The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

  The ultimate misogyny of female infanticide may suggest a feminist analysis, in which the sexism of a society extends to the right to life itself: being female is a capital offense. But that hypothesis doesn’t work either. No matter how sexist these societies were (or are), they did not want a world that was Frauenfrei. The men do not live in all-boy treehouses in which no girls are allowed; they depend on women for sex, children, child-rearing, and the gathering or preparation of most of their food. Families that kill their daughters want there to be women around. They just want someone else to raise them. Female infanticide is a kind of social parasitism, a free rider problem, a genealogical tragedy of the commons.129

  Free rider problems arise when no one owns a common resource, in this case, the pool of potential brides. In a free market in marriages in which parents wielded property rights, sons and daughters would be fungible, and neither sex would be favored across the board. If you really needed a fierce warrior or brawny field hand around the house, it shouldn’t matter whether you raised a son for the job or raised a daughter who would bring you a son-in-law. Families with more sons would trade some of them for daughters-in-law and vice versa. True, your son-in-law’s parents might prefer him to stay with them, but you could use your bargaining position to force the young man to move in with you if he wanted to have a wife at all. A preference for sons should arise only in a market with distorted property rights, one in which parents, in effect, own their sons but not their daughters.

  Hawkes noted that among foraging peoples, female infanticide is more common in patrilocal societies (in which daughters move away to live with their husbands and in-laws) than in matrilocal societies (in which they stay with their parents and their husbands move in with them) or in societies in which the couple goes wherever they want. Patrilocal societies are common in tribes in which neighboring villages are constantly at war, which encourages related men to stay and fight together. They are less common when the enemies are other tribes, and the men have more freedom of movement within their territory. The internally warring societies then fall into a vicious circle in which they kill their newborn girls so their wives can hurry up and bear them more warrior sons, the better to raid other villages, and to defend their own villages against being raided, for a supply of women that had been decimated by their own infanticides. The warring tribes in Homeric Greece were caught in a similar trap.130

  What about state societies like India and China? In state societies that practice female infanticide, Hawkes noted, parents also own their sons but not their daughters, though for economic rather than military reasons.131 In stratified societies whose elites have indivisible wealth, the inheritance often goes to a son. In India the caste system was an additional market distorter: lower castes had to pay steep dowries so their daughters could marry higher-caste grooms. In China, parents had a permanent claim on the support of their sons and daughters-in-law extending into their dotage, but not of their daughters and sons-in-law (hence the traditional adage “A daughter is like spilled water.”)132 China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1978, made parents’ need for a son to support them in their old age all the more acute. In all these cases, sons are an economic asset and daughters a liability, and parents respond to the distorted incentives with the most extreme measures. Today infanticide is illegal in both countries. In China, infanticide is thought to have given way to sex-selective abortions, which are also illegal, though still widely practiced. In India, despite the inroads of the ultrasound-abortion chains, it is thought to remain common.133 The pressure to reduce these practices will almost certainly increase, if only because governments have finally done the demographic arithmetic and realized that gynecide today means unruly bachelors tomorrow (a phenomenon we will revisit).134

  Whether they are new mothers in desperate straits, putative fathers doubting their paternity, or parents preferring a son over a daughter, people in the West can no longer kill their newborns with impunity.135 In 2007 in the United States, 221 infants were murdered out of 4.3 million births. That works out to a rate of 0.00005, or a reduction from the historical average by a factor of two to three thousand. About a quarter of them were killed on their first day of life by their mothers, like the “trash-can moms” who made headlines in the late 1990s by concealing their pregnancies, giving birth in secret (in one case during a high school prom), smothering their newborns, and discarding their bodies in the trash.136 These women find themselves in similar conditions to those who set the stage for infanticide in human prehistory: they are young, single, give birth alone, and feel they cannot count on the support of their kin. Other infants were killed by fatal abuse, often by a stepfather. Still others perished at the hands of a depressed mother who committed suicide and took her children with her because she could not imagine them living without her. Rarely, a mother with postpartum depression will cross the line into postpartum psychosis and kill her children under the spell of a delusion, like the infamous Andrea Yates, who in 2001 drowned her five children in a bathtub.

  What drove down the Western rate of infanticide by more than three orders of magnitude? The first step was to criminalize it. Biblical Judaism prohibited filicide, though it didn’t go the whole hog: killing an infant younger than a month did not count as murder, and loopholes were claimed by Abraham, King Solomon, and Yahweh himself for Plague #10.137 The prohibition became clearer in Talmudic Judaism and in Christianity, from which it was absorbed into the late Roman Empire. The prohibition came from an ideology that held that lives are owned by God, to be given and taken at his pleasure, so the lives of children no longer belonged to their parents. The upshot was a taboo in Western moral codes and legal systems on taking an identifiable human life: one could not deliberate on the value of the life of an individual in one’s midst. (Exceptions were exuberantly made, of course, for heretics, infidels, uncivilized tribes, enemy peoples, and transgressors of any of several hundred laws. And we continue to deliberate on the value of statistical lives, as opposed to identifiable lives, every time we send soldiers or police into harm’s way, or scrimp on expensive health and safety measures.)

