The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline.

  CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  So did Hobbes get it right? In part, he did. In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (preemptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids). And the numbers confirm that relatively speaking, “during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” and that in such condition they live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”

  But from his armchair in 17th-century England, Hobbes could not help but get a lot of it wrong. People in nonstate societies cooperate extensively with their kin and allies, so life for them is far from “solitary,” and only intermittently is it nasty and brutish. Even if they are drawn into raids and battles every few years, that leaves a lot of time for foraging, feasting, singing, storytelling, childrearing, tending to the sick, and the other necessities and pleasures of life. In a draft of a previous book, I casually referred to the Yanomamö as “the fierce people,” alluding to the title of the famous book by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. An anthropologist colleague wrote in the margin: “Are the babies fierce? Are the old women fierce? Do they eat fiercely?”

  As for their lives being “poor,” the story is mixed. Certainly societies without an organized state enjoy “no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, [and] no letters,” since it’s hard to develop these things if the warriors from the next village keep waking you up with poisoned arrows, abducting the women, and burning your huts. But the first peoples who gave up hunting and gathering for settled agriculture struck a hard bargain for themselves. Spending your days behind a plow, subsisting on starchy cereal grains, and living cheek by jowl with livestock and thousands of other people can be hazardous to your health. Studies of skeletons by Steckel and his colleagues show that compared to hunter-gatherers, the first city dwellers were anemic, infected, tooth-decayed, and almost two and a half inches shorter.78 Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” 79

  So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared.80

  The improved odds of a natural death came with another price, captured by the Roman historian Tacitus: “Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.” The Bible stories we examined in chapter 1 suggest that the first kings kept their subjects in awe with totalistic ideologies and brutal punishments. Just think of the wrathful deity watching people’s every move, the regulation of daily life by arbitrary laws, the stonings for blasphemy and nonconformity, the kings with the power to expropriate a woman into their harem or cut a baby in half, the crucifixions of thieves and cult leaders. In these respects the Bible was accurate. Social scientists who study the emergence of states have noted that they began as stratified theocracies in which elites secured their economic privileges by enforcing a brutal peace on their underlings. 81

  Three scholars have analyzed large samples of cultures to quantify the correlation between the political complexity of early societies and their reliance on absolutism and cruelty.82 The archaeologist Keith Otterbein has shown that societies with more centralized leadership were more likely to kill women in battles (as opposed to abducting them), to keep slaves, and to engage in human sacrifice. The sociologist Steven Spitzer has shown that complex societies are more likely to criminalize victimless activities like sacrilege, sexual deviance, disloyalty, and witchcraft, and to punish offenders by torture, mutilation, enslavement, and execution. And the historian and anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown that complex societies tend to fall under the control of despots: leaders who are guaranteed to get their way in conflicts, who can kill with impunity, and who have large harems of women at their disposal. She found that despotism in this sense emerged among the Babylonians, Israelites, Romans, Samoans, Fijians, Khmer, Aztecs, Incas, Natchez (of the lower Mississippi), Ashanti, and other kingdoms throughout Africa.

  When it came to violence, then, the first Leviathans solved one problem but created another. People were less likely to become victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptocrats. This gives us the more sinister sense of the word pacification: not just the bringing about of peace but the imposition of absolute control by a coercive government. Solving this second problem would have to wait another few millennia, and in much of the world it remains unsolved to this day.

  3

  THE CIVILIZING PROCESS

  It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

  —Sigmund Freud

  For as long as I have known how to eat with utensils, I have struggled with the rule of table manners that says that you may not guide food onto your fork with your knife. To be sure, I have the dexterity to capture chunks of food that have enough mass to stay put as I scoot my fork under them. But my feeble cerebellum is no match for finely diced cubes or slippery little spheres that ricochet and roll at the touch of the tines. I chase them around the plate, desperately seeking a ridge or a slope that will give me the needed purchase, hoping they will not reach escape velocity and come to rest on the tablecloth. On occasion I have seized the moment when my dining companion glances away and have placed my knife to block their getaway before she turns back to catch me in this faux pas. Anything to avoid the ignominy, the boorishness, the intolerable uncouthness of using a knife for some purpose other than cutting. Give me a lever long enough, said Archimedes, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. But if he knew his table manners, he could not have moved some peas onto his fork with his knife!

