10
ON ANGELS’ WINGS
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
This book grew out of an answer to the question “What are you optimistic about?” and I hope that the numbers I have marshaled have lifted your assessment of the state of the world from the lugubrious conventional wisdom. But having documented dozens of declines and abolitions and zeroes, my mood is one not so much of optimism as of gratitude. Optimism requires a touch of arrogance, because it extrapolates the past to an uncertain future. Though I am confident that human sacrifice, chattel slavery, breaking on the wheel, and wars between democracies will not make a comeback anytime soon, to predict that the current levels of crime, civil war, or terrorism will endure is to sally into territory where angels fear to tread. What we can feel sure about is that many kinds of violence have declined up to the present, and we can try to understand why that has happened. As a scientist, I must be skeptical of any mystical force or cosmic destiny that carries us ever upward. Declines of violence are a product of social, cultural, and material conditions. If the conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t.
In this final chapter I will not try to make predictions; nor will I offer advice to politicians, police chiefs, or peacemakers, which given my qualifications would be a form of malpractice. What I will try to do is identify the broad forces that have pushed violence downward. My quarry will be developments that repeatedly turned up in the historical chapters (2 through 7) and that engage the faculties of mind that were explored in the psychological chapters (8 and 9). That is, I will look for common threads in the Pacification Process, 671 the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Each should represent a way in which predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, or ideology has been overpowered by self-control, empathy, morality, or reason.
We should not expect these forces to fall out of a grand unified theory. The declines we seek to explain unfolded over vastly different scales of time and damage: the taming of chronic raiding and feuding, the reduction of vicious interpersonal violence such as cutting off noses, the elimination of cruel practices like human sacrifice, torture-executions, and flogging, the abolition of institutions such as slavery and debt bondage, the falling out of fashion of blood sports and dueling, the eroding of political murder and despotism, the recent decline of wars, pogroms, and genocides, the reduction of violence against women, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the protection of children and animals. The only thing these superseded practices have in common is that they physically hurt a victim, and so it is only from a generic victim’s perspective—which, as we saw, is also the perspective of the moralist—that we could even dream of a final theory. From the scientist’s perspective, the motives of the perpetrators may be motley, and so will the explanations for the forces that pushed against those motives.
At the same time, all these developments undeniably point in the same direction. It’s a good time in history to be a potential victim. One can imagine a historical narrative in which different practices went in different directions: slavery stayed abolished, for example, but parents decided to bring back savage beatings of their children; or states became increasingly humane to their citizens but more likely to wage war on one another. That hasn’t happened. Most practices have moved in the less violent direction, too many to be a coincidence.
To be sure, some developments went the other way: the destructiveness of European wars through World War II (overshadowing the decrease in their frequency until both fell in tandem), the heyday of genocidal dictators in the middle decades of the 20th century, the rise of crime in the 1960s, and the bulge of civil wars in the developing world following decolonization. Yet every one of these developments has been systematically reversed, and from where we sit on the time line, most trends point peaceward. We may not be entitled to a theory of everything, but we do need a theory that explains why so many somethings point the same way.
IMPORTANT BUT INCONSISTENT
Let me begin by noting a few forces that one might have thought would be important to the processes, peaces, and revolutions of chapters 2–7, but as best I can tell turned out not to be. It’s not that these forces are by any means minor; it’s just that they have not consistently worked to reduce violence.
Weaponry and Disarmament. Writers who are engrossed by violence and those who are repelled by it have one thing in common: they are fixated on weaponry. Military histories, written by and for guys, obsess over longbows, stirrups, artillery, and tanks. Many movements for nonviolence have been disarmament movements: the demonization of “merchants of war,” the antinuclear demonstrations, the campaigns for gun control. And then there is the contrary though equally weaponcentric prescription according to which the invention of unthinkably destructive weapons (dynamite, poison gas, nuclear bombs) would make war unthinkable.
