The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  And finally we get to meat. If someone were to count up every animal that has lived on earth in the past fifty years and tally the harmful acts done to them, he or she might argue that no progress has been made in the treatment of animals. The reason is that the Animal Rights Revolution has been partly canceled out by another development, the Broiler Chicken Revolution.285 The 1928 campaign slogan “A chicken in every pot” reminds us that chicken was once thought of as a luxury. The market responded by breeding meatier chickens and raising them more efficiently, if less humanely: factory-farmed chickens have spindly legs, live in cramped cages, breathe fetid air, and are handled roughly when transported and slaughtered. In the 1970s consumers became convinced that white meat was healthier than red (a trend exploited by the National Pork Board when it came up with the slogan “The Other White Meat”). And since poultry are smallbrained creatures from a different biological class, many people have a vague sense that they are less fully conscious than mammals. The result was a massive increase in the demand for chicken, surpassing, by the early 1990s, the demand for beef.286 The unintended consequence was that billions more unhappy lives had to be brought into being and snuffed out to meet the demand, because it takes two hundred chickens to provide the same amount of meat as a single cow.287 Now, factory farming and cruel treatment of poultry and livestock go back centuries, so the baleful trend was not a backsliding of moral sensibilities or an increase in callousness. It was a stealthy creeping up of the numbers, driven by changes in economics and taste, which had gone undetected because a majority of people had always been incurious about the lives of chickens. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the animals that provide us with the other white meat.

  But the tide has begun to turn. One sign is the increase in vegetarianism. I’m sure I was not the only dinner host in the 1990s to have had one of my guests announce as he sat down at the table, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I don’t eat dead animals.” Since that era the question “Do you have any food restrictions?” has become a part of the etiquette of a dinner invitation, and participants at conference dinners can now tick a box that will replace a plate of rubber chicken with a plate of sodden eggplant. The trend was noted in 2002, when Time magazine ran a cover story entitled: “Should You Be a Vegetarian? Millions of Americans Are Going Meatless.”

  The food industry has responded with a cornucopia of vegetarian and vegan products. The faux-meat section of my local supermarket offers Soyburgers, Gardenburgers, Seitanburgers, Veggie Burger Meatless Patties, Tofu Pups, Not Dogs, Smart Dogs, Fakin Bacon, Jerquee, Tofurky, Soy Sausage, Soyrizo, Chik Patties, Meatless Buffalo Wings, Celebration Roast, Tempeh Strips, Terkettes, Veggie Protein Slices, Vege-Scallops, and Tuno. The technological and verbal ingenuity is testimony both to the popularity of the new vegetarianism and to the persistence of ancient meat hunger. Those who enjoy a hearty breakfast can serve their Veggie Breakfast Strips with Tofu Scramblers, perhaps in an omelet with Soya Kaas, Soymage, or Veganrella. And for dessert there’s Ice Bean, Rice Dream, and Tofutti, perhaps garnished with Hip Whip and a cherry on top. The ultimate replacement for meat would be animal tissue grown in culture, sometimes called meat without feet. The everoptimistic People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has offered a milliondollar prize to the first scientist who brings cultured chicken meat to market.288

  For all the visibility of vegetarianism, pure vegetarians still make up just a few percentage points of the population. It’s not easy being green. Vegetarians are surrounded by dead animals and the carnivores who love them, and meat hunger has not been bred out of them. It’s not surprising that many fall off the wagon: at any moment there are three times as many lapsed vegetarians as observant ones.289 Many of those who continue to call themselves vegetarians have convinced themselves that a fish is a vegetable, because they partake of fish and seafood and sometimes even chicken.290 Others parse their dietary restrictions like Conservadox Jews in a Chinese restaurant, allowing themselves exemptions for narrowly defined categories or for food eaten outside the home. The demographic sector with the largest proportion of vegetarians is teenage girls, and their principal motive may not be compassion for animals. Vegetarianism among teenage girls is highly correlated with eating disorders.291

  But is vegetarianism at least trending upward? As best we can tell, it is. In the U.K. the Vegetarian Society gathers up the results of every opinion poll it can find and presents the data on its information sheets. In figure 7–28 I’ve plotted the results of all the questions that ask a national sample of respondents whether they are vegetarians. The best-fitting straight line suggests that over the past two decades, vegetarianism has more than tripled, from about 2 percent of the population to about 7 percent. In the United States, the Vegetarian Resource Group has commissioned polling agencies to ask Americans the more stringent question of whether they eat meat, fish, or fowl, excluding the flexitarians and those with creative Linnaean taxonomies. The numbers are smaller, but the trend is similar, more than tripling in about fifteen years.

  FIGURE 7–28. Vegetarianism in the United States and United Kingdom, 1984–2009 Sources: U.K.: Vegetarian Society, http://www.vegsoc.org/info/. Excluded are polls that ask about households, ask students, or ask about “strict” vegetarians. United States: Vegetarian Resource Group, Vegetarian Journal. 2009: http://www.vrg.org/press/2009poll.htm. 2005 and 2003: http://www.vrg.org/journal/vj2006issue4/vj2006issue4poll.htm. 2000: http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/poll2000.htm. 1997: http://www.vrg.org/journal/vj97sep/979poll.htm. 1994: http:www.vrg.org/nutshell/poll.htm.