  I remember, as a child, questioning this pointless prohibition. What is so terrible, I asked, about using your silverware in an efficient and perfectly sanitary way? It’s not as if I were asking to eat mashed potatoes with my hands. I lost the argument, as all children do, when faced with the rejoinder “Because I said so,” and for decades I silently grumbled about the unintelligibility of the rules of etiquette. Then one day, while doing research for this book, the scales fell from my eyes, the enigma evaporated, and I forever put aside my resentment of the no-knife rule. I owe this epiphany to the most important thinker you have never heard of, Norbert Elias (1897–1990).

  Elias was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroctaw, Poland), and studied sociology and the history of science.1 He fled Germany in 1933 because he was Jewish, was detained in a British camp in 1940 because he was German, and lost both parents to the Holocaust. On top of these tragedies, Nazism brought one more into his life: his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, was published in Germany in 1939, a time when the very idea seemed like a bad joke. Elias vagabonded from one university to another, mostly teaching night school, and retrained as a psychotherapist before settling down at the University of Leicester, where he taught until his retirem
ent in 1962. He emerged from obscurity in 1969 when The Civilizing Process was published in English translation, and he was recognized as a major figure only in the last decade of his life, when an astonishing fact came to light. The discovery was not about the rationale behind table manners but about the history of homicide.

  In 1981 the political scientist Ted Robert Gurr, using old court and county records, calculated thirty estimates of homicide rates at various times in English history, combined them with modern records from London, and plotted them on a graph.2 I’ve reproduced it in figure 3–1, using a logarithmic scale in which the same vertical distance separates 1 from 10, 10 from 100, and 100 from 1000. The rate is calculated in the same way as in the preceding chapter, namely the number of killings per 100,000 people per year. The log scale is necessary because the homicide rate declined so precipitously. The graph shows that from the 13th century to the 20th, homicide in various parts of England plummeted by a factor of ten, fifty, and in some cases a hundred—for example, from 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year in 14th-century Oxford to less than 1 homicide per 100,000 in mid-20th-century London.

  The graph stunned almost everyone who saw it (including me—as I mentioned in the preface, it was the seed that grew into this book). The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present. When I surveyed perceptions of violence in an Internet questionnaire, people guessed that 20th-century England was about 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England. In fact it was 95 percent less violent.3

  FIGURE 3–1. Homicide rates in England, 1200–2000: Gurr’s 1981 estimates

  Source: Data from Gurr, 1981, pp. 303–4, 313.

  This chapter is about the decline of homicide in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, and its counterparts and counterexamples in other times and places. I have borrowed the title of the chapter from Elias because he was the only major social thinker with a theory that could explain it.

  THE EUROPEAN HOMICIDE DECLINE

  Before we try to explain this remarkable development, let’s be sure it is real. Following the publication of Gurr’s graph, several historical criminologists dug more deeply into the history of homicide.4 The criminologist Manuel Eisner assembled a much larger set of estimates on homicide in England across the centuries, drawing on coroners’ inquests, court cases, and local records.5 Each dot on the graph in figure 3–2 is an estimate from some town or jurisdiction, plotted once again on a logarithmic scale. By the 19th century the British government was keeping annual records of homicide for the entire country, which are plotted on the graph as a gray line. Another historian, J. S. Cockburn, compiled continuous data from the town of Kent between 1560 and 1985, which Eisner superimposed on his own data as the black line.6

  FIGURE 3–2. Homicide rates in England, 1200–2000

  Source: Graph from Eisner, 2003.

  Once again we see a decline in annual homicide rates, and it is not small: from between 4 and 100 homicides per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages to around 0.8 (eight-tenths of a homicide) per 100,000 in the 1950s. The timing shows that the high medieval murder rates cannot be blamed on the social upheavals that followed the Black Death around 1350, because many of the estimates predated that epidemic.

  Eisner has given a lot of thought to how much we should trust these numbers. Homicide is the crime of choice for measurers of violence because regardless of how the people of a distant culture conceptualize crime, a dead body is hard to define away, and it always arouses curiosity about who or what produced it. Records of homicide are therefore a more reliable index of violence than records of robbery, rape, or assault, and they usually (though not always) correlate with them.7

  Still, it’s reasonable to wonder how the people of different eras reacted to these killings. Were they as likely as we are to judge a killing as intentional or accidental, or to prosecute the killing as opposed to letting it pass? Did people in earlier times always kill at the same percentage of the rate that they raped, robbed, and assaulted? How successful were they in saving the lives of victims of assault and thereby preventing them from becoming victims of homicide?

