The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,414

the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.293

10

ON ANGELS’ WINGS

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

This book grew out of an answer to the question “What are you optimistic about?” and I hope that the numbers I have marshaled have lifted your assessment of the state of the world from the lugubrious conventional wisdom. But having documented dozens of declines and abolitions and zeroes, my mood is one not so much of optimism as of gratitude. Optimism requires a touch of arrogance, because it extrapolates the past to an uncertain future. Though I am confident that human sacrifice, chattel slavery, breaking on the wheel, and wars between democracies will not make a comeback anytime soon, to predict that the current levels of crime, civil war, or terrorism will endure is to sally into territory where angels fear to tread. What we can feel sure about is that many kinds of violence have declined up to the present, and we can try to understand why that has happened. As a scientist, I must be skeptical of any mystical force or cosmic destiny that carries us ever upward. Declines of violence are a product of social, cultural, and material conditions. If the conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t.

In this final chapter I will not try to make predictions; nor will I offer advice to politicians, police chiefs, or peacemakers, which given my qualifications would be a form of malpractice. What I will try to do is identify the broad forces that have pushed violence downward. My quarry will be developments that repeatedly turned up in the historical chapters (2 through 7) and that engage the faculties of mind that were explored in the psychological chapters (8 and 9). That is, I will look for common threads in the Pacification Process, 671 the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.

We should not expect these forces to fall out of a grand unified theory. The declines we seek to explain unfolded over vastly different scales of time and damage: the taming of chronic raiding and feuding, the reduction of vicious interpersonal violence such as cutting off noses, the elimination of cruel practices like human sacrifice, torture-executions, and flogging, the abolition of institutions such as slavery and debt bondage, the falling out of fashion of blood sports and dueling, the eroding of political murder and despotism, the recent decline of wars, pogroms, and genocides, the reduction of violence against women, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the protection of children and animals. The only thing these superseded practices have in common is that they physically hurt a victim, and so it is only from a generic victim’s perspective—which, as we saw, is also the perspective of the moralist—that we could even dream of a final theory. From the scientist’s perspective, the motives of the perpetrators may be motley, and so will the explanations for the forces that pushed against those motives.

At the same time, all these developments undeniably point in the same direction. It’s a good time in history to be a potential victim. One can imagine a historical narrative in which different practices went in different directions: slavery stayed abolished, for example, but parents decided to bring back savage beatings of their children; or states became increasingly humane to their citizens but more likely to wage war on one another. That hasn’t happened. Most practices have moved in the less violent direction, too many to be a coincidence.

To be sure, some developments went the other way: the destructiveness of European wars through World War II (overshadowing the decrease in their frequency until both fell in tandem), the heyday of genocidal dictators in the middle decades of the 20th century, the rise of crime in the 1960s, and the bulge of civil wars in the developing world following decolonization. Yet every one of these developments has been