The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,51

either selfish or cooperative tended toward cooperation when they could be subsumed into a larger whole. They specialized, exchanged benefits, and developed safeguards to prevent one of them from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole. The journalist Robert Wright sketches a similar arc in his book Nonzero, an allusion to positive-sum games, and extends it to the history of human societies.41 In the final chapter of this book I will take a closer look at overarching theories of the decline of violence.

The theory of the Civilizing Process passed a stringent test for a scientific hypothesis: it made a surprising prediction that turned out to be true. Back in 1939 Elias had no access to the statistics of homicide; he worked from narrative histories and old books of etiquette. When Gurr, Eisner, Cockburn, and others surprised the world of criminology with their graphs showing a decline in killings, Elias had the only theory that anticipated it. But with everything else we have learned about violence in recent decades, how well does the theory fare?

Elias himself was haunted by the not-so-civilized behavior of his native Germany during World War II, and he labored to explain that “decivilizing process” within the framework of his theory.42 He discussed the fitful history of German unification and the resulting lack of trust in a legitimate central authority. He documented the persistence of a militaristic culture of honor among its elites, the breakdown of a state monopoly on violence with the rise of communist and fascist militias, and a resulting contraction of empathy for groups perceived to be outsiders, particularly the Jews. It would be a stretch to say that he rescued his theory with these analyses, but perhaps he shouldn’t have tried. The horrors of the Nazi era did not consist in an upsurge in feuding among warlords or of citizens stabbing each other over the dinner table, but in violence whose scale, nature, and causes are altogether different. In fact in Germany during the Nazi years the declining trend for one-on-one homicides continued (see, for example, figure3–19).43 In chapter 8 we will see how the compartmentalization of the moral sense, and the distribution of belief and enforcement among different sectors of a population, can lead to ideologically driven wars and genocides even in otherwise civilized societies.

Eisner pointed out another complication for the theory of the Civilizing Eisner pointed out another complication for the theory of the Civilizing Process: the decline of violence in Europe and the rise of centralized states did not always proceed in lockstep.44 Belgium and the Netherlands were at the forefront of the decline, yet they lacked strong centralized governments. When Sweden joined the trend, it wasn’t on the heels of an expansion in state power either. Conversely, the Italian states were in the rearguard of the decline in violence, yet their governments wielded an enormous bureaucracy and police force. Nor did cruel punishments, the enforcement method of choice among early modern monarchs, reduce violence in the areas where they were carried out with the most relish.

Many criminologists believe that the source of the state’s pacifying effect isn’t just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don’t fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan’s back is turned.45 This doesn’t refute Elias’s theory, but it adds a twist. An imposition of the rule of law may end the bloody mayhem of feuding warlords, but reducing rates of violence further, to the levels enjoyed by modern European societies, involves a more nebulous process in which certain populations accede to the rule of law that has been imposed on them.

Libertarians, anarchists, and other skeptics of the Leviathan point out that when communities are left to their own devices, they often develop norms of cooperation that allow them to settle their disputes nonviolently, without laws, police, courts, or the other trappings of government. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael explains how American whalers thousands of miles from the reach of the law dealt with disputes over whales that had been injured or killed by one ship and then claimed by another:Thus the most