The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  FIGURE 3–5. Detail from “Saturn,” Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch (The Medieval Housebook, 1475–80)

  Sources: Reproduced in Elias, 1939/2000, appendix 2; see Graf zu Waldburg Wolfegg, 1988.

  Figure 3–6 contains a detail from a second drawing, in which knights are attacking a village. In the lower left a peasant is stabbed by a soldier; above him, another peasant is restrained by his shirttail while a woman, hands in the air, cries out. At the lower right, a peasant is being stabbed in a chapel while his possessions are plundered, and nearby another peasant in fetters is cudgeled by a knight. Above them a group of horsemen are setting fire to a farmhouse, while one of them drives off the farmer’s cattle and strikes at his wife.

  The knights of feudal Europe were what today we would call warlords.

  FIGURE 3–6. Detail from “Mars,” Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch (The Medieval Housebook, 1475–80)

  Sources: Reproduced in Elias, 1939/2000, appendix 2; see Graf zu Waldburg Wolfegg, 1988.

  States were ineffectual, and the king was merely the most prominent of the noblemen, with no permanent army and little control over the country. Governance was outsourced to the barons, knights, and other noblemen who controlled fiefs of various sizes, exacting crops and military service from the peasants who lived in them. The knights raided one another’s territories in a Hobbesian dynamic of conquest, preemptive attack, and vengeance, and as the Housebook illustrations suggest, they did not restrict their killing to other knights. In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara Tuchman describes the way they made a living:These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing and maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry.13

  As we saw in chapter 1, to maintain the credibility of their deterrent threat, knights engaged in bloody tournaments and other demonstrations of macho prowess, gussied up with words like honor, valor, chivalry, glory, and gallantry, which made later generations forget they were bloodthirsty marauders.

  The private wars and tournaments were the backdrop to a life that was violent in other ways. As we saw, religious values were imparted with bloody crucifixes, threats of eternal torture, and prurient depictions of mutilated saints. Craftsmen applied their ingenuity to sadistic machines of punishment and execution. Brigands made travel a threat to life and limb, and ransoming captives was big business. As Elias noted, “the little people, too—the hatters, the tailors, the shepherds—were all quick to draw their knives.”14 Even clergymen got into the act. The historian Barbara Hanawalt quotes an account from 14th-century England:It happened at Ylvertoft on Saturday next before Martinmass in the fifth year of King Edward that a certain William of Wellington, parish chaplain of Ylvertoft, sent John, his clerk, to John Cobbler’s house to buy a candle for him for a penny. But John would not send it to him without the money wherefore William became enraged, and, knocking in the door upon him, he struck John in the front part of the head so that his brains flowed forth and he died forthwith.15

  Violence pervaded their entertainment as well. Tuchman describes two of the popular sports of the time: “Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws.... Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless.”16

  During my decades in academia I have read thousands of scholarly papers on a vast range of topics, from the grammar of irregular verbs to the physics of multiple universes. But the oddest journal article I have ever read is “Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honour in the Late Medieval Town.” 17 Here the historian Valentin Groebner documents dozens of accounts from medieval Europe in which one person cut off the nose of another. Sometimes it was an official punishment for heresy, treason, prostitution, or sodomy, but more often it was an act of private vengeance. In one case in Nuremberg in 1520, Hanns Rigel had an affair with the wife of Hanns von Eyb. A jealous von Eyb cut off the nose of Rigel’s innocent wife, a supreme injustice multiplied by the fact that Rigel was sentenced to four weeks of imprisonment for adultery while von Eyb walked away scot-free. These mutilations were so common that, according to Groebner,

  the authors of late-medieval surgical textbooks also devote particular attention to nasal injuries, discussing whether a nose once cut off can grow back, a controversial question that the French royal physician Henri de Mondeville answered in his famous Chirurgia with a categorical “No.” Other fifteenth-century medical authorities were more optimistic: Heinrich von Pforspundt’s 1460 pharmacoepia promised, among other things, a prescription for “making a new nose” for those who had lost theirs.18

  The practice was the source of our strange idiom to cut off your nose to spite your face. In late medieval times, cutting off someone’s nose was the prototypical act of spite.

