The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,93

the many humanitarian reforms that were launched in this remarkable slice of history. Another was the prevention of cruelty to animals. In 1789 Jeremy Bentham articulated the rationale for animal rights in a passage that continues to be the watchword of animal protection movements today: “The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Beginning in 1800, the first laws against bearbaiting were introduced into Parliament. In 1822 it passed the Ill-Treatment of Cattle Act and in 1835 extended its protections to bulls, bears, dogs, and cats.65 Like many humanitarian movements that originated in the Enlightenment, opposition to animal cruelty found a second wind during the Rights Revolutions of the second half of the 20th century, culminating in the banning of the last legal blood sport in Britain, the foxhunt, in 2005.

FIGURE 4–2. Time line for the abolition of judicial torture

Sources: Hunt, 2007, pp. 76, 179; Mannix, 1964, pp. 137–38.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering. But execution is still a form of extreme violence, especially when it is applied as frivolously as most states did for most of human history. In biblical, medieval, and early modern times, scores of trivial affronts and infractions were punishable by death, including sodomy, gossiping, stealing cabbages, picking up sticks on the Sabbath, talking back to parents, and criticizing the royal garden.66 During the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, there were more than ten executions in London every week. By 1822 England had 222 capital offenses on the books, including poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren, and cutting down a tree. And with an average trial length at the time of eight and a half minutes, it is certain that many of the people sent to the gallows were innocent.67 Rummel estimates that between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

But as the 18th century came to a close, capital punishment itself was on death row. Public hangings, which had long been rowdy carnivals, were abolished in England in 1783. The display of corpses on gibbets was abolished in 1834, and by 1861 England’s 222 capital offenses had been reduced to 4.69 During the 19th century many European countries stopped executing people for any crime but murder and high treason, and eventually almost every Western nation abolished capital punishment outright. To get ahead in the story, figure 4–3 shows that of the fifty-three extant European countries today, all but Russia and Belarus have abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes. (A handful keep it on the books for high treason and grave military offenses.) The abolition of capital punishment snowballed after World War II, but the practice had fallen out of favor well before that time. The Netherlands, for example, officially abolished capital punishment in 1982, but hadn’t actually executed anyone since 1860. On average fifty years elapsed between the last execution in a country and the year that it formally abolished capital punishment.

Today capital punishment is widely seen as a human rights violation. In 2007 the UN General Assembly voted 105–54 (with 29 abstentions) to declare a nonbinding moratorium on the death penalty, a measure that had failed in 1994 and 1999.70 One of the countries that opposed the resolution was the United States. As with most forms of violence, the United States is an outlier among Western democracies (or perhaps I should say “are outliers,” since seventeen states, mostly in the North, have abolished the death penalty as well—four of them within the past two years—and an eighteenth has not carried out an execution in forty-five years).71 But even the American death penalty, for all its notoriety, is more symbolic than real. Figure 4–4 shows that the rate of executions in the United States as a proportion of its population has plummeted since colonial times, and that the steepest drop was in the 17th and 18th centuries, when so many other forms of institutional violence were being scaled back in the West.

FIGURE 4–3. Time line for the abolition of capital punishment in Europe

Sources: French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2007; Capital Punishment U.K., 2004; Amnesty International, 2010.

FIGURE 4–4. Execution rate in the United States, 1640–2010

Sources: Payne, 2004, p. 130, based on data from Espy & Smykla, 2002. The figures for the