The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,82

of sadism, climaxing with ordeals of prolonged killing such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, pulling apart by horses, impalement through the rectum, disembowelment by winding a man’s intestines around a spool, and even hanging, which was a slow racking and strangulation rather than a quick breaking of the neck.3 Sadistic tortures were also inflicted by the Christian church during its inquisitions, witch hunts, and religious wars. Torture had been authorized by the ironically named Pope Innocent IV in 1251, and the order of Dominican monks carried it out with relish. As the Inquisition coffee table book notes, under Pope Paul IV (1555–59), the Inquisition was “downright insatiable—Paul, a Dominican and one-time Grand Inquisitor, was himself a fervent and skilled practitioner of torture and atrocious mass murders, talents for which he was elevated to sainthood in 1712.”4

Torture was not just a kind of rough justice, a crude attempt to deter violence with the threat of greater violence. Most of the infractions that sent a person to the rack or the stake were nonviolent, and today many are not even considered legally punishable, such as heresy, blasphemy, apostasy, criticism of the government, gossip, scolding, adultery, and unconventional sexual practices. Both the Christian and secular legal systems, inspired by Roman law, used torture to extract a confession and thereby convict a suspect, in defiance of the obvious fact that a person will say anything to stop the pain. Torture used to secure a confession is thus even more senseless than torture used to deter, terrorize, or extract verifiable information such as the names of accomplices or the location of weapons. Nor were other absurdities allowed to get in the way of the fun. If a victim was burned by fire rather than spared by a miracle, that was taken as proof that he was guilty. A suspected witch would be tied up and thrown into a lake: if she floated, it proved she was a witch and she would then be hanged; if she sank and drowned, it proved she had been innocent.5

Far from being hidden in dungeons, torture-executions were forms of popular entertainment, attracting throngs of jubilant spectators who watched the victim struggle and scream. Bodies broken on wheels, hanging from gibbets, or decomposing in iron cages where the victim had been left to die of starvation and exposure were a familiar part of the landscape. (Some of these cages still hang from European public buildings today, such as the cathedral of Münster.) Torture was often a participatory sport. A victim in the stocks would be tickled, beaten, mutilated, pelted with rocks, or smeared with mud or feces, sometimes leading to suffocation.

Systemic cruelty was far from unique to Europe. Hundreds of methods of torture, applied to millions of victims, have been documented in other civilizations, including the Assyrians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Chinese, Hindus, Polynesians, Aztecs, and many African kingdoms and Native American tribes. Brutal killings and punishments were also documented among the Israelites, Greeks, Arabs, and Ottoman Turks. Indeed, as we saw at the end of chapter 2, all of the first complex civilizations were absolutist theocracies which punished victimless crimes with torture and mutilation.6

This chapter is about the remarkable transformation in history that has left us reacting to these practices with horror. In the modern West and much of the rest of the world, capital and corporal punishments have been effectively eliminated, governments’ power to use violence against their subjects has been severely curtailed, slavery has been abolished, and people have lost their thirst for cruelty. All this happened in a narrow slice of history, beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17th century and cresting with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th.

Some of this progress—and if it isn’t progress, I don’t know what is—was propelled by ideas: by explicit arguments that institutionalized violence ought to be minimized or abolished. And some of it was propelled by a change in sensibilities. People began to sympathize with more of their fellow humans, and were no longer indifferent to their suffering. A new ideology coalesced from these forces, one that placed life and happiness at the center of values, and that used reason and evidence to motivate the design of institutions. The new ideology may be called humanism or human rights, and its sudden impact on Western life in the second half of the 18th century may be called the Humanitarian Revolution.

Today the Enlightenment is often mentioned with a sneer. “Critical theorists” on the left blame