Explorations into “violence” and “human nature”: the Pinker interpretation [Pt. 1]

Editor’s Note: The following are Excerpts from The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, by Steven Pinker. The book can be acquired on Amazon.com. (Publication Date: October 4, 2011).  This is a fascinating read on many counts, but, no man and therefore no book is above politics and political prejudices and Pinker’s are a bit obvious. Considering the record accumulated by the United States in the last 25 years alone, it is hard to follow Pinker’s belief in humanity’s reliance on a lone superpower (guess which) capable and willing of enforcing a “long peace.”  As well, it should be noted that Pinker, however sympathetic to animals and their plight, and optimistic about the decline of overall violence, remains by and large a dominionist—which he halfway admits. In sum, brilliant as he is, Pinker seems to us a bit of a liberal in the way he looks at the world and its contradictions.—PG

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year
The author of The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’s existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker’s exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind’s inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.

 ___________________________________________________________________________

STEVEN PINKER
PREFACE

…The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time. Indeed, it is a recognition of the decline in violence that best affirms that such efforts are worthwhile…

pages 36-40

How far back can we trace the history of violence? Though the primate ancestors of the human lineage have long been extinct, they left us with at least one kind of evidence about what they might have been like: their other descendants, chimpanzees.  We did not, of course, evolve from chimps, and as we shall see it’s an open question whether chimpanzees preserved the traits of our common ancestor or veered off in a uniquely chimp direction. But either way, chimpanzee aggression holds a lesson for us, because it shows how violence can evolve in a primate species with certain traits we share. And it tests the evolutionary prediction that violent tendencies are not hydraulic but strategic, deployed only in circumstances in which the potential gains are high and the risks are low.

Common chimpanzees live in communities of up to 150 individuals who occupy a distinct territory. As chimpanzees forage for the fruit and nuts that are unevenly distributed through the forest, they frequently split and coalesce into smaller groups ranging in size from one to fifteen. If one group encounters another group from a different community at the border between their territories, the interaction is always hostile. When the groups are evenly matched, they dispute the boundary in a noisy battle. The two sides bark, hoot, shake branches, throw objects, and charge at each other for half an hour or more, until one side, usually the smaller one, skulks away.

The battles are examples of the aggressive displays that are common among animals.  Once thought to be rituals that settle disputes without bloodshed for the good of the species, they are now understood as displays of strength and resolve that allow the weaker side to concede when the outcome of a fight is a foregone conclusion and going through with it would only risk injury to both.  When two animals are evenly matched, the show of force may escalate to serious fighting, and one or both can get injured or killed. Battles between groups of chimpanzees, however, do not escalate into serious fighting, and anthropologists once believed that the species was essentially peaceful.

Jane Goodall, the primatologist who first observed chimpanzees in the wild for extended periods of  time, eventually made a shocking discovery. When a group of male chimpanzees encounters a smaller group or a solitary individual from another community, they don’t hoot and bristle, but take advantage of their numbers. If the stranger is a sexually receptive adolescent female, they may groom her and try to mate. If she is carrying an infant, they will often attack her and kill and eat the baby. And if they encounter a solitary male, or isolate one from a small group, they will go after him with murderous savagery…Many of the attacks aren’t triggered by chance encounters but are the outcome of border patrols in which a group of males quietly seek out and target any solitary male they spot. Killings can also occur within a community. A gang of males may kill a rival, and a strong female, aided by a male or another female, may kill a weaker one’s offspring…Three decades later little doubt remains that lethal aggressions is a part of chimpanzees’ normal behavioral repertoire…In some communities, more than a third of the males die from violence.

Does chimpicide have a Darwinian rationale?…When chimpanzees eliminate rival males and their offspring, they expand their territory, either by moving into it immediately or by winning subsequent battles with the help of their enhanced numerical advantage…All they care about is dominating their territory and eliminating rivals if they can do so at minimal risk to themselves. The evolutionary benefits happen indirectly and over the long run.

As for the risks, the chimpanzees minimize them by picking unfair fights, those in which they outnumber their victim by at least three to one… 

…What does this have to do with violence in humans? It raises the possibility that the human lineage has been engaged in lethal raiding since the time of its common root with chimpanzees around six million years ago. There is, however, an alternative possibility. The shared ancestor of humans and common chimpanzees…bequeathed the world a third species, bonobos or pygmy chimps, which split from their common cousins around two million years ago.  We are as closely related to bonobos as we are to common chimps, and bonobos never engage in lethal raiding…

…The primatologist Frans de Waal points out that in theory the common ancestor of humans, common chimpanzees, and bonobos could have been similar to bonobos rather than to common chimps. If so, violence between coalitions of males would have shallower roots in human evolutionary history. Common chimpanzees and humans would have developed their lethal raiding independently, and human raiding may have developed historically in particular cultures rather than evolutionarily in the species. If so, humans would have no innate proclivities toward coalitional violence and would not need a Leviathan, or any other institution to keep them away from it. 