The technology of weaponry has obviously changed the course of history many times by determining winners and losers, making deterrence credible, and multiplying the destructive power of certain antagonists. No one would argue, for example, that the proliferation of automatic weapons in the developing world has been good for peace. Yet it’s hard to find any correlation over history between the destructive power of weaponry and the human toll of deadly quarrels. Over the millennia weapons, just like every technology, got better and better, yet rates of violence have not gone steadily up but rather have lurched up and down the slope of an inclined sawtooth. The spears and arrows of pre-state peoples notched up higher proportional body counts than has anything since (chapter 2), and the pikemen and cavalry of the Thirty Years’ War did more human damage than the artillery and gas of World War I (chapter 5). Though the 16th and 17th centuries saw a military revolution, it was less an arms race than an armies race, in which governments beefed up the size and efficiency of their armed forces. The history of genocide shows that people can be slaughtered as efficiently with primitive weapons as they can with industrial technology (chapters 5 and 6).
Nor did precipitous drops in violence, such as those of the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Great American Crime Decline, originate with the antagonists melting down their weapons. The historical sequence has usually gone the other way, as in the dismantling of armamentaria that was part of the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. As for the nuclear peace, we have seen that nuclear weapons may have made little difference to the course of world events, given their uselessness in battle and the massive destructive power of conventional forces (chapter 5). And the popular (if bizarre) argument that nuclear weapons would inevitably be used by the great powers to justify the cost of developing them turned out to be flat wrong.
The failure of technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence should not be that surprising. Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven, and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another one dead. The cliché of gun control opponents is literally true: guns don’t kill people; people kill people (which is not to endorse the arguments for or against gun control). Anyone who is equipped to hunt, harvest crops, chop firewood, or prepare salad has the means to damage a lot of human flesh. With necessity being the mother of invention, people can upgrade their technology to the extent their enemies force them to. Weaponry, in other words, appears to be largely endogenous to the historical dynamics that result in large declines in violence. When people are rapacious or terrified, they develop the weapons they need; when cooler heads prevail, the weapons rust in peace.
R
esources and Power. When I was a student in the 1970s, I had a professor who shared with anyone who would listen the truth about the Vietnam War: it was really about tungsten. The South China Sea, he discovered, had the world’s largest deposits of the metal used in lightbulb filaments and superhard steel. The debates on communism and nationalism and containment were all a smokescreen for the superpowers’ battle to control the source of this vital resource.
The tungsten theory of the Vietnam War is an example of resource determinism, the idea that people inevitably fight over finite resources like land, water, minerals, and strategic terrain. One version holds that conflict arises from an unequal allocation of resources, and that peace will come when they are distributed more equitably. Another feeds into “realist” theories that see conflict over land and resources as a permanent feature of international relations, and peace as the outcome of a balance of power in which each side is deterred from encroaching on the other’s sphere of influence.
While contests over resources are a vital dynamic in history, they offer little insight into grand trends in violence. The most destructive eruptions of the past half millennium were fueled not by resources but by ideologies, such as religion, revolution, nationalism, fascism, and communism (chapter 5). Though no one can prove that each of these cataclysms wasn’t really about tungsten or some other ulterior resource, any effort to show that they are is bound to look like a nutball conspiracy theory. As for the balance of power, the upending of the pans after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Germanys were unified did not send the world into a mad scramble. Rather, it had no discernible effect on the Long Peace among developed countries, and it presaged a New Peace among developing ones. Nor did either of these pleasant surprises originate in the discovery or redistribution of resources. In fact, resources in the developing world often turn out to be a curse rather than a blessing. Countries rich in oil and minerals, despite having a larger pie to divide among their citizens, are among those with the most violence (chapter 6).
The looseness of the connection between resource control and violence should also come as no surprise. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that no matter how rich or poor men are, they can always fight over women, status, and dominance. Economists tell us that wealth originates not from land with stuff in it but from the mobilization of ingenuity, effort, and cooperation to turn that stuff into usable products. When people divide the labor and exchange its fruits, wealth can grow and everyone wins. That means that resource competition is not a constant of nature but is endogenous to the web of societal forces that includes violence. Depending on their infrastructure and mindset, people in different times and places can choose to engage in positive-sum exchanges of finished products or in zero-sum contests over raw materials—indeed, negative-sum contests, because the costs of war have to be subtracted from the value of the plundered materials. The United States could invade Canada to seize its shipping lane to the Great Lakes or its precious deposits of nickel, but what would be the point, when it already enjoys their benefits through trade?
