The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  But the museum that I would least like to spend a day in is the Museo della Tortura e di Criminologia Medievale in San Gimignano, Italy.1 According to a helpful review in www.tripadvisor.com, “The cost is €8,00. Pretty steep for a dozen or so small rooms totalling no more than 100–150 items. If you’re into the macabre, though, you should not pass it by. Originals and reproductions of instruments of torture and execution are housed in moodily-lit stone-walled rooms. Each item is accompanied by excellent written descriptions in Italian, French, and English. No details are spared, including which orifice the device was meant for, which limb it was meant to dislocate, who was the usual customer and how the victim would suffer and/or die.”

  I think even the most atrocity-jaded readers of recent history would find something to shock them in this display of medieval cruelty. There is Judas’s Cradle, used in the Spanish Inquisition: the naked victim was bound hand and foot, suspended by an iron belt around the waist, and lowered onto a sharp wedge that penetrated the anus or vagina; when victims relaxed their muscles, the point would stretch and tear their tissues. The Virgin of Nuremberg was a version of the iron maiden, with spikes that were carefully positioned so as not to transfix the victim’s vital organs and prematurely end his suffering. A series of engravings show victims hung by the ankles and sawn in half from the crotch down; the display explains that this method of execution was used all over Europe for crimes that included rebellion, witchcraft, and military disobedience. The Pear is a split, spike-tipped wooden knob that was inserted into a mouth, anus, or vagina and spread apart by a screw mechanism to tear the victim open from the inside; it was used to punish sodomy, adultery, incest, heresy, blasphemy, and “sexual union with Satan.” The Cat’s Paw or Spanish Tickler was a cluster of hooks used to rip and shred a victim’s flesh. Masks of Infamy were shaped like the head of a pig or an ass; they subjected a victim both to public humiliation and to the pain of a blade or knob forced into their nose or mouth to prevent them from wailing. The Heretic’s Fork had a pair of sharp spikes at each end: one end was propped under the victim’s jaw and the other at the base of his neck, so that as his muscles became exhausted he would impale himself in both places.

  The devices in the Museo della Tortura are not particularly scarce. Collections of medieval torture instruments may also be found in San Marino, Amsterdam, Munich, Prague, Milan, and the Tower of London. Illustrations of literally hundreds of kinds of torture may be seen in coffee table books like Inquisition and Torment in Art, some of them reproduced in figure 4–1. 2

  Torture, of course, is not a thing of the past. It has been carried out in modern times by police states, by mobs during ethnic cleansings and genocides, and by democratic governments in interrogations and counterinsurgency operations, most infamously during the administration of George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks. But the sporadic, clandestine, and universally decried eruptions of torture in recent times cannot be equated with the centuries of institutionalized sadism in medieval Europe. Torture in the Middle Ages was not hidden, denied, or euphemized. It was not just a tactic by which brutal regimes intimidated their political enemies or moderate regimes extracted information from suspected terrorists. It did not erupt from a frenzied crowd stirred up in hatred against a dehumanized enemy. No, torture was woven into the fabric of public life. It was a form of punishment that was cultivated and celebrated, an outlet for artistic and technological creativity. Many of the instruments of torture were beautifully crafted and ornamented. They were designed to inflict not just physical pain, as would a beating, but visceral horrors, such as penetrating sensitive orifices, violating the bodily envelope, displaying the victim in humiliating postures, or putting them in positions where their own flagging stamina would increase their pain and lead to disfigurement or death. Torturers were the era’s foremost experts in anatomy and physiology, using their knowledge to maximize agony, avoid nerve damage that might deaden the pain, and prolong consciousness for as long as possible before death. When the victims were female, the sadism was eroticized: the women were stripped naked before being tortured, and their breasts and genitals were often the targets. Cold jokes made light of the victims’ suffering. In France, Judas’s Cradle was called “The Nightwatch” for its ability to keep a victim awake. A victim might be roasted alive inside an iron bull so his screams would come out of the bull’s mouth, like the bellowing of a beast. A man accused of disturbing the peace might be forced to wear a Noisemaker’s Fife, a facsimile of a flute or trumpet with an iron collar that went around his neck and a vise that crushed the bones and joints of his fingers. Many torture devices were shaped like animals and given whimsical names.

  FIGURE 4–1. Torture in medieval and early modern Europe

  Sources: Sawing: Held, 1986, p. 47. Cat’s Paw: Held, 1986, p. 107. Impalement: Held, 1986, p. 141. Burning at the stake: Pinker, 2007a. Judas’s Cradle: Held, 1986, p. 51. Breaking on the wheel: Puppi, 1990, p. 39.