The idea that humans evolved from a peaceful, bonobolike ancestor has two problems.  One is that it is easy to get carried away with the hippie-chimp story…much of what we know about them comes from observations of small groups of well-fed juveniles or young adults in captivity. Many primatologists suspect that systematic studies of older, hungrier, more populous, and freer groups of bonobos would pain a darker picture. Bonobos in the wild, it turns out, engage in hunting, confront each other belligerently, and injure one another in fights, perhaps sometimes fatally. So while bonobos are unquestionably less aggressive than common chimpanzees–they never raid one another, and communities can mingle peacefully–they are certainly not peaceful across the board. 

The second and more important problem is that the common ancestor of the two chimpanzee species and humans is far more likely to have been like a common chimpanzee than alike a bonobo…[Bonobos’] distinctive anatomy, when placed on the great ape family tree, suggests that bonobos were pulled away from the generic ape plan by neoteny, a process that retunes an animal’s growth program to preserve certain juvenile features in adulthood…Wrangham argues that the primary mover in bonobo evolution was selection for reduced aggression in males, perhaps because bonobos forage in large groups without vulnerable loners, so there are no opportunities for coalitional aggression to pay off. These considerations suggest that bonobos are the odd-ape-out, and we are descended from an animal that was closer to common chimpanzees.

Even if common chimps and humans discovered coalitional violence independently, the coincidence would be informative. It would suggest that lethal raiding can be evolutionarily advantageous in an intelligent species that fissions into groups of various sizes, and in which related males form coalitions and can assess each other’s relative strength. When we look at violence in humans later in the chapter, we will see that some of the parallels are a bit close for comfort…

…The more recent and abundant Homo fossils show that the males have been larger than the females for at least two million years, by at least as great a ratio as in modern humans. This reinforces the suspicion that violent competition among men has a long history in our evolutionary lineage. 

pages 40-42 

The species we belong to, ‘anatomically modern Homo sapiens,’ is said to be 200,000 years old. But ‘behaviorally modern’ humans, with art, ritual, clothing, complex tools, and the ability to live in different ecosystems, probably evolved closer to 75,000 years ago in Africa…The transition, sometimes called the Neolithic (new stone age) Revolution, began around 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, China, India, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.

It’s tempting, then, to use the 10,000-year horizon as a boundary between two major eras of human existence: a hunter-gatherer era, in which we did most of our biological evolving and which may still be glimpsed in extant hunter-gatherers, and the era of civilization thereafter…But that is not the cut that is most relevant to the Leviathan hypothesis…

…It took around five thousand years after the origin of agriculture for true states to appear on the scene. That happened when the more powerful chiefdoms used their armed retinues to bring other chiefdoms and tribes under their control, further centralizing their power and supporting niches for specialized classes of artisans and soldiers…

…Anthropologists have proposed many subtypes and intermediate cases among these kinds of societies, and have noted that there is no cultural escalator that inevitably turns simpler societies into more complex ones. Tribes and chiefdoms can maintain their ways indefinitely, such as the Montenegrin tribes in Europe that lasted into the 20th century. And when a state breaks down, it can be taken over by tribes, as in the Greek dark ages (which followed the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization and in which the Homeric epics were set) .and the European dark ages (which came after the fall of the Roman Empire). Even today, many parts of failed states, such as Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are essentially chiefdoms; we call the chiefs warlords…

…If we discover that violence has declined in a given people, it is because their mode of social organization has changed, not because the historical clock has struck a certain hour…The major transition we should expect is at the appearance of the first form of social organization that shows signs of design for reducing violence within its borders. That would be the centralized state, the Leviathan.

page 43

A modern concern with the dignity and rights of all peoples inhibits us from speaking too frankly about rates of violence in preliterate people, and the ‘anthropologists of peace’ have worked to give them a Rousseauian image makeover.

page 45 

Cannibalism has long been treated as the quintessence of primitive savagery, and in reaction many anthropologists used to dismiss reports of cannibalism as blood libels by neighboring tribes. But forensic archaeology has recently shown that cannibalism was widespread in human prehistory. The evidence includes human bones that bear human teethmarks or that had been cracked and cooked like those of animals and thrown out in the kitchen trash. Some of the butchered bones date back 800,000 years, to the time when Homo heidelbergensis, a common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, first appears on the evolutionary stage. Traces of human blood proteins have also been found in cooking pots and in ancient human excrement. Cannibalism may have been so common in prehistory as to have affected our evolution: our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases transmitted by cannibalism.

