You are less likely to die a violent death today than at any other time in human history. In fact, violence has been declining for centuries. That is the arresting claim made by Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking). The title, taken from Abraham Lincolns First Inaugural Address, refers to the way in which the modern world encourages people to suppress their inner demons and let their better angels fly.
Just a couple of centuries ago, violence was pervasive. Slavery was widespread, wife and child beating were acceptable practices, heretics and witches were burned at the stake, pogroms and race riots were common, and warfare was nearly constant. Public hangings, bearbaiting, and even cat burning were popular forms of entertainment. By examining collections of ancient skeletons and scrutinizing contemporary tribal societies, anthropologists have found that people were nine times as likely to die violent deaths in the prehistoric period than in modern times, even allowing for the world wars and genocides of the 20th century. Europes murder rate was 30 times higher in the Middle Ages than it is today.
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reason: Why has violence declined? I think most people would be astonished to hear that.
Steven Pinker: First of all, I have to convince people that theres a fact that needs to be explainednamely, that violence has declined. And it has, as I demonstrate with 100 graphs and data sets. The reasons, I think, are multiple. One of them is the spread of government, the outsourcing of revenge to a more or less disinterested third party. That tends to ramp down your rates of vendetta and blood feud for all the reasons that were familiar with from The Sopranos and The Godfather. If youve got a disinterested third party, theyre more likely to nip that cycle in the bud. Not necessarily because they have any benevolent interest in the welfare of their subject peoples, especially in the early governments. Their motive was closer to the motive of a farmer who doesnt want his livestock killing each other. Namely, its a deadweight loss to him.
But even without this benevolent interest, you find that with the first states in the transition from hunting and gathering to settled ways of life, violence goes down, and in the consolidation of kingdoms during the transition from medieval times to modernity, rates of homicide go way down.
reason: What else?
Pinker: A second one is the growth of commerce; opportunities for positive-sum exchange, as opposed to zero-sum plunder. When its cheaper to buy something than to steal it, that changes the incentives, and you get each side valuing the other more alive than deadthe theory of gentle commerce [that comes] from the Enlightenment.
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reason: Lets go through some of the reasons and processes by which the world became less violent. It began with what you call the pacification process, which involved the creation of states.
Pinker: The first states seemed to have in their wake a massive reduction of death in tribal raiding and feuding, basically because its a nuisance to the overlords. So you have things like the Pax Romana, the Pax Islamica, the Pax Sinica, in China, where the emperors would much rather have the peasants alive to stock their tax rolls and armies, and be slaves or serfs. So they had a selfish interest in preventing too much internecine feuding among their subject peoples and basically kept them from each others throats. Not that it was a life that we would consider particularly pleasant. Youre substituting a lot of violence among tribes and villages and clans for a lesser amountbut still a brutal form of violencefrom the state against its citizens.
The next transition, after you have the government preventing people from committing violence against each other, you now have the problem of preventing the government from committing violence against its own peoples. And that was, basically, the advent of democracy and the various reforms of the Enlightenment.
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Whats also [interesting is] a finding that I came across after the book had come out, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephannonviolent vs. violent resistance movements. If you want to topple your government, what works better: mass protests in the street or arming guerrillas? The answer is you cant tell if you just think of anecdotes, because there are some on each side that work and dont work. So they tabulated numbers, and they found that about 75 percent of nonviolent resistance movements work, and about 25 percent of violent resistance movements work. Unless you do the counting, youd never know that there was this massive difference.
reason: Over what period was that?
Pinker: I think its over the last 40 to 50 years.
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reason: Going back to the pacifying effects of gentle commerce that you mentioned, you note that this period could be called the Capitalist Peace.
Pinker: This is a heretical idea coming out of, of all places, Scandinavia. There are war nerds who run regressions trying to predict what leads to escalation, military tensions, or de-escalation. There was a lot of statistical support for an idea called the Democratic Peace. The extreme form is that no two democracies have ever waged war on one another. Theres a new movement to try to argue its actually the capitalism, more than the democracy, thats doing the work in this correlation. And there seem to be data that capitalist countries are less likely to go to war with each other. Theyre less likely to go to war, period, including against noncapitalist countries, [and are] less likely to have civil wars, and less likely to have genocides.
reason: In other words, Make money, not war.
Pinker: Yes, exactly.
