The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  According to this way of thinking, death by torture is not an unthinkable horror; it has a bright side. It is a route to salvation, a part of the divine plan. Like Jesus, the early Christian saints found a place next to God by being tortured to death in ingenious ways. For more than a millennium, Christian martyrologies described these torments with pornographic relish.29

  Here are just a few saints whose names, if not their causes of death, are widely known. Saint Peter, an apostle of Jesus and the first Pope, was crucified upside down. Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, met his end on an X-shaped cross, the source of the diagonal stripes on the Union Jack. Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on a gridiron, a detail unknown to most Canadians who recognize his name from the river, the gulf, and one of Montreal’s two major boulevards. The other one commemorates Saint Catherine, who was broken on the wheel, a punishment in which the executioner tied the victim to a wagon wheel, smashed his or her limbs with a sledgehammer, braided the shattered but living body through the spokes, and hoisted it onto a pole for birds to peck while the victim slowly died of hemorrhage and shock. (Catherine’s wheel, studded with spikes, adorns the shield of the eponymous college at Oxford.) Saint Barbara, namesake of the beautiful California city, was hung upside down by her ankles while soldiers ripped her body with iron claws, amputated her breasts, burned the wounds with hot irons, and beat her head with spiked clubs. And then there’s Saint George, the patron saint of England, Palestine, the republic of Georgia, the Crusades, and the Boy Scouts. Because God kept resuscitating him, George got to be tortured to death many times. He was seated astride a sharp blade with weights on his legs, roasted on a fire, pierced through the feet, crushed by a spiked wheel, had sixty nails hammered into his head, had the fat rendered out of his back with candles, and then was sawn in half.

  The voyeurism in the martyrologies was employed not to evoke outrage against torture but to inspire reverence for the bravery of the martyrs. As in the story of Jesus, torture was an excellent thing. The saints welcomed their torments, because suffering in this life would be rewarded with bliss in the next one. The Christian poet Prudentius wrote of one of the martyrs, “The mother was present, gazing on all the preparations for her dear one’s death and showed no signs of grief, rejoicing rather each time the pan hissing hot above the olive wood roasted and scorched her child.”30 Saint Lawrence would become the patron saint of comedians because while he was lying on the gridiron he said to his tormenters, “This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite.” The torturers were straight men, bit players; when they were put in a bad light it was because they were torturing our heroes, not because they used torture in the first place.

  The early Christians also extolled torture as just deserts for the sinful. Most people have heard of the seven deadly sins, standardized by Pope Gregory I in 590 CE. Fewer people know about the punishment in hell that was reserved for those who commit them:Pride: Broken on the wheel

  Envy: Put in freezing water

  Gluttony: Force-fed rats, toads, and snakes

  Lust: Smothered in fire and brimstone

  Anger: Dismembered alive

  Greed: Put in cauldrons of boiling oil

  Sloth: Thrown in snake pits 31

  The duration of these sentences, of course, was infinite.

  By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe. If you understand the expressions to burn at the stake, to hold his feet to the fire, to break a butterfly on the wheel, to be racked with pain, to be drawn and quartered, to disembowel, to flay, to press, the thumbscrew, the garrote, a slow burn, and the iron maiden (a hollow hinged statue lined with nails, later taken as the name of a heavy-metal rock band), you are familiar with a fraction of the ways that heretics were brutalized during the Middle Ages and early modern period.

  During the Spanish Inquisition, church officials concluded that the conversions of thousands of former Jews didn’t take. To compel the conversos to confess their hidden apostasy, the inquisitors tied their arms behind their backs, hoisted them by their wrists, and dropped them in a series of violent jerks, rupturing their tendons and pulling their arms out of their sockets.32 Many others were burned alive, a fate that also befell Michael Servetus for questioning the trinity, Giordano Bruno for believing (among other things) that the earth went around the sun, and William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English. Galileo, perhaps the most famous victim of the Inquisition, got off easy: he was only shown the instruments of torture (in particular, the rack) and was given the opportunity to recant for “having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves.” Today the rack shows up in cartoons featuring elasticized limbs and bad puns (Stretching exercises; Is this a wind-up? No pain no gain). But at the time it was no laughing matter. The Scottish travel writer William Lithgow, a contemporary of Galileo’s, described what it was like to be racked by the Inquisition:As the levers bent forward, the main force of my knees against the two planks burst asunder the sinews of my hams, and the lids of my knees were crushed. My eyes began to startle, my mouth to foam and froth, and my teeth to chatter like the doubling of a drummer’s sticks. My lips were shivering, my groans were vehement, and blood sprang from my arms, broken sinews, hands, and knees. Being loosed from these pinnacles of pain, I was hand-fast set on the floor, with this incessant imploration: “Confess! Confess!” 33