page 52 

So by this measure too, states are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

pages 54-56

The Andaman Islanders of the Indian Ocean are recorded as having an annual death rate of 20 per 100,000, well below the average for nonstate peoples (which exceeds 500 per 100,000).  But they are known to be among the fiercest hunter-gatherer groups left on earth. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, a worried humanitarian group flew over to the islands in a helicopter and were relieved to be met with a fusillade of arrows and spears, signs that the Andamanese had not been wiped out. Two years later a pair of Indian fishers fell into a drunken sleep, and their boat drifted ashore on one of the islands. They were immediately slain, and the helicopter sent to retrieve their bodies was also met with a shower of arrows. 

There are to be sure, hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists such as the Semai [Malaysia] who have never been known  to engage in the protracted, collective killings that can be called warfare. Anthropologists of peace have made much of these groups, suggesting that they could have been the norm in human evolutionary history, and that it is only the newer and wealthier horticulturalists and pastoralists who engage in systematic violence. The hypothesis is not directly relevant to this chapter, which compares people living in anarchy with those living under states rather than hunter-gatherers with everyone else. But there are reasons to doubt the hypothesis of hunter-gatherer innocence anyway: Figure 2-3 shows that the rates of death in warfare in these societies, though lower than those of horticulturalists and tribesmen, overlap with them considerably. And as I have mentioned, the hunter-gatherer groups we observe today may be historically unrepresentative. We find them in parched deserts or frozen wastelands where no one else wants to live, and they may have ended up there because they can keep a low profile and vote with their feet whenever they get on each other’s nerves. As Van der Dennen comments, ‘Most contemporary “peaceful” foragers…have solved the perennial problem of being left in peace by splendid isolation, by severing all contacts with other peoples, by fleeing and hiding, or else by being beaten into submission, by being tamed by defeat, by being pacified by force.” For example, the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, who is the 1960s were extolled as a paradigm of hunter-gatherer harmony, in earlier centuries had engaged in frequent warfare with European colonists, their Bantu neighbors, and one another, including several all-out massacres.

The low rates of death in warfare in selected small-scale societies can be misleading in another way. Though they may avoid war, they do commit the occasional murder, and their homicide rates can be compared to those of modern state societies. I’ve plotted them in figure 2-4 on a scale that is fifteen times larger than that of figure 2-3. Let’s begin with the right-most gray bar in the nonstate cluster. The Semai are a hunting and horticulturalist tribe who were described in a book called THE SEMAI: A NONVIOLENT PEOPLE OF MALAYA and who go out of their way to avoid the use of force. While there aren’t many Semai homicides, there aren’t many Semai. When the anthropologist Bruce Knauft did the arithmetic, he found that their homicide rate was 30 per 100,000 per year, which puts it in the range of the infamously dangerous American cities in their most violent years and at three times the rate of the US as a whole in its most violent decade. The same kind of long division has deflated the peaceful reputation of the !Kung, the subject of a book called THE HARMLESS PEOPLE, and of the Central Arctic Inuit (Eskimos), who inspired a book called NEVER IN ANGER. Not only do these harmless, nonviolent, anger-free people murder each other at rates far greater than Americans or Europeans do, but the murder rate among the !Kung went down by a third after their territory had been brought under the control of the Botswana government, as the Leviathan theory would predict.

The reduction of homicide by government control is so obvious to anthropologists that they seldom document it with numbers. The various ‘paxes’ that one reads about in history books–the Pax Romana, Islamica, Mongolica, Hispanica, Ottomana, Sinica, Britannica, Australiana (in New Guinea), Canadiana (in the Pacific Northwest), and Praetoriana (in South Africa)–refer to the reduction in raiding, feuding, and warfare in the territories brought under the control of an effective government. Though imperial conquest and rule can themselves be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered. The Pacification Process is so pervasive that anthropologists often treat it as a methodological nuisance….

…One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders. As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline. 

So did Hobbes get it right? In part, he did. In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (preemptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids). And the numbers confirm that relatively speaking, ‘during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,’ and that in such condition they live in ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death.’ 

