The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (85 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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No reasonable person would prophesy that the New Peace is going to be a long peace, to say nothing of a perpetual peace. There will certainly be wars and terrorist attacks in the decades to come, possibly large ones. On top of the known unknowns—militant Islamism, nuclear terrorists, environmental degradation—there are surely many unknown unknowns. Perhaps new leaders in China will decide to engulf Taiwan once and for all, or Russia will swallow a former Soviet republic or two, provoking an American response. Maybe an aggressive Chavismo will spill out of Venezuela and incite Marxist insurgencies and brutal counterinsurgencies throughout the developing world. Perhaps at this very moment terrorists from some liberation movement no one has heard of are plotting an attack of unprecedented destruction, or an eschatological ideology is fermenting in the mind of a cunning fanatic who will take over a major country and plunge the world back into war. As the
Saturday Night Live
news analyst Roseanne Roseannadanna observed, “It’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
Saturday Night Live
news analyst Roseanne Roseannadanna observed, “It’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
But it is just as foolish to let our lurid imaginations determine our sense of the probabilities. It may always be something, but there can be fewer of those things, and the things that happen don’t have to be as bad. The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades—not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome—democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies—are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight.
Of course we live in a dangerous world. As I have emphasized, a statistical appreciation of history tells us that violent catastrophes may be improbable, but they are not astronomically improbable. Yet that can also be stated in a more hopeful way. Violent catastrophes may not be astronomically improbable, but they are improbable.
7
THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
W
hen I was a boy, I was not particularly strong, swift, or agile, and that made organized sports a gantlet of indignities. Basketball meant chucking a series of airballs in the general direction of the backboard. Rope-climbing left me suspended a foot above the floor like a clump of seaweed on a fishing line. Baseball meant long interludes in sun-scorched right field praying that no fly ball would come my way.
hen I was a boy, I was not particularly strong, swift, or agile, and that made organized sports a gantlet of indignities. Basketball meant chucking a series of airballs in the general direction of the backboard. Rope-climbing left me suspended a foot above the floor like a clump of seaweed on a fishing line. Baseball meant long interludes in sun-scorched right field praying that no fly ball would come my way.
But one talent saved me from perpetual pariahhood among my peers: I was not afraid of pain. As long as the blows were delivered fair and square and without ad hominem humiliation, I could mix it up with the best of them. The boy culture that flourished in a parallel universe to that of gym teachers and camp counselors offered many opportunities to redeem myself.
There was pickup hockey and tackle football (sans helmet and pads), where I could check and be checked into the boards, or dive for fumbles in a scrum of bodies. There was murderball, in which one boy clutched a volleyball and counted off the seconds while the others pummeled him until he let go. There was Horse (strictly forbidden by the counselors, doubtless on the orders of lawyers), in which a fat kid (“the pillow”) would lean back against a tree, a teammate would bend over and hold him around the waist, and the rest of the team would form a line of backs by holding the waist of the kid in front of him. Each member of the opposing team would then take a running leap and come crashing down on the back of the “horse” until it either collapsed to the ground or supported the riders for three seconds. And during the evening there was Knucks, the outlawed card game in which the loser would be thwhacked on the knuckles with the deck of cards, the number of edge-on and face-on thwacks determined by the point spread and restrained by a complex set of rules about flinching, scraping, and excess force. Mothers would regularly inspect our knuckles for incriminating scabs and bruises.
Nothing organized by grown-ups could compare with these delirious pleasures. The closest they came was dodgeball, with its ecstatic chaos of hiding behind aggressive teammates, ducking projectiles, diving to the floor, and cheating death until the final mortal smack of rubber against skin. It was the only sport in the Orwellianly named “physical education” curriculum that I actually looked forward to.
But now the Boy Gender has lost another battle in its age-old war with camp counselors, phys ed teachers, lawyers, and moms. In school district after school district,
dodgeball has been banned.
A statement by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, which must have been written by someone who was never a boy, and quite possibly has never met one, explained the reason:
dodgeball has been banned.
A statement by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, which must have been written by someone who was never a boy, and quite possibly has never met one, explained the reason:
NASPE believes that dodgeball is not an appropriate activity for K–12 school physical education programs. Some kids may like it—the most skilled, the most confident. But many do not! Certainly not the student who gets hit hard in the stomach, head, or groin. And it is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by hurting others.
Yes, the fate of dodgeball is yet another sign of the historical decline of violence. Recreational violence has a long ancestry in our lineage. Play fighting is common among juvenile primate males, and rough-and-tumble play is one of the most robust sex differences in humans.
1
The channeling of these impulses into extreme sports has been common across cultures and throughout history. Together with Roman gladiatorial combat and medieval jousting tournaments, the bloody history of sports includes recreational fighting with sharp sticks in Renaissance Venice (where noblemen and priests would join in the fun), the Sioux Indian pastime in which boys would try to grab their opponents’ hair and knee them in the face, Irish faction fights with stout oak clubs called shillelaghs, the sport of shin-kicking (popular in the 19th-century American South) in which the contestants would lock forearms and kick each other in the shins until one collapsed, and the many forms of bare-knuckle fights whose typical tactics may be inferred from the current rules of boxing (no head-butting, no hitting below the belt, and so on).