  Fortunately, these questions can be addressed. Eisner cites studies showing that when people today are presented with the circumstances of a centuriesold murder and asked whether they think it was intentional, they usually come to the same conclusion as did the people at the time. He has shown that in most periods, the rates of homicide do correlate with the rates of other violent crimes. He notes that any historical advance in forensics or in the reach of the criminal justice system is bound to underestimate the decline in homicide, because a greater proportion of killers are caught, prosecuted, and convicted today than they were centuries ago. As for lifesaving medical care, doctors before the 20th century were quacks who killed as many patients as they saved; yet most of the decline took place between 1300 and 1900.8 In any case, the sampling noise that gives social scientists such a headache when they are estimating a change of a quarter or a half is not as much of a problem when they are dealing with a change of tenfold or fiftyfold.

  Were the English unusual among Europeans in gradually refraining from murder? Eisner looked at other Western European countries for which criminologists had compiled homicide data. Figure 3–3 shows that the results were similar. Scandinavians needed a couple of additional centuries before they thought the better of killing each other, and Italians didn’t get serious about it until the 19th century. But by the 20th century the annual homicide rate of every Western European country had fallen into a narrow band centered on 1 per 100,000.

  FIGURE 3–3. Homicide rates in five Western European regions, 1300–2000

  Source: Data from Eisner, 2003, table 1.

  To put the European decline in perspective, let’s compare it to the rates for nonstate societies that we encountered in chapter 2. In figure 3–4 I have extended the vertical axis up to 1,000 on the log scale to accommodate the additional order of magnitude required by the nonstate societies. Even in the late Middle Ages, Western Europe was far less violent than the unpacified nonstate societies and the Inuit, and it was comparable to the thinly settled foragers such as the Semai and the !Kung. And from the 14th century on, the European homicide rate sank steadily, with a tiny bounce in the last third of the 20th century.

  While Europe was becoming less murderous overall, certain patterns in homicide remained constant.9 Men were responsible for about 92 percent of the killings (other than infanticide), and they were most likely to kill when they were in their twenties. Until the 1960s uptick, cities were generally safer than the countryside. But other patterns changed. In the earlier centuries the upper and lower social classes engaged in homicide at comparable rates. But as the homicide rate fell, it dropped far more precipitously among the upper classes than among the lower ones, an important social change to which we will return.10

  Another historical change was that homicides in which one man kills another man who is unrelated to him declined far more rapidly than did the killing of children, parents, spouses, and siblings. This is a common pattern in homicide statistics, sometimes called Verkko’s Law: rates of male-on-male violence fluctuate more across different times and places than rates of domestic violence involving women or kin.11 Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s explanation is that family members get on each other’s nerves at similar rates in all times and places because of deeply rooted conflicts of interest that are inherent to the patterns of genetic overlap among kin. Macho violence among male acquaintances, in contrast, is fueled by contests of dominance that are more sensitive to circumstances. How violent a man must be to keep his rank in the pecking order in a given milieu depends on his assessment of how violent the other men are, leading to vicious or virtuous circles that can spiral up or down precipitously. I’ll explore the psychology of kinship in more detail in chapter 7, and of dominance in chapter 8.

  FIGURE 3–4. Homicide rates in Western Europe, 1300–2000, and in nonstate societies

&nb
sp; Sources: Nonstate (geometric mean of 26 societies, not including Semai, Inuit, and !Kung): see figure 2–3. Europe: Eisner, 2003, table 1; geometric mean of five regions; missing data interpolated.

  EXPLAINING THE EUROPEAN HOMICIDE DECLINE

  Now let’s consider the implications of the centuries-long decline in homicide in Europe. Do you think that city living, with its anonymity, crowding, immigrants, and jumble of cultures and classes, is a breeding ground for violence? What about the wrenching social changes brought on by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution? Is it your conviction that small-town life, centered on church, tradition, and fear of God, is our best bulwark against murder and mayhem? Well, think again. As Europe became more urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer. And that brings us back to the ideas of Norbert Elias, the only theory left standing.

  Elias developed the theory of the Civilizing Process not by poring over numbers, which weren’t available in his day, but by examining the texture of everyday life in medieval Europe. He examined, for instance, a series of drawings from the 15th-century German manuscript The Medieval Housebook, a depiction of daily life as seen through the eyes of a knight.12

  In the detail shown in figure 3–5, a peasant disembowels a horse as a pig sniffs his exposed buttocks. In a nearby cave a man and a woman sit in the stocks. Above them a man is being led to the gallows, where a corpse is already hanging, and next to it is a man who has been broken on the wheel, his shattered body pecked by a crow. The wheel and gibbet are not the focal point of the drawing, but a part of the landscape, like the trees and hills.