But from his armchair in 17th-century England, Hobbes could not help but get a long of it wrong. People in nonstate societies cooperate extensively with their kin and allies, so life for them is far from ‘solitary,’ and only intermittently is it nasty and brutish.

page 67-68 (Middle Ages)

Violence pervaded their entertainment as well. Tuchman describes two of the popular sports of the time: ‘Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws…Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of speculators as he ran squealing from the bows until beaten lifeless.’

page 69

Tuchman too writes of the ‘childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse…Though the childishness of the medievals was surely exaggerated, there may indeed be differences in degree in the mores of emotional expression in different eras. [Norbert] Elias [1897-1990] spends much of THE CIVILIZING PROCESS documenting this transition with an unusual database: manuals of etiquette….But at one time they were serious guides to moral conduct, written by the leading thinkers of the day. In 1530 the great scholar Desiderius Erasmus, one of the founders of modernity, wrote an etiquette manual called ON CIVILITY IN BOYS which was a bestseller throughout Europe for two centuries. By laying down rules for what people ought not to do, these manuals give us a snapshot of what they must have been doing. 

pages 71-73 

Elias notes that the etiquette books rarely mention health and hygiene. Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination…As the new etiquette took hold, it also applied to the accoutrements of violence, particularly knives…Elias cites a number of points of etiquette that center on the use of knives…Some of the medieval knife taboos remain with us today…Elias’s theory, then, attributes the decline in European violence to a larger psychological change (the subtitle of his book is SOCIOGENETIC AND PSYCHOGENETIC INVESTIGATIONS).  He proposed that over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor–the readiness to take revenge–gave way to a culture of dignity–the readiness to control one’s emotions. 

…To his credit, Elias leapfrogged academic fashion in not claiming that early modern Europeans ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’ self-control. He claimed only that they toned up a mental faculty that had always been a part of human nature but which the medievals had underused. He repeatedly drove the point home with the pronouncement ‘There is no zero point.’. As we shall see in chapter 9, exactly how people dial their capacity for self-control up or down is an interesting topic in psychology. One possibility is that self-control is like a muscle, so that if you exercise it with table manners it will be stronger across the board and more effective when you have to stop yourself from killing the person who just insulted you. Another possibility is that a particular setting of the self-control dial is a social norm. ..A third is that self-control can be adjusted adaptively according to its costs and benefits in the local environment…In that case people might adjust a self-control slider according to the dangerousness of those around them.

pages 77-78

And this brings us to the second exogenous change. Elias noted that in the late Middle Ages people began to unmire themselves from technological and economic stagnation…The two triggers of the Civilizing Process–the Leviathan and gentle commerce–are related. The positive-sum cooperation of commerce flourishes best inside a big tent presided over by a Leviathan…The two civilizing forces, then, reinforce each other, and Elias considered them to be part of a single process. The centralization of state control and its monopolization of violence, the growth of craft guilds and bureaucracies, the replacement of barter with money, the development of technology, the enhancement of trade, the growing webs of dependency among far-flung individuals, all fit into an organic whole. And to prosper within that whole, one had to cultivate faculties of empathy and self-control until they became, as he put it, second nature.

Indeed the ‘organic’ analogy is not far-fetched. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary have argued that an evolutionary dynamic similar to the Civilizing Process drove the major transitions in the history of life. These transitions were the successive emergence of genes, chromosomes, bacteria, cells with nuclei, organisms, sexually reproducing organisms, and animal societies. In each transition, entities with the capacity to be either selfish or cooperative tended toward cooperation when they could be subsumed into a larger whole. They specialized, exchanged benefits, and developed safeguards to prevent one of them from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole.

page 99

The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that ‘democracy came too early’ to America. In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms–which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

page 104

The decline of violence in the American West lagged that in the East by two centuries and spanned the famous 1890 announcement of the closing of the American frontier, which symbolically marked the end of anarchy in the US.

page 106 

An appreciation of the Civilizing Process in the American West and rural South helps to make sense of the American political landscape today. Many northern and coastal intellectuals are puzzled by the culture of their red state compatriots, with their embrace of guns, capital punishment, small government, evangelic Christianity, ‘family values,’ and sexual propriety. Their opposite numbers are just as baffled by the blue staters’ timidity toward criminals and foreign enemies, their trust in government, their intellectualized secularism, and their tolerance of licentiousness. This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

page 109

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds [in the 1960s] would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times. But this decivilizing process was magnified by a trend that had been gathering momentum throughout the 20th century. The sociologist Cas Wouters, a translator and intellectual heir of Elias, has argued that after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process. The Civilizing Process had been a flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward. But as Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were leveled.

page 128

Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the Civilizing Process. This is the long-term trend of informalization I mentioned earlier, and it leads to what Elias called a ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ and what Wouters calls third nature. If our first nature consists of the evolved motives that govern life in a state of nature, and our second nature consists of the ingrained habits of a civilized society, then our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture’s norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness.