2
1
The channeling of these impulses into extreme sports has been common across cultures and throughout history. Together with Roman gladiatorial combat and medieval jousting tournaments, the bloody history of sports includes recreational fighting with sharp sticks in Renaissance Venice (where noblemen and priests would join in the fun), the Sioux Indian pastime in which boys would try to grab their opponents’ hair and knee them in the face, Irish faction fights with stout oak clubs called shillelaghs, the sport of shin-kicking (popular in the 19th-century American South) in which the contestants would lock forearms and kick each other in the shins until one collapsed, and the many forms of bare-knuckle fights whose typical tactics may be inferred from the current rules of boxing (no head-butting, no hitting below the belt, and so on).
2
But in the past half-century the momentum has been going squarely against boys of all ages. Though people have lost none of their taste for consuming simulated and voluntary violence, they have engineered social life to place the most tempting kinds of real-life violence off-limits. It is part of a current in which Western culture has been extending its distaste for violence farther and farther down the magnitude scale. The postwar revulsion against forms of violence that kill by the millions and thousands, such as war and genocide, has spread to forms that kill by the hundreds, tens, and single digits, such as rioting, lynching, and hate crimes. It has extended from killing to other forms of harm such as rape, assault, battering, and intimidation. It has spread to vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. The ban on dodgeball is a weathervane for these winds of change.
The efforts to stigmatize, and in many cases criminalize, temptations to violence have been advanced in a cascade of campaigns for “rights”—civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights. The movements are tightly bunched in the second half of the 20th century, and I will refer to them as the Rights Revolutions. The contagion of rights in this era may be seen in figure 7–1, which plots the proportion of English-language books (as a percentage of the proportions in 2000) that contain the phrases
civil rights
,
women’s rights
,
children’s rights, gay rights,
and
animal rights
between 1948 (which symbolically inaugurated the era with the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights) and 2000.
civil rights
,
women’s rights
,
children’s rights, gay rights,
and
animal rights
between 1948 (which symbolically inaugurated the era with the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights) and 2000.
As the era begins, the terms
civil rights
and
women’s rights
already have a presence, because the ideas had been in the nation’s consciousness since the 19th century.
Civil rights
shot up between 1962 and 1969, the era of the most dramatic legal victories of the American civil rights movement. As it began to level off,
women’s rights
began its ascent, joined shortly by c
hildren’s rights;
then, in the 1970s,
gay rights
appeared on the scene, followed shortly by
animal rights
.
civil rights
and
women’s rights
already have a presence, because the ideas had been in the nation’s consciousness since the 19th century.
Civil rights
shot up between 1962 and 1969, the era of the most dramatic legal victories of the American civil rights movement. As it began to level off,
women’s rights
began its ascent, joined shortly by c
hildren’s rights;
then, in the 1970s,
gay rights
appeared on the scene, followed shortly by
animal rights
.
These staggered rises tell a story. Each of the movements took note of the success of its predecessors and adopted some of their tactics, rhetoric, and most significantly, moral rationale. During the Humanitarian Revolution two centuries earlier, a cascade of reforms tumbled out in quick succession, instigated by intellectual reflection on entrenched customs, and connected by a humanism that elevated the flourishing and suffering of individual minds over the color, class, or nationality of the bodies that housed them. Then and now the concept of individual rights is not a plateau but an escalator. If a sentient being’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may not be compromised because of the color of its skin, then why may it be compromised because of other irrelevant traits such as gender, age, sexual preference, or even species? Dull habit or brute force may prevent people in certain times and places from following this line of argument to each of its logical conclusions, but in an open society the momentum is unstoppable.
FIGURE 7–1.
Use of the terms
civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights,
and
animal rights
in English-language books, 1948–2000
Use of the terms
civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights,
and
animal rights
in English-language books, 1948–2000
Source:
Five million books digitized by Google Books, analyzed by the Bookworm program, Michel et al., 2011. Bookworm is a more powerful version of the Google Ngram Viewer (ngrams.googlelabs .com), and can analyze the proportion of books, in addition to the proportion of the corpus, in which a search string is found. Plotted as a percentage of the proportion of books containing each term in the year 2000, with a moving average of five years.
Five million books digitized by Google Books, analyzed by the Bookworm program, Michel et al., 2011. Bookworm is a more powerful version of the Google Ngram Viewer (ngrams.googlelabs .com), and can analyze the proportion of books, in addition to the proportion of the corpus, in which a search string is found. Plotted as a percentage of the proportion of books containing each term in the year 2000, with a moving average of five years.
The Rights Revolutions replayed some of the themes of the Humanitarian Revolution, but they also replayed one feature of the Civilizing Process. During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change, such as the revulsion to dinnertime dagger attacks that left us with the condemnation of eating peas with a knife. Likewise the sanctity of religion and “family values” in red-state America is no longer remembered as a tactic to pacify brawling men in cowboy towns and mining camps.
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