  Medieval Christendom was a culture of cruelty. Torture was meted out by national and local governments throughout the Continent, and it was codified in laws that prescribed blinding, branding, amputation of hands, ears, noses, and tongues, and other forms of mutilation as punishments for minor crimes. Executions were orgies of sadism, climaxing with ordeals of prolonged killing such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, pulling apart by horses, impalement through the rectum, disembowelment by winding a man’s intestines around a spool, and even hanging, which was a slow racking and strangulation rather than a quick breaking of the neck.3 Sadistic tortures were also inflicted by the Christian church during its inquisitions, witch hunts, and religious wars. Torture had been authorized by the ironically named Pope Innocent IV in 1251, and the order of Dominican monks carried it out with relish. As the Inquisition coffee table book notes, under Pope Paul IV (1555–59), the Inquisition was “downright insatiable—Paul, a Dominican and one-time Grand Inquisitor, was himself a fervent and skilled practitioner of torture and atrocious mass murders, talents for which he was elevated to sainthood in 1712.”4

  Torture was not just a kind of rough justice, a crude attempt to deter violence with the threat of greater violence. Most of the infractions that sent a person to the rack or the stake were nonviolent, and today many are not even considered legally punishable, such as heresy, blasphemy, apostasy, criticism of the government, gossip, scolding, adultery, and unconventional sexual practices. Both the Christian and secular legal systems, inspired by Roman law, used torture to extract a confession and thereby convict a suspect, in defiance of the obvious fact that a person will say anything to stop the pain. Torture used to secure a confession is thus even more senseless than torture used to deter, terrorize, or extract verifiable information such as the names of accomplices or the location of weapons. Nor were other absurdities allowed to get in the way of the fun. If a victim was burned by fire rather than spared by a miracle, that was taken as proof that he was guilty. A suspected witch would be tied up and thrown into a lake: if she floated, it proved she was a witch and she would then be hanged; if she sank and drowned, it proved she had been innocent.5

  Far from being hidden in dungeons, torture-executions were forms of popular entertainment, attracting throngs of jubilant spectators who watched the victim struggle and scream. Bodies broken on wheels, hanging from gibbets, or decomposing in iron cages where the victim had been left to die of starvation and exposure were a familiar part of the landscape. (Some of these cages still hang from European public buildings today, such as the cathedral of Münster.) Torture was often a participatory sport. A victim in the stocks would be tickled, beaten, mutilated, pelted with rocks, or smeared with mud or feces, sometimes leading to suffocation.

  Systemic cruelty was far from unique to Europe. Hundreds of methods of torture, applied to millions of victims, have been documented in other civilizations, including the Assyrians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Chinese, Hindus, Polynesians, Aztecs, and many African kingdoms and Native American tribes. Brutal
killings and punishments were also documented among the Israelites, Greeks, Arabs, and Ottoman Turks. Indeed, as we saw at the end of chapter 2, all of the first complex civilizations were absolutist theocracies which punished victimless crimes with torture and mutilation.6

  This chapter is about the remarkable transformation in history that has left us reacting to these practices with horror. In the modern West and much of the rest of the world, capital and corporal punishments have been effectively eliminated, governments’ power to use violence against their subjects has been severely curtailed, slavery has been abolished, and people have lost their thirst for cruelty. All this happened in a narrow slice of history, beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17th century and cresting with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th.

  Some of this progress—and if it isn’t progress, I don’t know what is—was propelled by ideas: by explicit arguments that institutionalized violence ought to be minimized or abolished. And some of it was propelled by a change in sensibilities. People began to sympathize with more of their fellow humans, and were no longer indifferent to their suffering. A new ideology coalesced from these forces, one that placed life and happiness at the center of values, and that used reason and evidence to motivate the design of institutions. The new ideology may be called humanism or human rights, and its sudden impact on Western life in the second half of the 18th century may be called the Humanitarian Revolution.

  Today the Enlightenment is often mentioned with a sneer. “Critical theorists” on the left blame it for the disasters of the 20th century; theoconservatives in the Vatican and the American intellectual right long to replace its tolerant secularism with the alleged moral clarity of medieval Catholicism.7 Even many moderate secular writers disparage the Enlightenment as the revenge of the nerds, the naïve faith that humans are a race of pointy-eared rational actors. This colossal amnesia and ingratitude is possible because of the natural whitewashing of history that we saw in chapter 1, in which the reality behind the atrocities of yesteryear is consigned to the memory hole and is remembered only in bland idioms and icons. If the opening of this chapter has been graphic, it is only to remind you of the realities of the era that the Enlightenment put to an end.

  Of course no historical change takes place in a single thunderclap, and humanist currents flowed for centuries before and after the Enlightenment and in parts of the world other than the West.8 But in Inventing Human Rights, the historian Lynn Hunt notes that human rights have been conspicuously affirmed at two moments in history. One was the end of the 18th century, which saw the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. The other was the midpoint of the 20th century, which saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, followed by a cascade of Rights Revolutions in the ensuing decades (chapter 7).

  As we shall see, the declarations were more than feel-good verbiage; the Humanitarian Revolution initiated the abolition of many barbaric practices that had been unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But the custom that most dramatically illustrates the advance of humanitarian sentiments was eradicated well before that time, and its disappearance is a starting point for understanding the decline of institutionalized violence.