page 132-134

Medieval Christendom was a culture of cruelty. Torture was meted out by national and local governments throughout the Continent, and it was codified in laws that prescribed blinding, branding, amputation of hands, ears, noses, and tongues, and other forms of mutilation as punishments for minor crimes. Executions were orgies of sadism, climaxing with ordeals of prolonged killing such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, pulling apart by horses, impalement through the rectum, disembowelment by winding a man’s intestines around a spool, and even hanging, which was a slow racking and strangulation rather than a quick breaking of the neck. Sadistic tortures were also inflicted by the Christian church during its inquisitions, witch, hunts, and religious wars. Torture had been authorized by the ironically named Pope Innocent IV in 1251, and the order of Dominican monks carried it out with relish. ..Torture was not just a kind of rough justice, a crude attempt to deter violence with the threat of greater violence. Most of the infractions that sent a person to the rack or the stake were nonviolent, and today many are not even considered legally punishable….Far from being hidden in dungeons, torture-executions were forms of popular entertainment, attracting throngs of jubilant spectators who watched the victim struggle and scream…Systemic cruelty was far from unique to Europe. Hundreds of methods of torture, applied to millions of victims, have been documented in other civilizations, including the Assyrians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Chinese, Hindus, Polynesians, Aztecs, and many African kingdoms and Native American tribes. Brutal killings and punishments were also documented among the Israelites, Greeks, Arabs, and Ottoman Turks. Indeed, as we saw at the end of chapter 2, all of the first complex civilizations were absolutist theocracies which punished victimless crimes with torture and mutilation.

This chapter is about the remarkable transformation in history that has left us reacting to these practices with horror…All of this happened in a narrow slice of history, beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17th century and cresting with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th…The new ideology may be called humanism or human rights, and its sudden impact on Western life in the second half of the 18th century may be called the Humanitarian Revolution….If the opening of this chapter has been graphic, it is only to remind you of the realities of the era that the Enlightenment put to an end.

Of course no historical change takes place in a single thunderclap, and humanist currents flowed for centuries before and after the Enlightenment and in part of the world other than the West. But in INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS, the historian Lynn Hunt notes that human rights have been conspicuously affirmed at two moments in history. One was the end of the 18th century, which saw the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. The other was the midpoint of the 20th century, which saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, followed by a cascade of Rights Revolutions in the ensuing decades.

pages 144-148

The debunking of superstition and dogma removes one of the pretexts for torture, but leaves it available as a punishment for secular crimes and misdemeanors. People in ancient, medieval, and early modern times thought cruel punishments were perfectly reasonable…[the state] had to make the punishments so memorably brutal that anyone who witnessed them would be terrorized into submission and would spread the word to terrorize others.

But the practical function of cruel punishments was just a part of their appeal. Spectators enjoyed cruelty, even when it served no judicial purpose. Torturing animals, for example, was good clean fun. In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, ‘The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.’ Also popular were dogfights, bull runs, cockfights, public executions of ‘criminal’ animals, and bearbaiting, in which a bear would be chained to a post and dogs would tear it apart or be killed in the he effort.

Even when they were not actively enjoying torture, people showed a chilling insouciance to it….

The 18th century marked a turning point in the use of institutionalized cruelty in the West…Voltaire took up the cause…Other prominent writers also began to inveigh against sadistic punishments. Some, like Voltaire, used the language of shaming…Others, like Montesquieu, pointed out the hypocrisy of Christians’ bemoaning their cruel treatment at the hands of Romans, Japanese, and Muslims, yet inflicting the same cruelty themselves…The English lawyer William Eden also noted the brutalizing effect of cruel punishments, writing in 1771…Most influential of all was the Milanese economist and social scientist Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 bestseller ON CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS influenced every major political thinker in the literate world, including Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams…Beccaria’s essay didn’t impress everyone.  It was placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books…But Beccaria’s ideas carried the day, and within a few decades punitive torture was abolished in every major Western country, including the newly independent US in its famous prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution…

I have demarcated the 18th century on this and other graphs in this chapter to highlight 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. 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 

page 150 capital punishment 

On average fifty years elapsed between the last execution in a country and the year that it formally abolished capital punishment.

pages 153-161 slavery 

For most of the history of civilization, the practice of slavery was the rule rather than the exception. It was upheld in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and was justified by Plato and Aristotle as a natural institution that was essential to civilized society. So-called democratic Athens in the time of Pericles enslaved 35 percent of its population, as did the Roman Republic. Slaves have always been a major booty in wartime, and stateless people of all races were vulnerable to capture. The word slave comes from Slav, because, as the dictionary informs us, ‘Slavic people were widely captured and enslaved during the Middle Ages.’ States and armed forces, when they were not used as enslaving devices, were used as enslavement-prevention devices, as we are reminded by the lyric, ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves. Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.’ Well before Africans were enslaved by Europeans, they were enslaved by other Africans, as well as by Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East. Some of those states did not abolish legal slavery until recently: Qatar in 1952; Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962; Mauritania in 1980. 

