But it is just as foolish to let our lurid imaginations determine our sense of the probabilities. It may always be something, but there can be fewer of those things, and the things that happen don’t have to be as bad. The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades—not to zero, but by a lot. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence, so that every cease-fire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release, is factually mistaken. Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome—democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies—are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever. But nor are they likely to vanish overnight.
Of course we live in a dangerous world. As I have emphasized, a statistical appreciation of history tells us that violent catastrophes may be improbable, but they are not astronomically improbable. Yet that can also be stated in a more hopeful way. Violent catastrophes may not be astronomically improbable, but they are improbable.
7
THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
When I was a boy, I was not particularly strong, swift, or agile, and that made organized sports a gantlet of indignities. Basketball meant chucking a series of airballs in the general direction of the backboard. Rope-climbing left me suspended a foot above the floor like a clump of seaweed on a fishing line. Baseball meant long interludes in sun-scorched right field praying that no fly ball would come my way.
But one talent saved me from perpetual pariahhood among my peers: I was not afraid of pain. As long as the blows were delivered fair and square and without ad hominem humiliation, I could mix it up with the best of them. The boy culture that flourished in a parallel universe to that of gym teachers and camp counselors offered many opportunities to redeem myself.
There was pickup hockey and tackle football (sans helmet and pads), where I could check and be checked into the boards, or dive for fumbles in a scrum of bodies. There was murderball, in which one boy clutched a volleyball and counted off the seconds while the others pummeled him until he let go. There was Horse (strictly forbidden by the counselors, doubtless on the orders of lawyers), in which a fat kid (“the pillow”) would lean back against a tree, a teammate would bend over and hold him around the waist, and the rest of the team would form a line of backs by holding the waist of the kid in front of him. Each member of the opposing team would then take a running leap and come crashing down on the back of the “horse” until it either collapsed to the ground or supported the riders for three seconds. And during the evening there was Knucks, the outlawed card game in which the loser would be thwhacked on the knuckles with the deck of cards, the number of edge-on and face-on thwacks determined by the point spread and restrained by a complex set of rules about flinching, scraping, and excess force. Mothers would regularly inspect our knuckles for incriminating scabs and bruises.
Nothing organized by grown-ups could compare with these delirious pleasures. The closest they came was dodgeball, with its ecstatic chaos of hiding behind aggressive teammates, ducking projectiles, diving to the floor, and cheating death until the final mortal smack of rubber against skin. It was the only sport in the Orwellianly named “physical education” curriculum that I actually looked forward to.
But now the Boy Gender has lost another battle in its age-old war with camp counselors, phys ed teachers, lawyers, and moms. In school district after school district, dodgeball has been banned. A statement by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, which must have been written by someone who was never a boy, and quite possibly has never met one, explained the reason:NASPE believes that dodgeball is not an appropriate activity for K–12 school physical education programs. Some kids may like it—the most skilled, the most confident. But many do not! Certainly not the student who gets hit hard in the stomach, head, or groin. And it is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by hurting others.
Yes, the fate of dodgeball is yet another sign of the historical decline of violence. Recreational violence has a long ancestry in our lineage. Play fighting is common among juvenile primate males, and rough-and-tumble play is one of the most robust sex differences in humans.1 The channeling of these impulses into extreme sports has been common across cultures and throughout history. Together with Roman gladiatorial combat and medieval jousting tournaments, the bloody history of sports includes recreational fighting with sharp sticks in Renaissance Venice (where noblemen and priests would join in the fun), the Sioux Indian pastime in which boys would try to grab their opponents’ hair and knee them in the face, Irish faction fights with stout oak clubs called shillelaghs, the sport of shin-kicking (popular in the 19th-century American South) in which the contestants would lock forearms and kick each other in the shins until one collapsed, and the many forms of bare-knuckle fights whose typical tactics may be inferred from the current rules of boxing (no head-butting, no hitting below the belt, and so on).2
But in the past half-century the momentum has been going squarely against boys of all ages. Though people have lost none of their taste for consuming simulated and voluntary violence, they have engineered social life to place the most tempting kinds of real-life violence off-limits. It is part of a current in which Western culture has been extending its distaste for violence farther and farther down the magnitude scale. The postwar revulsion against forms of violence that kill by the millions and thousands, such as war and genocide, has spread to forms that kill by the hundreds, tens, and single digits, such as rioting, lynching, and hate crimes. It has extended from killing to other forms of harm such as rape, assault, battering, and intimidation. It has spread to vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. The ban on dodgeball is a weathervane for these winds of change.