  It may seem odd to call the protection of identifiable human life a “taboo,” because it seems self-evident. The very act of holding the sacredness of life up to the light to examine it appears to be monstrous. But that reaction is precisely what makes a taboo a taboo, and questioning the identifiable-human-life taboo on intellectual and even moral grounds is certainly possible. In 1911 an English physician, Charles Mercier, presented arguments that infanticide should be considered a less heinous crime than the murder of an older child or an adult:The victim’s mind is not sufficiently developed to enable it to suffer from the contemplation of approaching suffering or death. It is incapable of feeling fear or terror. Nor is its consciousness sufficiently developed to enable it to suffer pain in appreciable degree. Its loss leaves no gap in any family circle, deprives no children of their breadwinner or their mother, no human being of a friend, helper, or companion.138

  Today we know that infants do feel pain, but in other ways Mercier’s line of reasoning has been taken up by several contemporary philosophers—invariably pilloried when their essays are brought to light—who have probed the shadowy regions of our ethical intuitions in cases of abortion, animal rights, stem cell research, and euthanasia.139 And while few people would admit to observations like Mercier’s, they creep into intuitions that in practice distinguish the killing of a newborn by its mother from other kinds of homicide. Many European legal systems separate the two, defining a separate crime of infanticide or neonaticide, or granting the mother a presumption of temporary insanity.140 Even in the United States, which makes no such distinction, when a mother kills a newborn prosecutors often don’t prosecute, juries rarely convict, and those found guilty often avoid jail.141 Sometimes, as with the trash-can moms of 1997, a media circus removes any possibility of leniency, but even these young women were paroled after three years in jail.

  Like the nucl
ear taboo, the human life taboo is in general a very good thing. Consider this memoir from a man whose family was migrating with a group of settlers from California to Oregon in 1846. During their journey they came across an abandoned eight-year-old Native American girl, who was starving, naked, and covered with sores.

  A council among the men was held to see what should be done with her. My father wanted to take her along; others wanted to kill her and put her out of her misery. Father said that would be willful murder. A vote was taken and it was decided to do nothing about it, but to leave her where we found her. My mother and my aunt were unwilling to leave the little girl. They stayed behind to do all they could for her. When they finally joined us their eyes were wet with tears. Mother said she had knelt down by the little girl and had asked God to take care of her. One of the young men in charge of the horses felt so badly about leaving her, he went back and put a bullet through her head and put her out of her misery.142

  Today the story leaves us in shock. But in the moral universe of the settlers, allowing the girl to die and actively ending her life were live options. Though we engage in similar reasoning when we put an aging pet or a horse with a broken leg out of its misery, we place humans in a sacred category. Trumping all calculations based on empathy and mercy is a veto based on human life: an identifiable human’s right to live is not negotiable.

  The human life taboo was cemented by our reaction to the Nazi Holocaust, which proceeded in stages. It started with the euthanizing of mentally retarded people, psychiatric patients, and children with disabilities, then expanded to homosexuals, inconvenient Slavs, the Roma, and the Jews. Among the masterminds of the Holocaust and the citizens who were complicit with them, each stage may have made the next more thinkable.143 A bright line at the top of the slippery slope, we now reason, might have prevented people from sliding into depravity. Since the Holocaust a taboo on human manipulations of life and death have put public discussions of infanticide, eugenics, and active euthanasia beyond the pale. But like all taboos, the human life taboo is incompatible with certain features of reality, and fierce debates in bioethics today hinge on how to reconcile it with the fuzziness of the biological boundary that demarcates human life during embryogenesis, comas, and noninstantaneous deaths. 144

  Any taboo that contravenes powerful inclinations in human nature must be fortified with layers of euphemism and hypocrisy, and it may have little practical effect on the proscribed activity. That is what happened with infanticide in most of European history. Perhaps the least contentious claim about human nature is that humans are apt to have sex under a wider range of circumstances than those in which they are capable of bringing up the resulting babies. In the absence of contraception, abortion, or an elaborate system of social welfare, many children will be born without suitable caregivers to bring them to adulthood. Taboo or no taboo, many of those newborns will end up dead.