….Most historians have concluded that Britain’s policing of the abolition of slavery was driven by humanitarian motives. Locke undermined the moral basis for slavery in his 1689 work TWO TREATISES ON GOVERNMENT, and though he and many of his intellectual descendants hypocritically profited from the institution, their advocacy of liberty, equality, and the universal rights of man let a genie out of the bottle and made it increasingly awkward for anyone to justify the practice.

….The statement ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ however hypocritical at the time, was a built-in rights-widener that could be invoked to end slavery four score and seven years later and other forms of racial coercion a century after that. The idea of democracy, once loosed on the world, would eventually infect larger and larger portions of it, and as we shall see, would turn out to be one of the greatest violence-reduction technologies since the appearance of government itself.

pages 168-174   Whence the humanitarian revolution?

We have seen that in the span of just over a century, cruel practices that had been a part of civilization for millennia were sudden abolished. The killing of witches, the torture of prisoners, the persecution of heretics, the execution of nonconformists, and the enslavement of foreigners–all carried out with stomach-turning cruelty–quickly passed from the unexceptionable to the unthinkable. Payne remarks on how difficult it is to explain these changes:

‘The routes whereby uses of force are abandoned are often quite unexpected, even mysterious–so mysterious that one is sometimes tempted to allude to a higher power at work. Time and again one encounters violent practices so rooted and so self-reinforcing that it seems almost magical that they were overcome. One is reduced to pointing to “History” to explain how this immensely beneficial policy–a reduction in the use of force–has been gradually imposed on a human race that has neither consciously sought it nor agreed with it.’ [Mysterious decline of force: J.L. Payne, 2004, p.29]

One example of this mysterious, unsought progress is the long-term trend away from using force to punish debtors, which most people never realized was a trend. Another is the way that political murder had faded in English-speaking countries well before the principles of democracy had been articulated. In cases like these a nebulous shift in sensibilities may have been a prerequisite to consciously designed reforms. It’s hard to imagine how a stable democracy can be implemented until competing factions give up the idea that murder is a good way to allocate power. The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance.

Still, a gradual shift in sensibilities is often incapable of changing actual practices until the change is implemented by the stroke of a pen.  The slave trade, for example, was abolished as a result of moral agitation that persuaded men in power to pass laws and back them up with guns and ships. Blood sports, public hangings, cruel punishments, and debtors’ prisons were also shut down by acts of legislators who had been influenced by moral agitators and the public debates they began.

In explaining the Humanitarian Revolution, then, we don’t have to decide between unspoken norms and explicit moral argumentation. Each affects the other. As sensibilities change, thinkers who question a practice are more likely to materialize, and their arguments are more likely to get a hearing and then catch on. The arguments may not only persuade the people who wield the levers of power but infiltrate the culture’s sensibilities by finding their way into barroom and dinner-table debates where they shift the consensus one mind at a time. And when a practice has vanished from everyday experience because it was outlawed from the top down, it may fall off the menu of live options in people’s imaginations. Just as today smoking in offices and classrooms has passed from commonplace to prohibited to unthinkable, practices like slavery and public hangings, when enough time passed that no one alive could remember them, became so unimaginable that they were no longer brought up for debate.

The most sweeping change in everyday sensibilities left by the Humanitarian Revolution is the reaction to suffering in other living things. People today are far from morally immaculate. They may covet nice objects, fantasize about sex with inappropriate partners, or want to kill someone who has humiliated them in public. But other sinful desires no longer occur to people in the first place. Most people today have no desire to watch a cat burn to death, let alone a man or a woman. In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don’t we feel it today? 

We won’t be equipped to answer this question until we plunge into the psychology of sadism in chapter 8 and empathy in chapter 9. But for now we can look at some historical changes that militated against the indulgence of cruelty. As always, the challenge is to find an exogenous change that precedes the change in sensibilities and behavior so we can avoid the circularity of saying that people stopped doing cruel things because they got less cruel. What changed in people’s environment that could have set off the Humanitarian Revolution?

The Civilizing Process is one candidate. Recall that Elias suggested that during the transition to modernity people not only exercised more self-control but also cultivated their sense of empathy. They did so not as an exercise in moral improvement but to hone their ability to get inside the heads of bureaucrats and merchants and prosper in a society that increasingly depended on networks of exchange rather than farming and plunder. Certainly the taste for cruelty clashes with the values of a cooperative society: it must be harder to work with your neighbors if you think they might enjoy seeing you disemboweled. And the reduction in personal violence brought about by the Civilizing Process may have lessened the demand for harsh punishments, just as today demands to ‘get tough on crime’ rise and fall with the crime rate. 

