The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,105

way that political murder had faded in English-speaking countries well before the principles of democracy had been articulated. In cases like these a nebulous shift in sensibilities may have been a prerequisite to consciously designed reforms. It’s hard to imagine how a stable democracy can be implemented until competing factions give up the idea that murder is a good way to allocate power. The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance.123

Still, a gradual shift in sensibilities is often incapable of changing actual practices until the change is implemented by the stroke of a pen. The slave trade, for example, was abolished as a result of moral agitation that persuaded men in power to pass laws and back them up with guns and ships.124 Blood sports, public hangings, cruel punishments, and debtors’ prisons were also shut down by acts of legislators who had been influenced by moral agitators and the public debates they began.

In explaining the Humanitarian Revolution, then, we don’t have to decide between unspoken norms and explicit moral argumentation. Each affects the other. As sensibilities change, thinkers who question a practice are more likely to materialize, and their arguments are more likely to get a hearing and then catch on. The arguments may not only persuade the people who wield the levers of power but infiltrate the culture’s sensibilities by finding their way into barroom and dinner-table debates where they may shift the consensus one mind at a time. And when a practice has vanished from everyday experience because it was outlawed from the top down, it may fall off the menu of live options in people’s imaginations. Just as today smoking in offices and classrooms has passed from commonplace to prohibited to unthinkable, practices like slavery and public hangings, when enough time passed that no one alive could remember them, became so unimaginable that they were no longer brought up for debate.

The most sweeping change in everyday sensibilities left by the Humanitarian Revolution is the reaction to suffering in other living things. People today are far from morally immaculate. They may covet nice objects, fantasize about sex with inappropriate partners, or want to kill someone who has humiliated them in public.125 But other sinful desires no longer occur to people in the first place. Most people today have no desire to watch a cat burn to death, let alone a man or a woman. In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don’t we feel it today?

We won’t be equipped to answer this question until we plunge into the psychology of sadism in chapter 8 and empathy in chapter 9. But for now we can look at some historical changes that militated against the indulgence of cruelty. As always, the challenge is to find an exogenous change that precedes the change in sensibilities and behavior so we can avoid the circularity of saying that people stopped doing cruel things because they got less cruel. What changed in people’s environment that could have set off the Humanitarian Revolution?

The Civilizing Process is one candidate. Recall that Elias suggested that during the transition to modernity people not only exercised more self-control but also cultivated their sense of empathy. They did so not as an exercise in moral improvement but to hone their ability to get inside the heads of bureaucrats and merchants and prosper in a society that increasingly depended on networks of exchange rather than farming and plunder. Certainly the taste for cruelty clashes with the values of a cooperative society: it must be harder to work with your neighbors if you think they might enjoy seeing you disemboweled. And the reduction in personal violence brought about by the Civilizing Process may have lessened the demand for harsh punishments, just as today demands to “get tough on crime” rise and fall with the crime rate.

Lynn Hunt, the historian of human rights, points to another knock-on effect of the Civilizing Process: the refinements in hygiene and manners, such as eating with utensils, having sex in private, and trying to keep one’s effluvia out of view and off one’s clothing. The enhanced decorum, she suggests, contributed to the sense that people are autonomous—that they