The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,232

stigmatize, and in many cases criminalize, temptations to violence have been advanced in a cascade of campaigns for “rights”—civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights. The movements are tightly bunched in the second half of the 20th century, and I will refer to them as the Rights Revolutions. The contagion of rights in this era may be seen in figure 7–1, which plots the proportion of English-language books (as a percentage of the proportions in 2000) that contain the phrases civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights between 1948 (which symbolically inaugurated the era with the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights) and 2000.

As the era begins, the terms civil rights and women’s rights already have a presence, because the ideas had been in the nation’s consciousness since the 19th century. Civil rights shot up between 1962 and 1969, the era of the most dramatic legal victories of the American civil rights movement. As it began to level off, women’s rights began its ascent, joined shortly by children’s rights; then, in the 1970s, gay rights appeared on the scene, followed shortly by animal rights.

These staggered rises tell a story. Each of the movements took note of the success of its predecessors and adopted some of their tactics, rhetoric, and most significantly, moral rationale. During the Humanitarian Revolution two centuries earlier, a cascade of reforms tumbled out in quick succession, instigated by intellectual reflection on entrenched customs, and connected by a humanism that elevated the flourishing and suffering of individual minds over the color, class, or nationality of the bodies that housed them. Then and now the concept of individual rights is not a plateau but an escalator. If a sentient being’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may not be compromised because of the color of its skin, then why may it be compromised because of other irrelevant traits such as gender, age, sexual preference, or even species? Dull habit or brute force may prevent people in certain times and places from following this line of argument to each of its logical conclusions, but in an open society the momentum is unstoppable.

FIGURE 7–1. Use of the terms civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights in English-language books, 1948–2000

Source: Five million books digitized by Google Books, analyzed by the Bookworm program, Michel et al., 2011. Bookworm is a more powerful version of the Google Ngram Viewer (ngrams.googlelabs .com), and can analyze the proportion of books, in addition to the proportion of the corpus, in which a search string is found. Plotted as a percentage of the proportion of books containing each term in the year 2000, with a moving average of five years.

The Rights Revolutions replayed some of the themes of the Humanitarian Revolution, but they also replayed one feature of the Civilizing Process. During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change, such as the revulsion to dinnertime dagger attacks that left us with the condemnation of eating peas with a knife. Likewise the sanctity of religion and “family values” in red-state America is no longer remembered as a tactic to pacify brawling men in cowboy towns and mining camps.

The prohibition of dodgeball represents the overshooting of yet another successful campaign against violence, the century-long movement to prevent the abuse and neglect of children. It reminds us of how a civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.

The Rights Revolutions have another curious legacy. Because they are propelled by an escalating sensitivity to new forms of harm, they erase their own tracks and leave us amnesic about their successes. As we shall see, the revolutions have brought us measurable and substantial declines in many categories of violence. But many people resist acknowledging the victories, partly out of ignorance of the statistics, partly because of a mission creep that encourages activists to keep up the pressure