  Like other scholars who have peered into medieval life, Elias was taken aback by accounts of the temperament of medieval people, who by our lights seem impetuous, uninhibited, almost childlike:Not that people were always going around with fierce looks, drawn brows and martial countenances.... On the contrary, a moment ago they were joking, now they mock each other, one word leads to another, and suddenly from the midst of laughter they find themselves in the fiercest feud. Much of what appears contradictory to us—the intensity of their piety, the violence of their fear of hell, their guilt feelings, their penitence, the immense outbursts of joy and gaiety, the sudden flaring and the uncontrollable force of their hatred and belligerence—all these, like the rapid changes of mood, are in reality symptoms of one and the same structuring of the emotional life. The drives, the emotions were vented more freely, more directly, more openly than later. It is only to us, in whom everything is more subdued, moderate, and calculated, and in whom social taboos are built much more deeply into the fabric of our drive-economy as self-restraints, that the unveiled intensity of this piety, belligerence, or cruelty appears to be contradictory. 19

  Tuchman too writes of the “childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse.”20 Dorothy Sayers, in the introduction to her translation of The Song of Roland, adds, “The idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin.”21

  Though the childishness of the medievals was surely exaggerated, there may indeed be differences in degree in the mores of emotional expression in different eras. Elias spends much of The Civilizing Process documenting this transition with an unusual database: manuals of etiquette. Today we think of these books, like Amy Vanderbilt’s Everyday Etiquette and Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, as sources of handy tips for avoiding embarrassing peccadilloes. But at one time they were serious guides to moral conduct, written by the leading thinkers of the day. In 1530 the great scholar Desiderius Erasmus, one of the founders of modernity, wrote an etiquette manual called On Civility in Boys which was a bestseller throughout Europe for two centuries. By laying down rules for what people ought not to do, these manuals give us a snapshot of what they must have been doing.

  The people of the Middle Ages were, in a word, gross. A number of the advisories in the etiquette books deal with eliminating bodily effluvia:Don’t foul the staircases, corridors, closets, or wall hangings with urine or other filth. • Don’t relieve yourself in front of ladies, or before doors or windows of court chambers. • Don’t slide back and forth on your chair as if you’re trying to pass gas. • Don’t touch your private parts under your clothes with your bare hands. • Don’t greet someone
while they are urinating or defecating. • Don’t make noise when you pass gas. • Don’t undo your clothes in front of other people in preparation for defecating, or do them up afterwards. • When you share a bed with someone in an inn, don’t lie so close to him that you touch him, and don’t put your legs between his. • If you come across something disgusting in the sheet, don’t turn to your companion and point it out to him, or hold up the stinking thing for the other to smell and say “I should like to know how much that stinks.”

  Others deal with blowing one’s nose:Don’t blow your nose onto the tablecloth, or into your fingers, sleeve, or hat. • Don’t offer your used handkerchief to someone else. • Don’t carry your handkerchief in your mouth. • “Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.”22

  Then there are fine points of spitting:Don’t spit into the bowl when you are washing your hands. • Do not spit so far that you have to look for the saliva to put your foot on it. • Turn away when spitting, lest your saliva fall on someone. • “If anything purulent falls to the ground, it should be trodden upon, lest it nauseate someone.”23 • If you notice saliva on someone’s coat, it is not polite to make it known.

  And there are many, many pieces of advice on table manners:Don’t be the first to take from the dish. • Don’t fall on the food like a pig, snorting and smacking your lips. • Don’t turn the serving dish around so the biggest piece of meat is near you. • “Don’t wolf your food like you’re about to be carried off to prison, nor push so much food into your mouth that your cheeks bulge like bellows, nor pull your lips apart so that they make a noise like pigs.” • Don’t dip your fingers into the sauce in the serving dish. • Don’t put a spoon into your mouth and then use it to take food from the serving dish. • Don’t gnaw on a bone and put it back in the serving dish. • Don’t wipe your utensils on the tablecloth. • Don’t put back on your plate what has been in your mouth. • Do not offer anyone a piece of food you have bitten into. • Don’t lick your greasy fingers, wipe them on the bread, or wipe them on your coat. • Don’t lean over to drink from your soup bowl. • Don’t spit bones, pits, eggshells, or rinds into your hand, or throw them on the floor. • Don’t pick your nose while eating. • Don’t drink from your dish; use a spoon. • Don’t slurp from your spoon. • Don’t loosen your belt at the table. • Don’t clean a dirty plate with your fingers. • Don’t stir sauce with your fingers. • Don’t lift meat to your nose to smell it. • Don’t drink coffee from your saucer.

  In the mind of a modern reader, these advisories set off a train of reactions. How inconsiderate, how boorish, how animalistic, how immature those people must have been! These are the kinds of directives you’d expect a parent to give to a three-year-old, not a great philosopher to a literate readership. Yet as Elias points out, the habits of refinement, self-control, and consideration that are second nature to us had to be acquired—that’s why we call them second nature—and they developed in Europe over the course of its modern history.

