What caused the Rights Revolutions? As hard as it was to establish the causes of the Long Peace, New Peace, and 1990s crime decline, it’s harder still to pinpoint an exogenous factor that would explain why the Rights Revolutions bunched up when they did. But we can consider the standard candidates.
The postwar years saw an expansion of prosperity, but prosperity has such a diffuse influence on a society that it offers little insight into the revolutions’ immediate triggers. Money can buy education, police, social science, social services, media penetration, a professional workforce with more women, and better care of children and animals. It’s hard to identify which of these made a difference, and even if we could, it would raise the question of why society chose to distribute its surplus among these various goods in such a way as to reduce harm to vulnerable populations. And though I know of no rigorous statistical analysis, I can discern no correlations between the timing of the various upswings in the consideration of rights from the 1960s to the 2000s and the economic booms and recessions of those decades.
Democratic government obviously played a role. The Rights Revolutions took place in democracies, which are constituted as social contracts among individuals designed to reduce violence among them; as such they contain the seeds of expansion to groups that originally had been overlooked. But the timing remains a puzzle, because democracy is not an entirely exogenous variable. It was the machinery of democracy itself that was at issue during the American civil rights movement, when the political disenfranchisement of blacks was remedied. In the other revolutions too, new groups were invited or argued their way into full partnership in the social contract. Only then could the government be empowered to police violence (or cease its own violence) against members of the affected groups.
During the Rights Revolutions, networks of reciprocity and trade had expanded with the shift from an economy based on stuff to one based on information. Women were less enslaved by domestic chores, and institutions sought talent from a wide pool of human capital rather than just from the local labor supply or old boys’ club. As women and members of minority groups were drawn into the wheelings and dealings of government and commerce, they ensured that their interests were factored into their workings. We have seen some evidence for this mechanism: countries with more women in government and the professions have less domestic violence against women, and people who know gay people personally are less likely to disapprove of homosexuality. But as with democracy, the inclusiveness of institutions is not a completely exogenous process. The hidden hand of an information economy may have made institutions more receptive to women, minorities, and gays, but it still took government muscle in the form of antidiscrimination laws to integrate them fully. And in the case of children and animals, there was no market for reciprocal exchanges at all: the beneficence went in one direction.
If I were to put my money on the single most important exogenous cause of the Rights Revolutions, it would be the technologies that made ideas and people increasingly mobile. The decades of the Rights Revolutions were the decades of the electronics revolutions: television, transistor radios, cable, satellite, long-distance telephones, photocopiers, fax machines, the Internet, cell phones, text messaging, Web video. They were the decades of the interstate highway, high-speed rail, and the jet airplane. They were the decades of the unprecedented growth in higher education and in the endless frontier of scientific research. Less well known is that they were also the decades of an explosion in book publishing. From 1960 to 2000, the annual number of books published in the United States increased almost fivefold. 305
I’ve mentioned the connection before. The Humanitarian Revolution came out of the Republic of Letters, and the Long Peace and New Peace were children of the Global Village. And remember what went wrong in the Islamic world: it may have been a rejection of the printing press and a resistance to the importation of books and the ideas they contain.
Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don’t mind being raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire’s quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Another causal pathway is an increase in invitations to adopt the viewpoints of people unlike oneself. The Humanitarian Revolution had its Clarissa, Pamela, and Julie, its Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Oliver Twist, its eyewitness reports of people being broken, burned, or flogged. During the electronic age, these empathy technologies were even more pervasive and engaging. African Americans and gay people appeared as entertainers on variety shows, then as guests on talk shows and as sympathetic characters on sitcoms and dramas. Their struggles were depicted in real-time footage of fire hoses and police dogs, and in bestselling books and plays like Travels with Charley, A Raisin in the Sun, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Telegenic feminists made their case on talk shows, and their views came out of the mouths of characters in soap operas and sitcoms.
And as we will see in chapter 9, it is not just the virtual reality experience of seeing the world through another person’s eyes that expands empathy and concern. It is also an intellectual agility—literally a kind of intelligence—which encourages one to step outside the parochial constraints of one’s birth and station, to consider hypothetical worlds, and to reflect back on the habits, impulses, and institutions that govern one’s beliefs and values. This reflective mindset may be a product of enhanced education, and it may also be a product of electronic media. As Paul Simon marveled:These are the days of miracle and wonder,
This is the long distance call,
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all.