Lynn Hunt, the historian of human rights, points to another knock-on effect of the Civilizing Process: the refinements in hygiene and manners…The enhanced decorum, she suggests, contributed to the sense that people are autonomous–that they own their bodies, which have an inherent integrity and are not a possession of society. Bodily integrity was increasingly seen as worthy of respect, as something that may not be breached at the expense of the person for the benefit of society. 

My own sensibilities tend toward the concrete, and I suspect there is a simpler hypothesis about the effect of cleanliness on moral sensibilities: people got less repulsive…people easily slip from visceral disgust to moralistic disgust and treat unsanitary things as contemptibly defiled and sordid. Scholars of 20th-century atrocities have wondered how brutality can spring up so easily when one group achieves domination over another. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has pointed to a downward spiral of dehumanization.  People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors’ conscience. Perhaps this spiral of dehumanization runs the movie of the Civilizing Process backwards.  It reverses the historical sweep toward greater cleanliness and dignity that led, over the centuries, to greater respect for people’s well-being. 

Unfortunately the Civilizing Process and the Humanitarian Revolution don’t line up in time in a way that would suggest that one caused the other. The rise of government and commerce and the plummeting of homicide that propelled the Civilizing Process had been under way for several centuries without anyone much caring about the barbarity of punishments, the power of kings, or the violent suppression of heresy. Indeed as states became more powerful, they also got crueler. The use of torture to extract confessions (rather than to punish), for example, was reintroduced in the Middle Ages when many states revived Roman law. Something else must have accelerated humanitarian sentiments in the 17th and 18th centuries.

An alternative explanation is that people became more compassionate as their own lives improve…

But the life-was-cheap hypothesis also has some problems. Many of the more affluent states of their day, such as the Roman Empire, were hotbeds of sadism, and today harsh punishments like amputations and stonings may be found among the wealthy oil-exporting nations of the Middle East. .. 

Affluence began its liftoff only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century…Yet the humanitarian changes we are trying to explain began in the 17th century and were concentrated in the 18th….Also, it’s not completely obvious that poverty and misery should lead people to enjoy torturing others. One could just as easily make the opposite prediction: if you have firsthand experience of pain and deprivation, you should be unwilling to inflict them on others; whereas if you have lived a cushy life, the suffering of others is less real to you. I will return to the life-was-cheap hypothesis in the final chapter, but for now we must seek other candidates for an exogenous change that made people more compassionate. 

One technology that did show a precocious increase in productivity before the Industrial Revolution was book production.

…The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution... 

pages 175   the rise of empathy and the regard for human life 

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. As we shall see in chapter 9, though people in all cultures can react sympathetically to kin, friends, and babies, they tend to hold back when it comes to larger circles of neighbors, strangers, foreigners, and other sentient beings. In his book THE EXPANDING CIRCLE, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own. An interesting question is what inflated the empathy circle. And a good candidate is the expansion of literacy. 

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. ..As we shall see, ’empathy’ in the sense of adopting someone’s viewpoint is not the same as ’empathy’ in the sense of feeling compassion toward the person, but the first can lead to the second by a natural route… 

…The philosophes of the Enlightenment extolled the way novels engaged a reader’s identification with and sympathetic concern for others…

…The clergy, of course, denounced these novels and placed several on the Index of Forbidden Books…

…But the full-strength causal hypothesis may be more than a fantasy of English teachers. The ordering of events is in the right direction: technological advances in publishing, the mass production of books, the expansion of literacy, and the popularity of the novel all preceded the major humanitarian reforms of the 18th century…

…Cinema and television reached even larger audiences and offered experiences that were even more immediate. In chapter 9 we will learn of experiments that confirm that fictional narratives can evoke people’s empathy and prick them to action. 

Whether or not novels in general, or epistolary novels in particular, were the critical genre in expanding empathy, the explosion of reading may have contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution by getting people into the habit of straying from their parochial vantage points. And it may have contributed in a second way: by creating a hothouse for new ideas about moral values and the social order.

pages 178-180

…the technologies of the day–the sailing ship, the printed book, and the postal service–had already made information and people portable. The result was the same: a global campus, a public sphere, or as it was called in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Republic of Letters…

…The subversive power of the flow of information and people has never been lost on political and religious tyrants. That is why they suppress speech, writing, and association, and why democracies protect these channels in their bills of rights. Before the rise of cities and literacy, liberating ideas had a harder time being conceived and amalgamated, and so the rise of cosmopolitanism in the 17th and 18th centuries deserves part of the credit for the Humanitarian Revolution..