The efforts to stigmatize, and in many cases criminalize, temptations to violence have been advanced in a cascade of campaigns for “rights”—civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights. The movements are tightly bunched in the second half of the 20th century, and I will refer to them as the Rights Revolutions. The contagion of rights in this era may be seen in figure 7–1, which plots the proportion of English-language books (as a percentage of the proportions in 2000) that contain the phrases civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights between 1948 (which symbolically inaugurated the era with the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights) and 2000.
As the era begins, the terms civil rights and women’s rights already have a presence, because the ideas had been in the nation’s consciousness since the 19th century. Civil rights shot up between 1962 and 1969, the era of the most dramatic legal victories of the American civil rights movement. As it began to level off, women’s rights began its ascent, joined shortly by children’s rights; then, in the 1970s, gay rights appeared on the scene, followed shortly by animal rights.
These staggered rises tell a story. Each of the movements took note of the success of its predecessors and adopted some of their tactics, rhetoric, and most significantly, moral rationale. During the Humanitarian Revolution two centuries earlier, a cascade of reforms tumbled out in quick succession, instigated by intellectual reflection on entrenched customs, and connected by a humanism that elevated the flourishing and suffering of individual minds over the color, class, or nationality of the bodies that housed them. Then and now the concept of individual rights is not a plateau but
an escalator. If a sentient being’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may not be compromised because of the color of its skin, then why may it be compromised because of other irrelevant traits such as gender, age, sexual preference, or even species? Dull habit or brute force may prevent people in certain times and places from following this line of argument to each of its logical conclusions, but in an open society the momentum is unstoppable.
FIGURE 7–1. Use of the terms civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights in English-language books, 1948–2000
Source: Five million books digitized by Google Books, analyzed by the Bookworm program, Michel et al., 2011. Bookworm is a more powerful version of the Google Ngram Viewer (ngrams.googlelabs .com), and can analyze the proportion of books, in addition to the proportion of the corpus, in which a search string is found. Plotted as a percentage of the proportion of books containing each term in the year 2000, with a moving average of five years.
The Rights Revolutions replayed some of the themes of the Humanitarian Revolution, but they also replayed one feature of the Civilizing Process. During the transition to modernity, people did not fully appreciate that they were undergoing changes aimed at reducing violence, and once the changes were entrenched, the process was forgotten. When Europeans were mastering norms of self-control, they felt like they were becoming more civilized and courteous, not that they were part of a campaign to drive the homicide statistics downward. Today we give little thought to the rationale behind the customs left behind by that change, such as the revulsion to dinnertime dagger attacks that left us with the condemnation of eating peas with a knife. Likewise the sanctity of religion and “family values” in red-state America is no longer remembered as a tactic to pacify brawling men in cowboy towns and mining camps.
The prohibition of dodgeball represents the overshooting of yet another successful campaign against violence, the century-long movement to prevent the abuse and neglect of children. It reminds us of how a civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.
The Rights Revolutions have another curious legacy. Because they are propelled by an escalating sensitivity to new forms of harm, they erase their own tracks and leave us amnesic about their successes. As we shall see, the revolutions have brought us measurable and substantial declines in many categories of violence. But many people resist acknowledging the victories, partly out of ignorance of the statistics, partly because of a mission creep that encourages activists to keep up the pressure by denying that progress has been made. The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement was played out in lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. (When Clarence Thomas described his successful but contentious 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching,” it was the epitome of tastelessness but also a sign of how far we have come.) The oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and confine their wives; today it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a fifty-fifty ratio of male and female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment. It’s just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed. These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.
CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE DECLINE OF LYNCHING AND RACIAL POGROMS
When most people think of the American civil rights movement, they recall a twenty-year run of newsworthy events. It began in 1948, when Harry Truman ended segregation in the U.S. armed forces; accelerated through the 1950s, when the Supreme Court banned segregated schools, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, and Martin Luther King organized a boycott in response; climaxed in the early 1960s, when two hundred thousand people marched on Washington and heard King give perhaps the greatest speech in history; and culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968.