There is a third way that a flow of information can fertilize moral growth. Scholars who have puzzled over the trajectory of material progress in different parts of the world, such as the economist Thomas Sowell in his Culture trilogy and the physiologist Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, have concluded that the key to material success is being situated in a large catchment area of innovations.306 No one is smart enough to invent anything in isolation that anyone else would want to use. Successful innovators not only stand on the shoulders of giants; they engage in massive intellectual property theft, skimming ideas from a vast watershed of tributaries flowing their way. The civilizations of Europe and western Asia conquered the world because their migration and shipping routes allowed traders and conquerors to leave behind inventions that had originated anywhere in the vast Eurasian landmass: cereal crops and alphabetic writing from the Middle East, gunpowder and paper from China, domesticated horses from Ukraine, oceangoing navigation from Portugal, and much else. There is a reason that the literal meaning of cosmopolitan is “citizen of the world,” and the literal meaning of insular is “of an island.” Societies that are marooned on islands or in impassable highlands tend to be technologically backward. And morally backward too. We have seen that cultures of honor, whose overriding ethic is tribal loyalty and blood revenge, can survive in mountainous regions long after their lowland neighbors have undergone a civilizing process.
What’s true of technological progress may also be true of moral progress. Individuals or civilizations that are situated in a vast informational catchment area can compile a moral know-how that is more sustainable and expandable than even the most righteous prophet could devise in isolation. Let me illustrate this point with a potted history of the Rights Revolutions.
In his 1963 essay
“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Martin Luther King recounted the intellectual threads that he wove into his political philosophy.307 As a graduate student in theology in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was, of course, conversant with the Bible and orthodox theology. But he also read renegade theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who criticized the historical accuracy of the Bible and the dogma that Jesus died for people’s sins.
King then embarked on “a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke. All of these masters stimulated my thinking—such as it was—and, while finding things to question in each of them, I nevertheless learned a great deal from their study.” He carefully read (and rejected) Nietzsche and Marx, inoculating himself against the autocratic and communist ideologies that would be so seductive to other liberation movements. He also rejected the “anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth,” while admiring Reinhold Niebuhr’s “extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups.... These elements in Niebuhr’s thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism.”
King’s thinking was irrevocably changed one day when he traveled to Philadelphia to hear a lecture by Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University. Johnson had recently returned from a trip to India and spoke about Mohandas Gandhi, whose influence had recently culminated in national independence. “His message was so profound and electrifying,” King wrote, “that I left the meeting and bought a half-a-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.”
King immediately appreciated that Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance was not a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teachings of Jesus. Instead it was a set of hardheaded tactics to prevail over an adversary by outwitting him rather than trying to annihilate him. A taboo on violence, King inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure and mayhem. It preserves morale and focus among followers when the movement suffers early defeats. By removing any pretext for legitimate retaliation by the enemy, it stays on the positive side of the moral ledger in the eyes of third parties, while luring the enemy onto the negative side. For the same reason, it divides the enemy, paring away supporters who find it increasingly uncomfortable to identify themselves with one-sided violence. All the while it can press its agenda by making a nuisance of itself with sit-ins, strikes, and demonstrations. The tactic obviously won’t work with all enemies, but it can work with some.
King’s historic speech to the March on Washington in 1963 was an ingenious recombination of the intellectual components he had collected during his peripatetic pilgrimage: imagery and language from the Hebrew prophets, the valorization of suffering from Christianity, the ideal of individual rights from the European Enlightenment, cadences and rhetorical tropes from the African American church, and a strategic plan from an Indian who had been steeped in Jain, Hindu, and British culture.
It is not too lazy to say that the rest is history. The moral contrivance assembled by King was thrown back into the idea pool, there to be adapted by the entrepreneurs of the other rights movements. They consciously appropriated its name, its moral rationale, and significantly, many of its tactics.