  Though many Protestants were victims of these tortures, when they got the upper hand they enthusiastically inflicted them on others, including a hundred thousand women they burned at the stake for witchcraft between the 15th and 18th centuries.34 As so often happens in the history of atrocity, later centuries would treat these horrors in lighthearted ways. In popular culture today witches are not the victims of torture and execution but mischievous cartoon characters or sassy enchantresses, like Broom-Hilda, Witch Hazel, Glinda, Samantha, and the Halliwell sisters in Charmed.

  Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later. And silencing a person before he can corrupt others, or making an example of him to deter the rest, is a responsible public health measure. Saint Augustine brought the point home with a pair of analogies: a good father prevents his son from picking up a venomous snake, and a good gardener cuts off a rotten branch to save the rest of the tree.35 The method of choice had been specified by Jesus himself: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”36

  Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

  MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS

  If the word saintly deserves a second look, so does the word chivalrous. The legends of knights and ladies in King Arthur’s time have provided Western culture with some of its most romantic images. Lancelot and Guinevere are the archetypes of romantic love, Sir Galahad the embodiment of gallantry. Camelot, the name of King Arthur’s court, was used as the title of a Broadway musical, and when word got out after John F. Kennedy’s assassination that he had enjoyed
the sound track, it became a nostalgic term for his administration. Kennedy’s favorite lines reportedly were “Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot / For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

  As a matter of fact, the knightly way of life was forgot, which is a good thing for the image of the knightly way of life. The actual content of the tales of medieval chivalry, which were set in the 6th century and written between the 11th and the 13th, was not the stuff of a typical Broadway musical. The medievalist Richard Kaeuper tallied the number of acts of extreme violence in the most famous of these romances, the 13th-century Lancelot, and on average found one every four pages.

  Limiting ourselves to quantifiable instances, at least eight skulls are split (some to the eyes, some to the teeth, some to the chin), eight unhorsed men are deliberately crushed by the huge hooves of the victor’s war-horse (so that they faint in agony, repeatedly), five decapitations take place, two entire shoulders are hewn away, three hands are cut off, three arms are severed at various lengths, one knight is thrown into a blazing fire and two knights are catapulted to sudden death. One woman is painfully bound in iron bands by a knight; one is kept for years in a tub of boiling water by God, one is narrowly missed by a hurled lance. Women are frequently abducted and we hear at one point of forty rapes....

  Beyond these readily enumerable acts there are reports of three private wars (with, in one case, 100 casualties on one side, and with 500 deaths with poison in another).... In one [tournament], to provide the flavor, Lancelot kills the first man he encounters with his lance and then, sword drawn, “struck to the right and the left, killing horses and knights all at the same time, cutting feet and hands, heads and arms, shoulders and thighs, striking down those above him whenever he met them, and leaving a sorrowful wake behind him, so that the whole earth was bathed in blood wherever he passed.”37

  How did the knights ever earn their reputation for being gentlemen? According to Lancelot, “Lancelot had the custom of never killing a knight who begged for mercy, unless he had sworn beforehand to do so, or unless he could not avoid it.” 38

  As for their vaunted treatment of the ladies, one knight woos a princess by pledging to rape the most beautiful woman he can find on her behalf; his rival promises to send her the heads of the knights he defeats in tournaments. Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights. According to Lancelot, “The customs of the Kingdom of Logres are such that if a lady or a maiden travels by herself, she fears no one. But if she travels in the company of a knight and another knight can win her in battle, the winner can take a lady or maiden in any way he desires without incurring shame or blame.”39 Presumably that is not what most people today mean by the word chivalry.

  EARLY MODERN EUROPE

  In chapter 3 we will see that medieval Europe settles down a bit when the knightly warlords are brought under the control of monarchs in centralized kingdoms. But the kings and queens were hardly paragons of nobility themselves.

