The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,71

championed a release from inhibitions as part of the revolutionary struggle. Troublemakers were increasingly seen as rebels and nonconformists, or as victims of racism, poverty, and bad parenting. Graffiti vandals were now “artists,” thieves were “class warriors,” and neighborhood hooligans were “community leaders.” Many smart people, intoxicated by radical chic, did incredibly stupid things. Graduates of elite universities built bombs to be set off at army social functions, or drove getaway cars while “radicals” shot guards during armed robberies. New York intellectuals were conned by Marxobabblespouting psychopaths into lobbying for their release from prison.120

In the interval between the onset of the sexual revolution of the early 1960s and the rise of feminism in the 1970s, the control of women’s sexuality was seen as a perquisite of sophisticated men. Boasts of sexual coercion and jealous violence appeared in popular novels and films and in the lyrics of rock songs such as the Beatles’ “Run for Your Life,” Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” and Ronnie Hawkins’s “Who Do You Love?”121 It was even rationalized in “revolutionary” political writings, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s bestselling 1968 memoir Soul on Ice, in which the Black Panther leader wrote:Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.122

Somehow the interests of the women who were defiled in this insurrectionary act never figured into his political principles, nor into the critical reaction to the book (New York Times: “Brilliant and revealing”; The Nation: “A remarkable book . . . beautifully written”; Atlantic Monthly: “An intelligent and turbulent and passionate and eloquent man”).123

As the rationalizations for criminality caught the attention of judges and legislators, they became increasingly reluctant to put miscreants behind bars. Though the civil liberties reform of the era did not lead to nearly as many vicious criminals “going free on a technicality” as the Dirty Harry movies would suggest, law enforcement was indeed retreating as the crime rate was advancing. In the United States from 1962 to 1979, the likelihood that a crime would lead to an arrest dropped from 0.32 to 0.18, the likelihood that an arrest would lead to imprisonment dropped from 0.32 to 0.14, and the likelihood that a crime would lead to imprisonment fell from 0.10 to 0.02, a factor of five.124

Even more calamitous than the return of hoodlums to the street was the mutual disengagement between law enforcement and communities, and the resulting deterioration of neighborhood life. Offenses against civil order like vagrancy, loitering, and panhandling were decriminalized, and minor crimes like vandalism, graffiti-spraying, turnstile-jumping, and urinating in public fell off the police radar screens.125 Thanks to intermittently effective antipsychotic drugs and a change in attitudes toward deviance, the wards of mental hospitals were emptied, which multiplied the ranks of the homeless. Shopkeepers and citizens with a stake in the neighborhood, who otherwise would have kept an eye out for local misbehavior, eventually surrendered to the vandals, panhandlers, and muggers and retreated to the suburbs.

The 1960s decivilizing process affected the choices of individuals as well as policymakers. Many young men decided that they ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more and, instead of pursuing a respectable family life, hung out in all-male packs that spawned the familiar cycle of competition for dominance, insult or minor aggression, and violent retaliation. The sexual revolution, which provided men with plentiful sexual opportunities without the responsibilities of marriage, added to this dubious freedom. Some men tried to get a piece of the lucrative trade in contraband drugs, in which self-help justice is the only way to enforce property rights. (The cutthroat market in crack cocaine in the late 1980s had a particularly low barrier for entry because doses of the drug could be sold in small amounts, and the resulting infusion of teenage crack dealers probably contributed to the 25 percent increase in the homicide rate between 1985 and 1991.) On top of the violence that accompanies any market in contraband, the drugs themselves, together with good old-fashioned alcohol, lowered inhibitions and sent sparks onto the tinder.

The decivilizing effects hit African American communities particularly hard. They started out with the historical disadvantages of second-class citizenship, which left many young people teetering between