  With all the signs of increasing concern with animal welfare, it may be surprising that the percentage of vegetarians, though rising, is still so low. But it really shouldn’t be. Being a vegetarian and being concerned with animal welfare are not the same thing. Not only do vegetarians have motives other than animal welfare—health, taste, ecology, religion, driving their mothers crazy—but people who are concerned with animal welfare may wonder whether the symbolic statement of vegetarianism is the best way to reduce animal suffering. They may feel that the hamburgers they altruistically forgo are unlikely to register amid the noise in the vast national demand for meat or to lead to the sparing of the lives of any cows. And even if they did, the lives of the remaining cows would be no more pleasant. Changing the practices of the food industry is a collective action dilemma, in which individuals are tempted to shirk from private sacrifices that have marginal effects on aggregate welfare.

  The increase in vegetarianism, though, is a symbolic indicator of a broader concern for animals that can be seen in other forms. People who don’t abstain from meat as a matter of principle may still eat less of it. (American consumption of meat from mammals has declined since 1980.) 292 Restaurants and supermarkets increasingly inform their patrons about what their main course fed on and how freely it ranged while it was still on the hoof or claw. Two of the major poultry processors in the United States announced in 2010 that they were switching to a more humane method of slaughtering, in which the birds are knocked out by carbon dioxide before being hung by their feet to have their throats slit. The marketers have to walk a fine line. Diners are happy to learn that their entrée was humanely treated until its last breath, but they would rather not know the details of exactly how it met its end. And even the most humane technique has an image problem. As one executive said, “I don’t want the public to say we gas our chickens.”293

  More significantly, a majority of people support legal measures that would solve the collective action problem by approving laws that force farmers and meatpackers to treat animals more humanely. In a 2000 poll 80 percent of Britons said “they would like to see better welfare conditions for Britain’s farm animals.”294 Even Americans, with their more libertarian temperament, are willing to empower the government to enforce such conditions. In a 2003 Gallup poll, a remarkable 96 percent of Americans said that animals deserve at least some protection from harm and exploitation, and only 3 percent said that they need no protecti
on “since they are just animals.”295 Though Americans oppose bans on hunting or on the use of animals in medical research and product testing, 62 percent support “strict laws concerning the treatment of farm animals.” And when given the opportunity, they translate their opinions into votes. Livestock rights have been written into the laws of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon, and in 2008, 63 percent of California voters approved the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which bans veal crates, poultry cages, and sow gestation crates that prevent the animal from moving around.296 There is a cliché in American politics: as California goes, so goes the country.

  And perhaps as Europe goes, so goes California. The European Union has elaborate regulations on animal care “that start with the recognition that animals are sentient beings. The general aim is to ensure that animals need not endure avoidable pain or suffering and obliges the owner/keeper of animals to respect minimum welfare requirements.”297 Not every country has gone so far as Switzerland, which enacted 150 pages of regulations that force dog owners to attend a four-hour “theory” course and legislate how pet owners may house, feed, walk, play with, and dispose of their pets. (No more flushing live goldfish down the toilet.) But even the Swiss balked at a 2010 referendum that would have nationalized a Zurich policy that pays an “animal advocate” to haul offenders into criminal court, including an angler who boasted to a local newspaper that he took ten minutes to land a large pike. (The angler was acquitted; the pike was eaten.)298 All this may sound like American conservatives’ worst nightmare, but they too are willing to allow the government to regulate animal welfare. In the 2003 poll, a majority of Republicans favored passing “strict laws” on the treatment of farm animals.299

  How far will it go? People often ask me whether I think the moral momentum that carried us from the abolition of slavery and torture to civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights will culminate in the abolition of meat-eating, hunting, and animal experimentation. Will our 22nd-century descendants be as horrified that we ate meat as we are that our ancestors kept slaves?

  Maybe, but maybe not. The analogy between oppressed people and oppressed animals has been rhetorically powerful, and insofar as we are all sentient beings, it has a great deal of intellectual warrant. But the analogy is not exact—African Americans, women, children, and gay people are not broiler chickens—and I doubt that the trajectory of animal rights will be a time-lagged copy of the one for human rights. In his book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, the psychologist Hal Herzog lays out the many reasons why it’s so hard for us to converge on a coherent moral philosophy to govern our dealings with animals. I’ll mention a few that have struck me.