  SUPERSTITIOUS KILLING: HUMAN SACRIFICE, WITCHCRAFT, AND BLOOD LIBEL

  The most benighted form of institutionalized violence is human sacrifice: the torture and killing of an innocent person to slake a deity’s thirst for blood.9

  The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted that their god was morally superior to those of the neighboring tribes because he demanded only that sheep and cattle be slaughtered on his behalf, not children. But the temptation must have been around, because the Israelites saw fit to outlaw it in Leviticus 18:21: “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Molech, and so profane the name of your God.” For centuries their descendants would have to take measures against people backsliding into the custom. In the 7th century BCE, King Josiah defiled the sacrificial arena of Tophet so “that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech.”10 After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among Jews, but it survived as an ideal in one of its breakaway sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity.

  Human sacrifice appears in the mythology of all the major civilizations. In addition to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, it is recounted in the Greek legend in which Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in hopes of bringing a fair wind for his war fleet; in the episode in Roman history in which four slaves were buried alive to keep Hannibal at bay; in a Druid legend from Wales in which priests killed a child to stop the disappearance of building materials for a fort; and in many legends surrounding the multiarmed Hindu goddess Kali and the feathered Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.

  Human sacrifice was more than a riveting myth. Two millennia ago the Roman historian Tacitus left eyewitness accounts of the practice among Germanic tribes. Plutarch described it taking place in Carthage, where tourists today can see the charred remains of the sacrificial children. It has been documented among traditional Hawaiians, Scandinavians, Incas, and Celts (remember Bog Man?). It was a veritable industry among the Aztecs in Mexico, the Khonds in southeast India, and the Ashanti, Benin, and Dahomey kingdoms in western Africa, where victims were sacrificed by the thousands. Matthew White estimates that between the years 1440 and 1524 CE the Aztecs sacrificed about forty people a day, 1.2 million people in all.11

  Human sacrifice is usually preceded by torture. The Aztecs, for example, lowered their victims into a fire, lifted them out before they died, and cut the beating hearts out of their chests (a spectacle incongruously reenacted in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a sacrifice to Kali in 1930s India). The Dayaks of Borneo inflicted death by a thousand cuts, slowly bleeding the victim to death with bamboo needles and blades. To meet the demand for sacrificial victims, the Aztecs went to war to capture prisoners, and the Khonds raised them for that purpose from childhood.

  The killing of innocents was often combined with other superstitious customs. Foundation sacrifices, in which a victim was interred in the foundation of a fort, palace, or temple to mitigate the effrontery of intruding into the gods’ lofty realm, were performed in Wales, Germany, India, Japan, and China. Another bright idea that was independently discovered in many kingdoms (including Sumeria, Egypt, China, and Japan) was the burial sacrifice: when a king died, his retinue and harem would be buried with him. The Indian practice of suttee, in which a widow would join her late husband on the funeral pyre, is yet another variation. About 200,000 women suffered these pointless deaths between the Middle Ages and 1829, when the practice was outlawed.12

  What were these people thinking? Many institutionalized killings, however unforgivable, are at least understandable. People in power kill in order to eliminate enemies, deter troublemakers, or demonstrate their prowess. But sacrificing harmless children, going to war to capture victims, and raising a doomed caste from childhood hardly seem like cost-effective ways to stay in power.

  In an insightful book on the history of force, the political scientist James Payne suggests that ancient peoples put a low value on other people’s lives because pain and death were so common in their own. This set a low threshold for any practice that had a chance of bringing them an advantage, even if the price was the lives of others. And if the ancients believed in gods, as most people do, then human sacrifice could easily have been seen as offering them that advantage. “Their primitive world was full of dangers, suffering, and nasty surprises, including plagues, famines, and wars. It would be natural for them to ask, ‘What kind of god would create such a world?’ A plausible answer was: a sadistic god, a god who liked to see people bleed and suffer.”13 So, the
y might think, if these gods have a minimum daily requirement of human gore, why not be proactive about it? Better him than me.

  Human sacrifice was eliminated in some parts of the world by Christian proselytizers, such as Saint Patrick in Ireland, and in others by European colonial powers like the British in Africa and India. Charles Napier, the British army’s commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee, replied, “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”14

  In most places, though, human sacrifice died out on its own. It was abandoned by the Israelites around 600 BCE, and by the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Japanese a few centuries later. Something about mature, literate states eventually leads them to think the better of human sacrifice. One possibility is that the combination of a literate elite, the rudiments of historical scholarship, and contacts with neighboring societies gives people the means to figure out that the bloodthirsty-god hypothesis is incorrect. They infer that throwing a virgin into a volcano does not, in fact, cure diseases, defeat enemies, or bring them good weather. Another possibility, favored by Payne, is that a more affluent and predictable life erodes people’s fatalism and elevates their valuation of other people’s lives. Both theories are plausible, but neither is easy to prove, because it’s hard to find any scientific or economic advance that coincides with the abandonment of human sacrifice.