  The sheer quantity of the advice tells a story. The three-dozen-odd rules are not independent of one another but exemplify a few themes. It’s unlikely that each of us today had to be instructed in every rule individually, so that if some mother had been remiss in teaching one of them, her adult son would still be blowing his nose into the tablecloth. The rules in the list (and many more that are not) are deducible from a few principles: Control your appetites; Delay gratification; Consider the sensibilities of others; Don’t act like a peasant; Distance yourself from your animal nature. And the penalty for these infractions was assumed to be internal: a sense of shame. Elias notes that the etiquette books rarely mention health and hygiene. Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.24 But an understanding of microbes and infection did not arrive until well into the 19th century. The only explicit rationales stated in the etiquette books are to avoid acting like a peasant or an animal and to avoid offending others.

  In the European Middle Ages, sexual activity too was less discreet. People were publicly naked more often, and couples took only perfunctory measures to keep their coitus private. Prostitutes offered their services openly; in many English towns, the red-light district was called Gropecunt Lane. Men would discuss their sexual exploits with their children, and a man’s illegitimate offspring would mix with his legitimate ones. During the transition to modernity, this openness came to be frowned upon as uncouth and then as unacceptable.

  The change left its mark in the language. Words for peasantry took on a second meaning as words for turpitude: boor (which originally just meant “farmer,” as in the German Bauer and Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, a commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat. Many of the words for the fraught actions and substances became taboo. Englishmen used to swear by invoking supernatural beings, as in My God! and Jesus Christ! At the start of the modern era they began to invoke sexuality and excretion, and the “Anglo-Saxon four-letter words,” as we call them today, could no longer be used in polite company.25 As the historian Geoffrey Hughes has noted, “The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shitecrow and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece.”26Bastard, cunt, arse, and whore also passed from ordinary to taboo.

  As the new etiquette took hold, it also applied to the accoutrements of violence, particularly knives. In the Middle Ages, most people carried a knife and would use it at the dinner table to carve a chunk of meat off the roasted carcass, spear it, and bring it to their mouths. But the menace of a lethal weapon within reach at a communal gathering, and the horrific image of a knife pointed at a face, became increasingly repellent. Elias cites a number of points of etiquette that center on the use of knives:Don’t pick your teeth with your knife. • Don’t hold your knife the entire time you are eating, but only when you are using it. • Don’t use the tip of your knife to put food into your mouth. • Don’t cut bread; break it. • If you pass someone a knife, take the point in your hand and offer him the handle. • Don’t clutch your knife with your whole hand like a stick, but hold it in your fingers. • Don’t use your knife to point at someone.

  It was during this transition that the fork came into common use as a table utensil, so that people no longer had to bring their knives to their mouths. Special knives were set at the table so people would not have to unsheathe their own, and they were designed with rounded rather than pointed ends. Certain foods were never to be cut with a knife, such as fish, round objects, and bread—hence the expression to break bread together.

  Some of the medieval knife taboos remain with us today. Many people will not give a knife as a present unless it is accompanied by a coin, which the recipient gives back, to make the transaction a sale rather than a gift. The ostensible reason is to avoid the symbolism of “severing the friendship,” but a more likely reason is to avoid the symbolism of directing an unsolicited knife in the friend’s direction. A similar superstition makes it bad luck to hand someone a knife: one is supposed to lay it down on the table and allow the recipient to pick it up. Knives in table settings are rounded at the end and no sharper than needed: steak knives are brought out for tough meat, and blunter knives substituted for fish. And knives may be used only when they are absolutely necessary. It’s rude to use a knife to eat a piece of cake, to bring food to your mouth, to mix ingredients (“Stir with a knife, stir up strife”), or to push food onto your fork.

  Aha!

  Elias’s theory, then, attributes the decline in European violence to a larger psychological change (the subtitle of his book is Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations). He proposed that over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Eu
ropeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions. These ideals originated in explicit instructions that cultural arbiters gave to aristocrats and noblemen, allowing them to differentiate themselves from the villains and boors. But they were then absorbed into the socialization of younger and younger children until they became second nature. The standards also trickled down from the upper classes to the bourgeoisie that strove to emulate them, and from them to the lower classes, eventually becoming a part of the culture as a whole.

  Elias helped himself to Freud’s structural model of the psyche, in which children acquire a conscience (the superego) by internalizing the injunctions of their parents when they are too young to understand them. At that point the child’s ego can apply these injunctions to keep their biological impulses (the id) in check. Elias stayed away from Freud’s more exotic claims (such as the primeval parricide, the death instinct, and the oedipal complex), and his psychology is thoroughly modern. In chapter 9 we will look at a faculty of the mind that psychologists call self-control, delay of gratification, and shallow temporal discounting and that laypeople call counting to ten, holding your horses, biting your tongue, saving for a rainy day, and keeping your pecker in your pocket.27 We will also look at a faculty that psychologists call empathy, intuitive psychology, perspective-taking, and theory of mind and that laypeople call getting into other people’s heads, seeing the world from their point of view, walking a mile in their moccasins, and feeling their pain. Elias anticipated the scientific study of both of these better angels.