  One impediment is meat hunger and the social pleasures that go with the consumption of meat. Though traditional Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains prove that a meatless society is possible, the 3 percent market share of vegetarian diets in the United States shows that we are very far from a tipping point. While gathering the data for this chapter, I was excited to stumble upon a 2004 Pew Research poll in which 13 percent of the respondents were vegetarians. Upon reading the fine print, I discovered that it was a poll of supporters of the presidential candidacy of Howard Dean, the left-wing governor of Vermont. That means that even among the crunchiest granolas in Ben-and-Jerry land, 87 percent still eat meat. 300

  But the impediments run deeper than meat hunger. Many interactions between humans and animals will always be zero-sum. Animals eat our houses, our crops, and occasionally our children. They make us itch and bleed. They are vectors for diseases that torment and kill us. They kill each other, including endangered species that we would like to keep around. Without their participation in experiments, medicine would be frozen at its current state, and billions of living and unborn people would suffer and die for the sake of mice. An ethical calculus that gave equal weight to any harm suffered by any sentient being, allowing no chauvinism toward our own species, would prevent us from trading off the well-being of animals for an equivalent well-being of humans—for example, shooting a wild dog to save a little girl. To be sure, the interests of humans could be given some extra points by virtue of our zoological peculiarities, such as that our big brains allow us to savor our lives, reflect on our past and future, dread death, and enmesh our well-being with those of others in dense social networks. But the human life taboo, which among other things protects the lives of mentally incompetent people just because they are people, would have to go. Singer himself unflinchingly accepts this implication of a species-blind morality.301 But it will not take over Western morality anytime soon.

  Ultimately the move toward animal rights will bump against some of the most perplexing enigmas in the space of human thoughts, a place where moral intuitions start to break down. One is the hard problem of consciousness, namely how sentience arises from neural information processing.302 Descartes was certainly wrong about mammals, and I am pretty sure he was wrong about fish. But was he wrong about oysters? Slugs? Termites? Earthworms? If we wanted ethical certainty in our cooking, gardening, home repair, and recreation, we would need nothing less than a solution to this philosophical conundrum. Another paradox is that human beings are simultaneously rational, moral agents and organisms that are part of nature red in tooth and claw. Something in me objects to the image of a hunter shooting a moose. But why am I not upset by the image of a grizzly bear that renders it just as dead? Why don’t I think it’s a moral imperative to tempt the bear away with all-soy meatless moose patties? Should we arrange for the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, or even genetically engineer them into herbivores?303 We recoil from these thought experiments because, rightly or wrongly, we assign some degree of ethical weight to what we feel is “natural.” But if the natural carnivory of other species counts for something, why not the natural carnivory of Homo sapiens—particularly if we deploy our cognitive and moral faculties to minimize the animals’ suffering?

  These imponderables, I suspect, prevent the animal rights movement from duplicating the trajectory of the other Rights Revolutions exactly. But for now the location of the finish line is beside the point. There are many opportunities in which enormous suffering by animals can be reduced at a small cost to humans. Given the recent changes in sensibilities, it is certain that the lives of animals will continue to improve.

  WHENCE THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS?

  When I began my research for this chapter, I knew that the decades of the Long Peace and the New Peace were also decades of progress for racial minorities, women, children, gay people, and animals. But I had no idea that in every case, quantifiable measures of violence—hate crimes and rape, wife-beating and child abuse, even the number of motion pictures in which animals were harmed—would all point downward. How can we make sense of all the movements toward nonviolence of the past fifty years?

  The trends have a few things in common. In each case they had to swim against powerful currents of human nature. These include the dehumanization and demonization of out-groups; men’s sexual rapacity and their proprietary sentiments toward women; manifestations of parent-offspring conflict such as infanticide and corporal punishment; the moralization of sexual disgust in homophobia; and our meat hunger, thrill of the hunt, and boundaries of empathy based on kinship, reciprocity, and charisma.

  As if biology didn’t make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia: the demonization of infidels, the ownership of women, the sinfulness of children, the abomination of homosexuality, the dominion over animals and denial to them of souls. Asian cultures have plenty to be ashamed of too, particularly the mass disowning of daughters that encouraged a holocaust of baby girls. And then there is the entrenchment of norms: beating wives, smacking children, confining calves, and shocking rats were acceptable because everyone had always treated them as acceptable.

  Insofar as violence is immoral, the Rights Revolutions show that a moral w
ay of life often requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. We force ourselves into the shoes (or paws) of other sentient beings and consider their interests, starting with their interest in not being hurt or killed, and we ignore superficialities that may catch our eye such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and to some extent, species.

  This conclusion, of course, is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it. The Rights Revolutions are liberal revolutions. Each has been associated with liberal movements, and each is currently distributed along a gradient that runs, more or less, from Western Europe to the blue American states to the red American states to the democracies of Latin America and Asia and then to the more authoritarian countries, with Africa and most of the Islamic world pulling up the rear. In every case, the movements have left Western cultures with excesses of propriety and taboo that are deservedly ridiculed as political correctness. But the numbers show that the movements have reduced many causes of death and suffering and have made the culture increasingly intolerant of violence in any form.

  To hear the liberal punditry talk, one would think that the United States has been hurtling rightward for more than forty years, from Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to the Bushes and now the angry white men in the Tea Party movement. Yet in every issue touched by the Rights Revolutions—interracial marriage, the empowerment of women, the tolerance of homosexuality, the punishment of children, and the treatment of animals—the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals. As the conservative historian George Nash points out, “In practice if not quite in theory American conservatism today stands well to the left of where it stood in 1980.”304 (Maybe that’s why the men are so angry.)