The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,84

lowered their victims into a fire, lifted them out before they died, and cut the beating hearts out of their chests (a spectacle incongruously reenacted in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a sacrifice to Kali in 1930s India). The Dayaks of Borneo inflicted death by a thousand cuts, slowly bleeding the victim to death with bamboo needles and blades. To meet the demand for sacrificial victims, the Aztecs went to war to capture prisoners, and the Khonds raised them for that purpose from childhood.

The killing of innocents was often combined with other superstitious customs. Foundation sacrifices, in which a victim was interred in the foundation of a fort, palace, or temple to mitigate the effrontery of intruding into the gods’ lofty realm, were performed in Wales, Germany, India, Japan, and China. Another bright idea that was independently discovered in many kingdoms (including Sumeria, Egypt, China, and Japan) was the burial sacrifice: when a king died, his retinue and harem would be buried with him. The Indian practice of suttee, in which a widow would join her late husband on the funeral pyre, is yet another variation. About 200,000 women suffered these pointless deaths between the Middle Ages and 1829, when the practice was outlawed.12

What were these people thinking? Many institutionalized killings, however unforgivable, are at least understandable. People in power kill in order to eliminate enemies, deter troublemakers, or demonstrate their prowess. But sacrificing harmless children, going to war to capture victims, and raising a doomed caste from childhood hardly seem like cost-effective ways to stay in power.

In an insightful book on the history of force, the political scientist James Payne suggests that ancient peoples put a low value on other people’s lives because pain and death were so common in their own. This set a low threshold for any practice that had a chance of bringing them an advantage, even if the price was the lives of others. And if the ancients believed in gods, as most people do, then human sacrifice could easily have been seen as offering them that advantage. “Their primitive world was full of dangers, suffering, and nasty surprises, including plagues, famines, and wars. It would be natural for them to ask, ‘What kind of god would create such a world?’ A plausible answer was: a sadistic god, a god who liked to see people bleed and suffer.”13 So, they might think, if these gods have a minimum daily requirement of human gore, why not be proactive about it? Better him than me.

Human sacrifice was eliminated in some parts of the world by Christian proselytizers, such as Saint Patrick in Ireland, and in others by European colonial powers like the British in Africa and India. Charles Napier, the British army’s commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee, replied, “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”14

In most places, though, human sacrifice died out on its own. It was abandoned by the Israelites around 600 BCE, and by the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Japanese a few centuries later. Something about mature, literate states eventually leads them to think the better of human sacrifice. One possibility is that the combination of a literate elite, the rudiments of historical scholarship, and contacts with neighboring societies gives people the means to figure out that the bloodthirsty-god hypothesis is incorrect. They infer that throwing a virgin into a volcano does not, in fact, cure diseases, defeat enemies, or bring them good weather. Another possibility, favored by Payne, is that a more affluent and predictable life erodes people’s fatalism and elevates their valuation of other people’s lives. Both theories are plausible, but neither is easy to prove, because it’s hard to find any scientific or economic advance that coincides with the abandonment of human sacrifice.

The transition away from human sacrifice always has a moral coloring. The people who live through the abolition know they have made progress, and they look with disgust at the unenlightened foreigners who cling to the old ways. One episode in Japan illustrates the expansion of sympathy that must contribute to abolition. When the emperor’s brother died in 2 BCE, his entourage was buried with him in a