  Commonwealth schoolchildren are often taught one of the key events in British history with the help of a mnemonic:King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded:

  One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.

  Beheaded! In 1536 Henry had his wife Anne Boleyn decapitated on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason because she gave him a son that did not survive, and he had become attracted to one of her ladies-in-waiting. Two wives later he suspected Catherine Howard of adultery and sent her to the ax as well. (Tourists visiting the Tower of London can see the chopping block for themselves.) Henry was clearly the jealous type: he also had an old boyfriend of Catherine’s drawn and quartered, which is to say hanged by the neck, taken down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, decapitated, and cut into four.

  The throne passed to Henry’s son Edward, then to Henry’s daughter Mary, and then to another daughter, Elizabeth. “Bloody Mary” did not get her nickname by putting tomato juice in her vodka but by having three hundred religious dissenters burned at the stake. And both sisters kept up the family tradition for how to resolve domestic squabbles: Mary imprisoned Elizabeth and presided over the execution of their cousin, Lady Jane Grey, and Elizabeth executed another cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth also had 123 priests drawn and quartered, and had other enemies tortured with bone-crushing manacles, another attraction on display in the Tower. Today the British royal family is excoriated for shortcomings ranging from rudeness to infidelity. You’d think people would give them credit for not having had a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered.

  Despite signing off on all that torture, Elizabeth I is among England’s most revered monarchs. Her reign has been called a golden age in which the arts flourished, especially the theater. It’s hardly news that Shakespeare’s tragedies depict a lot of violence. But his fictional worlds contained levels of barbarity that can shock even the inured audiences of popular entertainment today. Henry V, one of Shakespeare’s heroes, issues the following ultimatum of surrender to a French village during the Hundred Years’ War:why, in a moment look to see

  The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand

  Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;

  Your fathers taken by the silver beards,

  And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls,

  Your naked infants spitted upon pikes.40

  In King Lear, the Duke of Cornwall gouges out the eyes of the Earl of Gloucester (“Out, vile jelly!”), whereupon his wife, Regan, orders the earl, bleeding from the sockets, out of the house: “Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell his way to Dover.” In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock obtains the right to cut a pound of flesh from the chest of the guarantor of a loan. In Titus Andronicus, two men kill another man, rape his bride, cut out her tongue, and amputate her hands. Her father kills the rapists, cooks them in a pie, and feeds them to their mother, whom he then kills before killing his own daughter for having gotten raped in the first place; then he is killed, and his killer is killed.

  Entertainment written for children was no less grisly. In 1815 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a compendium of old folktales that had gradually been adapted for children. Commonly known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the collection ranks with the Bible and Shakespeare as one of the bestselling and most respected works in the Western canon. Though it isn’t obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney films, the tales are filled with murder, infanticide, cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse—grim fairy tales indeed. Take just the three famous stepmother stories:

  • During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and “the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way.” 41

  • Cinderella’s stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother’s advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives.”

  • Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but “iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals.... She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead.” 42

  As we shall see, purveyors of entertainment for young children today have become so intolerant of violence that even episodes of the early Muppets have been deemed too dangerous for them. And s
peaking of puppetry, one of the most popular forms of children’s entertainment in Europe used to be the Punch and Judy show. Well into the 20th century, this pair of bickering glove puppets acted out slapstick routines in ornate booths in English seaside towns. The literature scholar Harold Schechter summarizes a typical plot:It begins when Punch goes to pet his neighbor’s dog, which promptly clamps its teeth around the puppet’s grotesquely oversized nose. After prying the dog loose, Punch summons the owner, Scaramouche and, after a bit of crude banter, knocks the fellow’s head “clean off his shoulders.” Punch then calls for his wife, Judy, and requests a kiss. She responds by walloping him in the face. Seeking another outlet for his affection, Punch asks for his infant child and begins to cradle it. Unfortunately, the baby picks that moment to dirty itself. Always the loving family man, Punch reacts by beating the baby’s head against the stage, then hurling its dead body into the audience. When Judy reappears and discovers what’s happened, she is understandably upset. Tearing Punch’s stick from his hands, she begins to lay into him. He wrestles the cudgel away from her, pummels her to death, and then breaks into a triumphant little song: