Rover

  Got run over.

  “Rover was killed by a Pontiac,” Lehrer added, “and it was done with such grace and artistry that the witnesses awarded the driver both ears and the tail.” The reaction of young Spaniards today is closer to Lehrer’s than to Hemingway’s. Their heroes are not matadors but singers and football players who become famous without the spiritual and aesthetic pride of killing anything. While bullfighting retains a loyal following in Spain, the crowds are middle-aged and older.

  Hunting is another pastime that has been in decline. Whether it is from compassion for Bambi or an association with Elmer Fudd, fewer Americans shoot animals for fun. Figure 7–26 shows the declining proportion of Americans in the past three decades who have told the General Social Survey that either they or their spouse hunts. Other statistics show that the average age of hunters is steadily creeping upward.278

  It’s not just that Americans are spending more time behind video screens and less in the great outdoors. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in the decade between 1996 and 2006, while the number of hunters, days of hunting, and dollars spent on hunting declined by about 10 to 15 percent, the number of wildlife watchers, days of wildlife watching, and dollars spent on wildlife watching increased by 10 to 20 percent.279 People still like to commune with animals; they would just rather look at them than shoot them. It remains to be seen whether the decline will be reversed by the locavore craze, in which young urban professionals have taken up hunting to reduce their food miles and harvest their ownfree-range, grass-fed, sustainable, humanely slaughtered meat.280

  It’s hard to imagine that fishing could ever be considered a humane sport, but anglers are doing their best. Some of them take catch-and-release a step further and release the catch before it even breaks the surface, because expofurther and release the catch before it even breaks the surface, because exposure to the air is stressful to a fish. Better still is hookless fly-fishing: the angler watches the trout take the fly, feels a little tug on the line, and that’s it. One of them describes the experience: “I entered the trout’s world and got among them in a much more natural way than ever before. I didn’t interrupt their feeding rhythms. They took the fly continually, and I still got that little jolt of pleasure you feel when a fish takes your fly. I don’t want to harass or harm trout anymore, so now there’s a way for me to do that and still keep fishing.”281

  FIGURE 7–26. Percentage of American households with hunters, 1977–2006

  Source: General Social Survey, http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website/.

  And do you recognize this trope?

  No Trees Were Harmed in the Making of This Blog Post.

  No Hamsters Were Harmed in the Making of This Book Trailer.

  No Polar Bears Were Harmed in the Making of This Commercial.

  No Goats Were Harmed in the Writing of This Review.

  No Cans of Diet Coke Were Harmed in the Production of This Product.

  No Tea Partiers Were Harmed in the Protesting of This Health Care Bill.

  It comes from the trademarked certification of the American Humane Association that no animals were harmed in the making of a motion picture, displayed in the rolling credits after the names of the gaffer and key grip.282 In response to movies that depicted horses plunging over cliffs by actually filming horses plunging over cliffs, the AHA created its film and television unit to develop guidelines for the treatment of animals in films. As the association explains, “Today’s consumers, increasingly savvy about animal welfare issues, have forged a partnership with American Humane to demand greater responsibility and accountability from entertainment entities that use animal actors”—a term they insist on, because, they explain, “animals are not props.” Their 131-page Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media, first compiled in 1988, begins with a definition of animal (“any sentient creature, including birds, fish, reptiles and insects”) and leaves no species or contingency unregulated.283 Here is a page I turned to at random:WATER EFFECTS (Also see Water Safety in Chapter 5.)

  6–2. No animal shall be subjected to extreme, forceful rain simulation. Water pressure and the velocity of any fans used to create this effect must be monitored at all times.

  6–3. Rubber mats or other non-slip material or surface shall be provided when simulating rain. If effects call for mud, the depth of the mud must be approved by American Humane prior to filming. When necessary, a non-slip surface shall be provided underneath the mud.

  The AHA boasts that “since the introduction of the Guidelines, animal accidents, illnesses and deaths on the set have sharply declined.” They back it up with numbers, and since I like to tell my story with graphs, figure7–27 is one that shows the number of films per year designated as “u
nacceptable” because of mistreatment of animal actors.

  FIGURE 7–27. Number of motion pictures per year in which animals were harmed, 1972–2010

  Source: American Humane Association, Film and Television Unit, 2010.

  And if that is not enough to convince you that animal rights have been taken to a new level, consider the events of June 16, 2009, as recounted in a New York Times article entitled “What’s White, Has 132 Rooms, and Flies?” The answer to the riddle is the White House, which had recently become infested with the bugs. During a televised interview a large fly orbited President Obama’s head. When the Secret Service did not wrestle it to the ground, the president took matters into his own hands, using one of them to smack the fly on the back of the other. “I got the sucker,” boasted the exterminator in chief. The footage became a YouTube sensation but drew a complaint from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They noted on their blog, “It can’t be said that President Obama wouldn’t hurt a fly,” and sent over one of their Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catchers “in the event of future insect incidents.”284