The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,107

from Clark, 2007a, p. 195.

Even if we could show that affluence correlated with humanitarian sensibilities, it would be hard to pinpoint the reasons. Money does not just fill the belly and put a roof over one’s head; it also buys better governments, higher rates of literacy, greater mobility, and other goods. Also, it’s not completely obvious that poverty and misery should lead people to enjoy torturing others. One could just as easily make the opposite prediction: if you have firsthand experience of pain and deprivation, you should be unwilling to inflict them on others, whereas if you have lived a cushy life, the suffering of others is less real to you. I will return to the life-was-cheap hypothesis in the final chapter, but for now we must seek other candidates for an exogenous change that made people more compassionate.

One technology that did show a precocious increase in productivity before the Industrial Revolution was book production. Before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1452, every copy of a book had to be written out by hand. Not only was the process time-consuming—it took thirty-seven persondays to produce the equivalent of a 250-page book—but it was inefficient in materials and energy. Handwriting is harder to read than type is, and so handwritten books had to be larger, using up more paper and making the book more expensive to bind, store, and ship. In the two centuries after Gutenberg, publishing became a high-tech venture, and productivity in printing and papermaking grew more than twentyfold (figure 4–8), faster than the growth rate of the entire British economy during the Industrial Revolution.130

FIGURE 4–8. Efficiency in book production in England, 1470–1860s

Source: Graph from Clark, 2007a, p. 253.

FIGURE 4–9. Number of books in English published per decade, 1475–1800

Sources: Simons, 2001; graph adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File1477-1799_ESTC_titles_per_decade,_stati....

The newly efficient publishing technology set off an explosion in book publication. Figure 4–9 shows that the number of books published per year rose significantly in the 17th century and shot up toward the end of the 18th.

The books, moreover, were not just playthings for aristocrats and intellectuals. As the literary scholar Suzanne Keen notes, “By the late 18th century, circulating libraries had become widespread in London and provincial towns, and most of what they offered for rent was novels.”131 With more numerous and cheaper books available, people had a greater incentive to read. It’s not easy to estimate the level of literacy in periods before the advent of universal schooling and standardized testing, but historians have used clever proxy measures such as the proportion of people who could sign their marriage registers or court declarations. Figure 4–10 presents a pair of time series from Clark which suggest that during the 17th century in England, rates of literacy doubled, and that by the end of the century a majority of Englishmen had learned to read and write.132

Literacy was increasing in other parts of Western Europe at the same time. By the late 18th century a majority of French citizens had become literate, and though estimates of literacy don’t appear for other countries until later, they suggest that by the early 19th century a majority of men were literate in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Scotland, Sweden, and Switzerland as well.133 Not only were more people reading, but they were reading in different ways, a development the historian Rolf Engelsing has called the Reading Revolution.134 People began to read secular rather than just religious material, to read to themselves instead of in groups, and to read a wide range of topical media, such as pamphlets and periodicals, rather than rereading a few canonical texts like almanacs, devotional works, and the Bible. As the historian Robert Darnton put it, “The late eighteenth century does seem to represent a turning point, a time when more reading matter became available to a wider public, when one can see the emergence of a mass readership that would grow to giant proportions in the nineteenth century with the development of machine-made paper, steam-powered presses, linotype, and nearly universal literacy.”135

FIGURE 4–10. Literacy rate in England, 1625–1925

Source: Graph adapted from Clark, 2007a, p. 179.

And of course people in the 17th and 18th centuries had more to read about. The Scientific Revolution had revealed that everyday experience is a narrow slice of a vast continuum of scales from the microscopic to the astronomical, and that our own abode is a rock orbiting a star rather than the center of creation. The European exploration of the Americas, Oceania, and Africa, and the discovery of