The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,80

fearsome-looking young man clad in black leather, shod in jackboots, painted with tattoos, and pierced by rings and studs. The other passengers were giving him a wide berth when he bellowed, “Isn’t anyone going to give up his seat for this old woman? She could be your grandmother!”

The cliché about Generation X, who came of age in the 1990s, was that they were media-savvy, ironic, postmodern. They could adopt poses, try on styles, and immerse themselves in seedy cultural genres without taking any of them too seriously. (In this regard they were more sophisticated than the boomers in their youth, who treated the drivel of rock musicians as serious political philosophy.) Today this discernment is exercised by much of Western society. In his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, the journalist David Brooks observed that many members of the middle class have become “bourgeois bohemians” who affect the look of people at the fringes of society while living a thoroughly conventional lifestyle.

Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the Civilizing Process. This is the long-term trend of informalization I mentioned earlier, and it leads to what Elias called a “controlled decontrolling of emotional controls” and what Wouters calls third nature.182 If our first nature consists of the evolved motives that govern life in a state of nature, and our second nature consists of the ingrained habits of a civilized society, then our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture’s norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness. Centuries ago our ancestors may have had to squelch all signs of spontaneity and individuality in order to civilize themselves, but now that norms of nonviolence are entrenched, we can let up on particular inhibitions that may be obsolete. In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it’s a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response. As the novelist Robert Howard put it, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.” Maybe the time has even come when I can use a knife to push peas onto my fork.

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THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

—Voltaire

The world contains a lot of strange museums. There is the Museum of Pez Memorabilia in Burlingame, California, which showcases more than five hundred of the cartoon-headed candy dispensers. Visitors to Paris have long stood in line to see the museum devoted to the city’s sewer system. The Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Texas, “presents every detail and aspect of barbed wire.” In Tokyo, the Meguro Museum of Parasitology invites its visitors to “try to think about parasites without a feeling of fear, and take the time to learn about their wonderful world of the Parasites.” And then there is the Phallological Museum in Húsavík, “a collection of over one hundred penises and penile parts belonging to almost all the land and sea mammals that can be found in Iceland.”

But the museum that I would least like to spend a day in is the Museo della Tortura e di Criminologia Medievale in San Gimignano, Italy.1 According to a helpful review in www.tripadvisor.com, “The cost is €8,00. Pretty steep for a dozen or so small rooms totalling no more than 100–150 items. If you’re into the macabre, though, you should not pass it by. Originals and reproductions of instruments of torture and execution are housed in moodily-lit stone-walled rooms. Each item is accompanied by excellent written descriptions in Italian, French, and English. No details are spared, including which orifice the device was meant for, which limb it was meant to dislocate, who was the usual customer and how the victim would suffer and/or die.”

I think even the most atrocity-jaded readers of recent history would find something to shock them in this display of medieval cruelty. There is Judas’s Cradle, used in the Spanish Inquisition: the naked victim was bound hand and foot, suspended by an iron belt around the waist, and lowered onto a sharp wedge that penetrated the anus or vagina; when victims relaxed their muscles, the point would stretch and tear their tissues. The