By the standards of history, a striking feature of the late-20th-century Rights Revolutions is how little violence they employed or even provoked. King himself was a martyr of the civil rights movement, as were the handful of victims of segregationist terrorism. But the urban riots that we associate with the 1960s were not a part of the civil rights movement and erupted after most of its milestones were in place. The other revolutions had hardly any violence at all: there was the nonlethal Stonewall riot, some terrorism from the fringes of the animal rights movement, and that’s about it. Their entrepreneurs wrote books, gave speeches, held marches, lobbied legislators, and gathered signatures for plebiscites. They had only to nudge a populace that had become receptive to an ethic based on the rights of individuals and were increasingly repelled by violence in any form. Compare this record to that of earlier movements which ended despotism, slavery, and colonial empires only after bloodbaths that killed people by the hundreds of thousands or millions.
FROM HISTORY TO PSYCHOLOGY
We have come to the end of six chapters that have documented the historical decline of violence. In them we have seen graph after graph that locates the first decade of the new millennium at the bottom of a slope representing the use of force over time. For all the violence that remains in the world, we are living in an extraordinary age. Perhaps it is a snapshot in a progression to an even greater peace. Perhaps it is a bottoming out to a new normal, with the easy reductions all plucked and additional ones harder and harder to reach. Perhaps it is a lucky confluence of good fortune that will soon unravel. But regardless of how the trends extrapolate into the future, something remarkable has brought us to the present.
One of Martin Luther King’s most famous quotations was adapted from an 1852 essay by the abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker:I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. 308
A century and a half later our eyes can see that the arc has bent toward justice in ways that Parker could not have imagined. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe either; nor can I divine it by conscience. But in the next two chapters, let’s see how much of it we can understand with science.
8
INNER DEMONS
But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
—William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Two aspects of the decline of violence have profound implications for our understanding of human nature: (1) the violence; (2) the decline. The last six chapters have shown that human history is a cavalcade of bloodshed. We have seen tribal raiding and feuding that kills a majority of males, the disposal of newborns that kills a majority of females, the staging of torture for vengeance and pleasure, and killings of enough kinds of victims to fill a page of a rhyming dictionary: homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide. Violence is found throughout the history and prehistory of our species, and shows no signs of having been invented in one place and spread to the others.
At the same time, those chapters contain five dozen graphs that plot violence over time and display a line that meanders from the top left to the bottom right. Not a single category of violence has been pinned to a fixed rate over the course of history. Whatever causes violence, it is not a perennial urge like hunger, sex, or the need to sleep.
The decline of violence thereby allows us to dispatch a dichotomy that has stood in the way of understanding the roots of violence for millennia: whether humankind is basically bad or basically good, an ape or an angel, a hawk or a dove, the nasty brute of textbook Hobbes or the noble savage of textbook Rousseau. Left to their own devices, humans will not fall into a state of peaceful cooperation, but nor do they have a thirst for blood that must regularly be slaked. There must be at least a grain of truth in conceptions of the human mind that grant it more than one part—theories like faculty psychology, multiple intelligences, mental organs, modularity, domain-specificity, and the metaphor of the mind as a Swiss army knife. Human nature accommodates motives that impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that—under the right circumstances—impel us toward peace, like c
ompassion, fairness, self-control, and reason. This chapter and its successor will explore these motives and the circumstances that engage them.
THE DARK SIDE
Before exploring our inner demons, I need to make the case that they exist, because there is a resistance in modern intellectual life to the idea that human nature embraces any motives that incline us toward violence at all.1 Though the ideas that we evolved from hippie chimps and that primitive people had no concept of violence have been refuted by the facts of anthropology, one still sometimes reads that violence is perpetrated by a few bad apples who do all the damage and that everyone else is peaceful at heart.
It is certainly true that the lives of most people in most societies do not end in violence. The numbers on the vertical axes of the graphs in the preceding chapters have been graduated in single digits, tens, or at most hundreds of killings per 100,000 people per year; only rarely, as in tribal warfare or an unfolding genocide, are the rates in the thousands. It is also true that in most hostile encounters, the antagonists, whether humans or other animals, usually back down before either of them can do serious damage to the other. Even in wartime, many soldiers do not fire their weapons and are racked by posttraumatic stress disorder when they do. Some writers conclude that the vast majority of humans are constitutionally averse to violence and that the high body counts are merely signs of how much harm a few psychopaths can do.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 71