The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,410

of the tripod may also be fortified by reasoning. One of the great puzzles of political science is why democracy takes root in some countries but not others—why, for example, the former satellites and republics of the Soviet Union in Europe made the transition, but the -stans in Central Asia did not. The wobbliness of the democracies imposed on Iraq and Afghanistan makes the problem all the more acute.

Theorists have long speculated that a literate, knowledgeable populace is a prerequisite to a functioning democracy. Down the road from where I sit, the Boston Public Library displays on its entablature the stirring words “The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.” Presumably by “education” what the carvers had in mind was not an ability to name the capitals of all the states one would pass through on a trip from Columbus, Ohio, to the Gulf of Mexico, but literacy and numeracy, an understanding of the principles behind democratic government and civil society, an ability to evaluate leaders and their policies, an awareness of other peoples and their diverse cultures, and an expectation that one is part of a commonwealth of educated citizens who share these understandings.277 These competencies require a modicum of abstract reasoning, and they overlap with the abilities that have risen with the Flynn Effect, presumably because the Flynn Effect itself has been driven by education.

But the Boston Public Library theory of democracy-readiness has not, until recently, been tested. It’s long been known that mature democracies have better educated and smarter populations, but mature democracies have more of everything that is good in life, and we can’t tell what causes what. Perhaps more democratic countries are also richer and can afford more schools and libraries, which make their citizens better educated and smarter, rather than the other way around.

The psychologist Heiner Rindermann tried to cut the correlational knot with a social science technique called cross-lagged correlation (we saw an example of the technique in the British study showing that bright children become enlightened adults).278 Several datasets assign countries numerical scores on their levels of democracy and rule of law. Also available for many countries are the number of years of education attained by their children. In a subsample of countries, Rindermann also obtained data on their average scores on widely used intelligence tests, together with performance on internationally administered tests of academic achievement; he combined the two into a measure of intellectual ability. Rindermann tested whether a country’s level of education and intellectual ability in one era (1960–72) predicted its level of prosperity, democracy, and rule of law in a later one (1991–2003). If the Boston Public Library theory is true, these correlations should be strong even when other variables, like the nation’s wealth in the earlier period, are held constant. And crucially, they should be far stronger than the correlation between democracy and rule of law in an earlier period and education and intellectual ability in the later one, because the past affects the present, not the other way around.

Let’s tip our hats to the stonecarvers of the Boston Public Library. Education and intellectual abilities in the past indeed predicted democracy and rule of law (together with prosperity) in the recent present, holding all else constant. Wealth in the past, in contrast, did not predict democracy in the present (though it did mildly predict rule of law). Intellectual ability was a more powerful predictor of democracy than the number of years of schooling, and Rindermann showed that schooling was predictive only because of its correlation with intellectual ability. It is not a big leap to conclude that an education-fueled rise in reasoning ability made at least some parts of the world safe for democracy. Democracy by definition is associated with less government violence, and we know that it is statistically associated with an aversion to interstate war, deadly ethnic riots, and genocide, and with a reduction in the severity of civil wars.279

Education and Civil War. What about the developing world? Average scores on intelligence tests, though they started from lower levels, have been steeply rising in the countries in which the trends have been measured, such as Kenya and Dominica.280 Can we attribute any part of the New Peace to rising levels of reasoning in those countries? Here the evidence is circumstantial but suggestive. Earlier we saw that the New Peace has been led, in part, by a greater acceptance of democracy and open economies, which, as we have just seen,