The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,289

to vulnerable populations. And though I know of no rigorous statistical analysis, I can discern no correlations between the timing of the various upswings in the consideration of rights from the 1960s to the 2000s and the economic booms and recessions of those decades.

Democratic government obviously played a role. The Rights Revolutions took place in democracies, which are constituted as social contracts among individuals designed to reduce violence among them; as such they contain the seeds of expansion to groups that originally had been overlooked. But the timing remains a puzzle, because democracy is not an entirely exogenous variable. It was the machinery of democracy itself that was at issue during the American civil rights movement, when the political disenfranchisement of blacks was remedied. In the other revolutions too, new groups were invited or argued their way into full partnership in the social contract. Only then could the government be empowered to police violence (or cease its own violence) against members of the affected groups.

During the Rights Revolutions, networks of reciprocity and trade had expanded with the shift from an economy based on stuff to one based on information. Women were less enslaved by domestic chores, and institutions sought talent from a wide pool of human capital rather than just from the local labor supply or old boys’ club. As women and members of minority groups were drawn into the wheelings and dealings of government and commerce, they ensured that their interests were factored into their workings. We have seen some evidence for this mechanism: countries with more women in government and the professions have less domestic violence against women, and people who know gay people personally are less likely to disapprove of homosexuality. But as with democracy, the inclusiveness of institutions is not a completely exogenous process. The hidden hand of an information economy may have made institutions more receptive to women, minorities, and gays, but it still took government muscle in the form of antidiscrimination laws to integrate them fully. And in the case of children and animals, there was no market for reciprocal exchanges at all: the beneficence went in one direction.

If I were to put my money on the single most important exogenous cause of the Rights Revolutions, it would be the technologies that made ideas and people increasingly mobile. The decades of the Rights Revolutions were the decades of the electronics revolutions: television, transistor radios, cable, satellite, long-distance telephones, photocopiers, fax machines, the Internet, cell phones, text messaging, Web video. They were the decades of the interstate highway, high-speed rail, and the jet airplane. They were the decades of the unprecedented growth in higher education and in the endless frontier of scientific research. Less well known is that they were also the decades of an explosion in book publishing. From 1960 to 2000, the annual number of books published in the United States increased almost fivefold. 305

I’ve mentioned the connection before. The Humanitarian Revolution came out of the Republic of Letters, and the Long Peace and New Peace were children of the Global Village. And remember what went wrong in the Islamic world: it may have been a rejection of the printing press and a resistance to the importation of books and the ideas they contain.

Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don’t mind being raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire’s quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Another causal pathway is an increase in invitations to adopt the viewpoints of people unlike oneself. The Humanitarian Revolution had its Clarissa, Pamela, and Julie, its Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Oliver Twist, its eyewitness reports of people being broken, burned, or flogged. During the electronic age, these empathy technologies were even more pervasive and engaging. African Americans and gay people appeared as entertainers on variety shows, then as guests on talk shows