The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,106

own their bodies, which have an inherent integrity and are not a possession of society. Bodily integrity was increasingly seen as worthy of respect, as something that may not be breached at the expense of the person for the benefit of society.

My own sensibilities tend toward the concrete, and I suspect there is a simpler hypothesis about the effect of cleanliness on moral sensibilities: people got less repulsive. Humans have a revulsion to filth and bodily secretions, and just as people today may avoid a homeless person who reeks of feces and urine, people in earlier centuries may have been more callous to their neighbors because those neighbors were more disgusting. Worse, people easily slip from visceral disgust to moralistic disgust and treat unsanitary things as contemptibly defiled and sordid.126 Scholars of 20th-century atrocities have wondered how brutality can spring up so easily when one group achieves domination over another. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has pointed to a downward spiral of dehumanization. People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors’ conscience.127 Perhaps this spiral of dehumanization runs the movie of the Civilizing Process backwards. It reverses the historical sweep toward greater cleanliness and dignity that led, over the centuries, to greater respect for people’s well-being.

Unfortunately the Civilizing Process and the Humanitarian Revolution don’t line up in time in a way that would suggest that one caused the other. The rise of government and commerce and the plummeting of homicide that propelled the Civilizing Process had been under way for several centuries without anyone much caring about the barbarity of punishments, the power of kings, or the violent suppression of heresy. Indeed as states became more powerful, they also got crueler. The use of torture to extract confessions (rather than to punish), for example, was reintroduced in the Middle Ages when many states revived Roman law.128 Something else must have accelerated humanitarian sentiments in the 17th and 18th centuries.

An alternative explanation is that people become more compassionate as their own lives improve. Payne speculates that “when people grow richer, so that they are better fed, healthier, and more comfortable, they come to value their own lives, and the lives of others, more highly.”129 The hypothesis that life used to be cheap but has become dearer loosely fits within the broad sweep of history. Over the millennia the world has moved away from barbaric practices like human sacrifice and sadistic executions, and over the millennia people have been living longer and in greater comfort. Countries that were at the leading edge of the abolition of cruelty, such as 17th-century England and Holland, were also among the more affluent countries of their time. And today it is in the poorer corners of the world that we continue to find backwaters with slavery, superstitious killing, and other barbaric customs.

But the life-was-cheap hypothesis also has some problems. Many of the more affluent states of their day, such as the Roman Empire, were hotbeds of sadism, and today harsh punishments like amputations and stonings may be found among the wealthy oil-exporting nations of the Middle East. A bigger problem is that the timing is off. The history of affluence in the modern West is depicted in figure 4–7, in which the economic historian Gregory Clark plots real income per person (calibrated in terms of how much money would be needed to buy a fixed amount of food) in England from 1200 to 2000.

Affluence began its liftoff only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Before 1800 the mathematics of Malthus prevailed: any advance in producing food only bred more mouths to feed, leaving the population as poor as before. This was true not only in England but all over the world. Between 1200 and 1800 measures of economic well-being, such as income, calories per capita, protein per capita, and number of surviving children per woman, showed no upward trend in any European country. Indeed, they were barely above the levels of hunter-gatherer societies. Only when the Industrial Revolution introduced more efficient manufacturing techniques and built an infrastructure of canals and railroads did European economies start to shoot upward and the populace become more affluent. Yet the humanitarian changes we are trying to explain began in the 17th century and were concentrated in the 18th.

FIGURE 4–7. Real income per person in England, 1200–2000

Source: Graph