The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,58

homicide that came about as a by-product of the consolidation of states and the promotion of commerce, a civilizing offensive is a deliberate effort by sectors of a community (often women, elders, or clergy) to tame the Rambos and Raskols and restore civilized life. Wiessner reports on a civilizing offensive in the Enga province in the 2000s.73 Church leaders tried to lure young men from the thrill of gang life with exuberant sports, music, and prayer, and to substitute an ethic of forgiveness for the ethic of revenge. Tribal elders, using the cell phones that had been introduced in 2007, developed rapid response units to apprise one another of disputes and rush to the trouble spot before the fighting got out of control. They reined in the most uncontrollable firebrands in their own clans, sometimes with brutal public executions. Community governments were set up to restrict gambling, drinking, and prostitution. And a newer generation was receptive to these efforts, having seen that “the lives of Rambos are short and lead nowhere.” Wiessner quantified the results: after having increased for decades, the number of killings declined significantly from the first half of the 2000s to the second. As we shall see, it was not the only time and place in which a civilizing offensive has paid off.

VIOLENCE IN THESE UNITED STATES

Violence is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown

The Black Panther spokesman may have mixed up his fruits, but he did express a statistically valid generalization about the United States. Among Western democracies, the United States leaps out of the homicide statistics. Instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world. Not only has the homicide rate for the United States not wafted down to the levels enjoyed by every European and Commonwealth democracy, but it showed no overall decline during the 20th century, as we see in figure 3–10. (For the 20th-century graphs, I will use a linear rather than a logarithmic scale.)

FIGURE 3–10. Homicide rates in the United States and England, 1900–2000

Sources: Graph from Monkkonen, 2001, pp. 171, 185–88; see also Zahn & McCall, 1999, p. 12. Note that Monkkonen’s U.S. data differ slightly from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports data plotted in figure 3–18 and cited in this chapter.

The American homicide rate crept up until 1933, nose-dived in the 1930s and 1940s, remained low in the 1950s, and then was launched skyward in 1962, bouncing around in the stratosphere in the 1970s and 1980s before returning to earth starting in 1992. The upsurge in the 1960s was shared with every other Western democracy, and I’ll return to it in the next section. But why did the United States start the century with homicide rates so much higher than England’s, and never close the gap? Could it be a counterexample to the generalization that countries with good governments and good economies enjoy a civilizing process that pushes their rate of violence downward? And if so, what is unusual about the United States? In newspaper commentaries one often reads pseudo-explanations like this: “Why is America more violent? It’s our cultural predisposition to violence.” 74 How can we find our way out of this logical circle? It’s not just that America is gun-happy. Even if you subtract all the killings with firearms and count only the ones with rope, knives, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, and so on, Americans commit murders at a higher rate than Europeans.75

Europeans have always thought America is uncivilized, but that is only partly true. A key to understanding American homicide is to remember that the United States was originally a plural noun, as in these United States. When it comes to violence, the United States is not a country; it’s three countries. Figure 3–11 is a map that plots the 2007 homicide rates for the fifty states, using the same shading scheme as the world map in figure 3–9.

FIGURE 3-11. Geography of homicide in the United States, 2007

Source: Data from U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007, table4. Crime in the United States by Region, Geographical Division, and State, 2006-7

The shading shows that some of the United States are not so different from Europe after all. They include the aptly named New England states, and a band of northern states stretching toward the Pacific (Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, and the Pacific Northwest states), together with Utah. The band reflects not a common climate, since Oregon’s is