The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,86

are not too hard to demonstrate if enough people are allowed to compare notes and question popular beliefs. Throughout the Middle Ages there were scattered clerics and politicians who pointed out the obvious, namely that there is no such thing as a witch, and so persecuting someone for witchcraft was a moral abomination. (Unfortunately, some of these skeptics ended up in the torture chambers themselves.)24 These voices became more prominent during the Age of Reason, and included influential writers such as Erasmus, Montaigne, and Hobbes.

Some officials became infected with the scientific spirit and tested the witchcraft hypothesis for themselves. A Milanese judge killed his mule, accused his servant of committing the misdeed, and had him subjected to torture, whereupon the man confessed to the crime; he even refused to recant on the gallows for fear of being tortured again. (Today this experiment would not be approved by committees for the protection of human subjects in research.) The judge then abolished the use of torture in his court. The writer Daniel Mannix recounts another demonstration:The Duke of Brunswick in Germany was so shocked by the methods used by Inquisitors in his duchy that he asked two famous Jesuit scholars to supervise the hearings. After a careful study the Jesuits told the Duke, “The Inquisitors are doing their duty. They are arresting only people who have been implicated by the confession of other witches.”

“Come with me to the torture chamber,” suggested the Duke. The priests followed him to where a wretched woman was being stretched on the rack. “Let me question her,” suggested the Duke. “Now woman, you are a confessed witch. I suspect these two men of being warlocks. What do you say? Another turn of the rack, executioners.”

“No, no!” screamed the woman. “You are quite right. I have often seen them at the Sabbat. They can turn themselves into goats, wolves, and other animals.”

“What else do you know about them?” demanded the Duke.

“Several witches have had children by them. One woman even had eight children whom these men fathered. The children had heads like toads and legs like spiders.”

The Duke turned to the astonished Jesuits. “Shall I put you to the torture until you confess, my friends?”25

One of the Jesuits, Father Friedrich Spee, was so impressed that he wrote a book in 1631 that has been credited with ending witchcraft accusations in much of Germany. The persecution of witches began to subside during the 17th century, when several European states abolished it. The year 1716 was the last time a woman was hanged as a witch in England, and 1749 was the last year a woman was burned as a witch anywhere in Europe.26

In most of the world, institutionalized superstitious killing, whether in human sacrifice, blood libel, or witch persecution, has succumbed to two pressures. One is intellectual: the realization that some events, even those with profound personal significance, must be attributed to impersonal physical forces and raw chance rather than the designs of other conscious beings. A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with “Love thy neighbor” and “All men are created equal,” is the one on the bumper sticker: “Shit happens.”

The other pressure is harder to explain but just as forceful: an increased valuation of human life and happiness. Why are we taken aback by the experiment in which a judge tortured his servant to prove that torture was immoral, harming one to help many? It is because we sympathize with other humans, even if we don’t know them, by virtue of the fact that they are human, and we parlay that sympathy into bright lines that outlaw the imposition of suffering on an identifiable human being. Even if we have not eliminated the features of human nature that tempt us to blame others for our misfortunes, we have increasingly prevented that temptation from erupting in violence. An increased valuation of the well-being of other people, we shall see, was a common thread in the abandonment of other barbaric practices during the Humanitarian Revolution.

SUPERSTITIOUS KILLING: VIOLENCE AGAINST BLASPHEMERS, HERETICS, AND APOSTATES

Human sacrifice and witch-burnings are just two examples of the harm that can result from people pursuing ends that involve figments of their imagination. Another may be seen in psychotics who kill in pursuit of a delusion, such as Charles Manson’s plan to hasten an apocalyptic race war, and John Hinckley’s scheme to impress Jodie Foster. But the greatest damage comes from religious beliefs that downgrade the lives of flesh-and-blood people, such as the faith that