Affluence. Over the millennia, the world has become more prosperous, and it has also become less violent. Do societies become more peaceful as they get richer? Perhaps the daily pains and frustrations of poverty make people more ornery and give them more to fight over, and the bounty of an affluent society gives them more reasons to value their lives, and by extension, the lives of others.
Nonetheless tight correlations between affluence and nonviolence are hard to find, and some correlations go the other way. Among pre-state peoples, it is often the sedentary tribes living in temperate regions flush with fish and game, such as the Pacific Northwest, that had slaves, castes, and a warrior culture, while the materially modest San and Semai are at the peaceable end of the distribution (chapter 2). And it was the glorious ancient empires that had slaves, crucifixions, gladiators, ruthless conquest, and human sacrifice (chapter 1).
The ideas behind democracy and other humanitarian reforms blossomed in the 18th century, but upsurges in material well-being came considerably later (chapter 4). Wealth in the West began to surge only with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, and health and longevity took off with the public health revolution at the end of the 19th. Smaller-scale fluctuations in prosperity also appear to be out of sync with a concern for human rights. Though it has been suggested that lynchings in the American South went up when cotton prices went down, the overwhelming historical trend was an exponential decay of lynchings in the first half of the 20th century, without a deflection in either the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression (chapter 7). As far as we can tell, the Rights Revolutions that started in the late 1950s did not pick up steam or run out of it in tandem with the ups and downs of the business cycle. And they are not automatic outcomes of modern affluence, as we see in the relatively high tolerance of domestic violence and the spanking of children in some well-to-do Asian states (chapter 7).
Nor does violent crime closely track the economic indicators. The careenings of the American homicide rate in the 20th century were largely uncorrelated with measures of prosperity: the murder rate plunged in the midst of the Great Depression, soared during the boom years of the 1960s, and hugged new lows during the Great Recession that began in 2007 (chapter 3). The poor correlation could have been predicted by the police blotters, which show that homicides are driven by moralistic motives like payback for insults and infidelity rather than by material motives such as cash or food.
Wealth and violence do show a powerful connection in one comparison: differences among countries at the bottom of the economic scale (chapter 6). The likelihood that a country will be torn by violent civil unrest, as we saw, starts to soar as its annual per capita domestic product falls below $1,000. It’s hard, though, to pinpoint the causes behind the correlation. Money can buy many things, and it’s not obvious which of the things that a country cannot afford is responsible for its violence. It may be deprivations of individual people, such as nutrition and health care, but it also may be deprivations of the entire country, such as decent schools, police, and governments (chapter 6). And since war is development in reverse, we cannot even know the degree to which poverty causes war or war causes poverty.
And though extreme poverty is related to civil war, it does not seem to be related to genocide. Recall that poor countries have more political crises, and political crises can lead to genocides, but once a country has a crisis, poverty makes it no more likely to host a genocide (chapter 6). At the other end of the affluence scale, late 1930s Germany had the worst of the Great Depression behind it and was becoming an industrial powerhouse, yet that was when it brewed the atrocities that led to the coining of the word genocide.
The tangled relationship between wealth and violence reminds us that humans do not live by bread alone. We are believing, moralizing animals, and a lot of our violence comes from destructive ideologies rather than not enough wealth. For better or worse—usually worse—people are often willing to trade off material comfort for what they see as spiritual purity, communal glory, or perfect justice.
Religion. Speaking of ideologies, we have seen that little good has come from ancient tribal dogmas. All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorized the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers (chapter 4). The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals (chapters 1, 4, and 7). Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists (chapter 4). The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to re
ject the possibility of compromise (chapter 9). It inflamed the combatants in the European Wars of Religion, the second-bloodiest period in modern Western history, and it continues to inflame partisans in the Middle East and parts of the Islamic world today. The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.