The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,263

they grow into is conventional wisdom today, but it was news at the time. Several of Locke’s contemporaries and successors turned to metaphor to remind people about the formative years of life. John Milton wrote, “The childhood shows the man as morning shows the day.” Alexander Pope elevated the correlation to causation: “Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” And William Wordsworth inverted the metaphor of childhood itself: “The child is father of the man.” The new understanding required people to rethink the moral and practical implications of the treatment of children. Beating a child was no longer an exorcism of malign forces possessing a child, or even a technique of behavior modification designed to reduce the frequency of bratty behavior in the present. It shaped the kind of person that the child would grow into, so its consequences, foreseen and unforeseen, would alter the makeup of civilization in the future.

Another gestalt shift came from Rousseau, who replaced the Christian notion of original sin with the romantic notion of original innocence. In his 1762 treatise Émile, or On Education, Rousseau wrote, “Everything is good as it leaves the hand of the Author of things, and everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Foreshadowing the theories of the 20th-century psychologist Jean Piaget, Rousseau divided childhood into a succession of stages centered on Instinct, Sensations, and Ideas. He argued that young children have not yet reached the Age of Ideas, and so should not be expected to reason in the ways of adults. Rather than drilling youngsters in the rules of good and evil, adults should allow children to interact with nature and learn from their experiences. If in the course of exploring the world they damaged things, it was not from an intention to do harm but from their own innocence. “Respect childhood,” he implored, and “leave nature to act for a long time before you get involved with acting in its place.”169 The 19th-century Romantic movement inspired by Rousseau saw childhood as a period of wisdom, purity, and creativity, a stage that children should be left to enjoy rather than be disciplined out of. The sensibility is familiar today but was radical at the time.

During the Enlightenment, elite opinion began to incorporate the childfriendly doctrines of the blank slate and original innocence. But historians of childhood place the turning point in the actual treatment of children considerably later, in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century.170 The economist Viviana Zelizer has suggested that the era from the 1870s to the 1930s saw a “sacralization” of childhood among middle- and upper-class parents in the West. That was when children attained the status we now grant them: “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”171 The era was inaugurated in England when a “baby-farming” scandal led to the formation of the Infant Protection Society in 1870 and to the Infant Life Protection Acts of 1872 and 1897. Around the same time, pasteurization and sterilized bottles meant that fewer infants were outsourced to infanticidal wet nurses. Though the Industrial Revolution originally moved children from backbreaking labor on farms to backbreaking labor in mills and factories, legal reforms increasingly restricted child labor. At the same time, the affluence that flowed from the maturing Industrial Revolution drove rates of infant mortality downward, reduced the need for child labor, and provided a tax stream that could support social services. More children went to school, which soon became compulsory and free. To deal with the packs of urchins, ragamuffins, and artful dodgers who roamed city streets, child welfare agencies founded kindergartens, orphanages, reform schools, fresh-air camps, and boys’ and girls’ clubs.172 Stories for children were written to give them pleasure rather than to terrorize them or moralize to them. The Child Study movement aimed for a scientific approach to human development and began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child-rearing experts.

We have seen that during periods of humanitarian reform, a recognition of the rights of one group can lead to a recognition of others by analogy, as when the despotism of kings was analogized to the despotism of husbands, and when two centuries later the civil rights movement inspired the women’s rights movement. The protection of abused children also benefited from an analogy—in this case, believe it or not, with animals.

In Manhattan in 1874, the neighbors of ten-year-old Mary Ellen McCormack, an orphan being raised by an adoptive mother and her second husband, noticed suspicious cuts and bruises