  For almost a millennium and a half the Judeo-Christian prohibition against infanticide coexisted with massive infanticide in practice. According to one historian, exposure of infants during the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”145 Milner cites birth records showing an average of 5.1 births among wealthy families, 2.9 among the middle class, and 1.8 among the poor, adding, “There was no evidence that the number of pregnancies followed similar lines.”146 In 1527 a French priest wrote that “the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.”147

  At various points in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, systems of criminal justice tried to do something about infanticide. The steps they took were a dubious improvement. In some countries, the breasts of unmarried servant women were regularly inspected for signs of milk, and if the woman could not produce a baby, she would be tortured to find out what happened to it.148 A woman who concealed the birth of a baby who did not survive was presumed guilty of infanticide and put to death, often by being sewn into a sack with a couple of feral cats and thrown into a river. Even with less colorful methods of punishment, the campaign to reduce infanticide by executing young mothers, many of them servants impregnated by the man of the house, began to tug on people’s consciences, as they realized they were preserving the sanctity of human life by allowing men to dispose of their inconvenient mistresses.

  Various fig leaves were procured. The phenomenon of “overlying,” in which a mother would accidentally smother an infant by rolling over it in her sleep, at times became an epidemic. Women were invited to drop off their unwanted babies at foundling homes, some of them equipped with turntables and trapdoors to ensure anonymity. The mortality rates for the inhabitants of these h omes ranged from 50 percent to more than 99 percent. 149 Women handed over their infants to wet nurses or “baby farmers” who were known to have similar rates of success. Elixirs of opium, alcohol, and treacle were readily obtainable by mothers and wet nurses to becalm a cranky infant, and at the right dosage it could becalm them very effectively indeed. Many a child who survived infancy was sent to a workhouse, “without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing,” as Dickens described them in Oliver Twist, and where “it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.” Even with these contrivances, tiny corpses were a frequent sight in parks, under bridges, and in ditches. According to a British coroner in 1862, “The police seemed to think no more of finding a dead child than they did of finding a dead cat or a dead dog.”150

  The several-thousandfold reduction in infanticide enjoyed in the Western world today is partly a gift of affluence, which leaves fewer mothers in desperate straits, and partly a gift of technology, in the form of safe and reliable contraception and abortion that has reduced the number of unwanted newborns. But it also reflects a change in the valuation of children. Rather than leaving it a pious aspiration, societies finally made good on the doctrine that the lives of infants are sacred—regardless of who bore them, regardless of how shapeless and foul they were at birth, regardless of how noticeable a gap their loss would leave in a family circle, regardless of how expensive they were to feed and care for. In the 20th century, even before abortions were widely available, a girl who got pregnant was less likely to give birth alone and secretly kill her newborn, because other people had set up alternatives, such as homes for unwed mothers, orphanages that were not death camps, and agencies that found adoptive and foster parents for motherless children. Why did governments, charities, and religions start putting money into these lifesavers ? One gets a sense that children became more highly valued, and that our collective circle of concern has widened to embrace their interests, beginning with their interest in staying alive. A look at other aspects of the treatment of children confirms that the recent changes have been sweeping.

  Before turning to the bigger picture of the appreciation of children in the West, I must spend a few words on a more jaundiced view of the historical fate of infanticide. According to an alternative history, the major long-term trend in the West is that people have switched from killing children shortly after they are born to killing them shortly after they are conceived.

  It is true that in much of the world today, a similar proportion of pregnancies end in abortion as the fraction that in centuries past ended in infanticide. 151 Women in the developed West abort between 12 and 25 percent of their pregnancies; in some of the former communist countries the proportion is greater than half. In 2003 a million fetuses were aborted in the United States, and about 5 million were aborted throughout Europe and the West, with at least another 11 million aborted elsewhere in the world. If abortion counts as a form of violence, the West has made no progress in its treatment of children. Indeed, because effective abortion has become widely
available only since the 1970s (especially, in the United States, with the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision), the moral state of the West hasn’t improved; it has collapsed.

  This is not the place to discuss the morality of abortion, but the larger context of trends in violence can provide some insight into how people conceive of abortion. Many opponents of legalized abortion predicted that acceptance of the practice would cheapen human life and put society on a slippery slope toward infanticide, euthanasia of the handicapped, a devaluation of the lives of children, and eventually widespread murder and genocide. Today we can say with confidence that that has not happened. Though abortion has been available in most of the Northern Hemisphere for decades, no country has allowed the deadline for abortions during pregnancy to creep steadily forward into legal infanticide, nor has the availability of abortion prepared the ground for euthanasia of disabled children. Between the time when abortion was made widely available and today, the rate of every category of violence has gone down, and, as we shall see, the valuation of the lives of children has shot up.