Yet these triumphs were presaged by quieter but no less important ones. King began his 1963 speech by noting, “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we now stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation . . . a great beacon-light of hope to millions of negro slaves.” Yet “one hundred years later, the negro still is not free.” The reason that African Americans did not exercise their rights in the intervening century was that they were intimidated by the threat of violence. Not only did the government use force in administering segregation and discriminatory laws, but African Americans were kept in their place by the category of violence called intercommunal conflict, in which one group of citizens—defined by race, tribe, religion, or language—targets another. In many parts of the United States, African American families were terrorized by organized thugs such as the Ku Klux Klan. And in thousands of incidents, a mob would publicly torture and execute an individual—a lynching—or visit an orgy of vandalism and murder on a community—a racial pogrom, also called a deadly ethnic riot.
In his definitive book on the deadly ethnic riot, the political scientist Donald Horowitz studied reports of 150 episodes of this form of intercommunal violence spanning fifty countries and laid out their common features.3 An ethnic riot combines aspects of genocide and terrorism with features of its own. Unlike these two other forms of collective violence, it is not planned, has no articulated ideology, and is not masterminded by a leader or implemented by a government or militia, though it does depend on the government sympathizing with the perpetrators and looking the other way. Its psychological roots, though, are the same as those of genocide. One group essentializes the members of another and deems them less than human, inherently evil, or both. A mob forms and strikes against its target, either preemptively, in response to the Hobbesian fear of being targeted first, or retributively, in revenge for a dastardly crime. The inciting threat or crime is typically rumored, embellished, or invented out of whole cloth. The rioters are consumed by their hatred and strike with demonic fury. They burn and destroy assets rather than plundering them, and they kill, rape, torture, and mutilate members of the despised group at random rather than seeking the alleged wrongdoers. Usually they go after their victims with bladed weapons and other hands-on armaments rather than with firearms. The perpetrators (mostly young men, of course) carry out their atrocities in a euphoric frenzy and afterward feel no remorse for what they see as a justifiable response to an intolerable provocation. An ethnic riot doesn’t destroy the targeted group, but it kills far greater numbers than terrorism; the death toll averages around a dozen but can range into the hundreds, the thousands, or (as in the nationwide rioting after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947) the hundreds of thousands. Deadly ethnic riots can be an effective means of ethnic cleansing, sending millions of refugees from their homes in fear of their lives. And like terrorism, deadly riots can exact enormous costs in money and fear, leading to martial law, the abrogation of democracy, coups d’état, and secessionist warfare.4
Deadly ethnic riots are by no means an innovation of the 20th century. Pogrom is a Russian word that was applied to the frequent anti-Jewish riots in the 19th-century Pale of Settlement, which were just the latest wave in a millennium of intercommunal killings of Jews in Europe. In the 17th and 18th centuries England was swept by hundreds of deadly riots targeting Catholics. One response was a piece of legislation that a
magistrate would publicly recite to a mob threatening them with execution if they did not immediately disperse. We remember this crowd-control measure in the expression to read them the Riot Act.5
The United States also has a long history of intercommunal violence. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries just about every religious group came under assault in deadly riots, including Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, together with immigrant communities such as Germans, Poles, Italians, Irish, and Chinese.6 And as we saw in chapter 6, intercommunal violence against some Native American peoples was so complete that it can be placed in the category of genocide. Though the federal government did not perpetrate any overt genocides, it carried out several ethnic cleansings. The forced expulsion of “five civilized tribes” along the Trail of Tears from their southeastern homelands to present-day Oklahoma resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands from disease, hunger, and exposure. As recently as the 1940s, a hundred thousand Japanese Americans were forced into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the nation the country was fighting.
But the longest-running victims of intercommunal and government-indulged violence were African Americans.7 Though we tend to think of lynching as a phenomenon of the American South, two of the most atrocious incidents took place in New York City: a 1741 rampage following rumors of a slave revolt in which many African Americans were burned at the stake, and the 1863 draft riots (depicted in the 2002 film Gangs of New York) in which at least fifty were lynched. In some years in the postbellum South, thousands of African Americans were killed, and the early 20th century saw race riots killing dozens at a time in more than twenty-five cites.8