…The universe of ideas, in which one idea entails others, is itself an exogenous force, and once a community of thinkers enters that universe, they will be forced in certain directions regardless of their material surroundings. I think this process of moral discovery was a significant cause of the Humanitarian Revolution. 

I am prepared to take this line of explanation a step further. The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

page 184-186

On the heels of the Enlightenment came the French Revolution: a brief promise of democracy followed by a train of regicides, putsches, fanatics, mobs, terrors, and preemptive wars, culminating in a megalomaniacal emperor and an insane war of conquest… 

…The theory that the Enlightenment was responsible for the Terror and Napoleon is, to put it mildly, dubious…The American Revolution, which stuck more closely to the Enlightenment script, gave the world a liberal democracy that has lasted more than two centuries. ..

…Unspoken norms of civilized behavior, both in everyday interactions and in the conduct of government, may be a prerequisite to implementing certain reforms successfully…They may explain why today it is so hard to impose liberal democracy on countries in the developing world that have not outgrown their superstitions, warlords, and feuding tribes.

Civilization and Enlightenment need not be alternatives in explaining declines of violence. In some periods, tacit norms of empathy, self-control, and cooperation may take the lead, and rationally articulated principles of equality, nonviolence, and human rights may follow, In other periods, it may go in the other direction.

This to-and-fro may explain why the American Revolution was not as calamitous as its French counterpart. The Founders were products not just of the Enlightenment but of the English Civilizing Process, and self-control and cooperation had become second nature ot them…

‘…What is government itself,’ asked Madison, ‘but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?’ Democracy, in their vision, had to be designed to counteract the vices of human nature, particularly the temptation in leaders to abuse their power. An acknowledgment of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confreres, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete. In 1794 Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, wrote ‘The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species.’

In THE BLANK SLATE I argued that two extreme visions of human nature–a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists–define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies. And I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated than either. The human mind is not a blank slate, and no humane political system should be allowed to deify its leaders or remake its citizens. Yet for all its limitations, human nature includes a recursive, open-ended, combinatorial system for reasoning, which can take cognizance of its own limitations. That is why the engine of Enlightenment humanism, rationality, can never be refuted by some flaw or error in the reasoning of the people in a given ear. Reason can always stand back, take note of the flaw, and revise its rules so as not to succumb to it the next time.

page 186

A second counter-Enlightenment movement took root in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was centered not in England but in Germany…This counter-Enlightenment originated with Rousseau and was developed by theologians, poets, and essayists…Its target was not, as it was for Burke, the unintended consequences of Enlightenment reason for social stability, but the foundations of reason itself. 

…The counter-Enlightenment also rejected the assumption that violence was a problem to be solved. Struggle and bloodshed are inherent in the natural order, and cannot be eliminated without draining life of its vitality and subverting the destiny of mankind. ..Later it would be retrofitted with a scientific patina in the form of ‘social Darwinism,’ though the connection with Darwin is anachronistic and unjust: THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES was published in 1859, long after romantic struggleism had become a popular philosophy, and Darwin himself was a thoroughgoing liberal humanist.

The counter-Enlightenment was the wellspring of a family of romantic movements that gained strength during the 19th century. Some of them influenced the arts and gave us sublime music and poetry. Others became political ideologies and led to horrendous reversals in the trend of declining violence. One of these ideologies was a form of militant nationalism that came to be known as ‘blood and soil’–the notion that an ethnic group and the land from which hit originated form an organic whole with unique moral qualities, and that its grandeur and glory are more precious than the lives and happiness of its individual members. Another was romantic militarism…A third was Marxist socialism, in which history is a glorious struggle between classes, culminating in the subjugation of the bourgeoisie and the supremacy of the proletariat. And a fourth was National Socialism, in which history is a glorious struggle between races, culminating in the subjugation of inferior races and the supremacy of the Aryans.

page 290 

The researchers concluded that Kant got it right three out of three times: democracy favors peace, trade favors peace, and membership in intergovernmental organizations favors peace.

page 313

No one found much romance in the frumpy institutions of the Civilizing Process, namely a competent government and police force and a dependable infrastructure for trade and commerce. Yet history suggests that these institutions are necessary for the reduction of chronic violence, which is a prerequisite to every other social good.

pages 326-332 

Human cognition often works by analogy, and the concept of an irksome collection of procreating beings repeatedly calls to mind the concept of vermin. Perpetrators of genocide the world over keep rediscovering the same metaphors to the point of cliche. Despised people are rats, snakes, maggots, lice, flies, parasites, cockroaches, or (in parts of the world where they are pests) monkeys, baboons, and dogs…

…The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust…Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle–a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing…

…The emotional pathways to genocide–anger, fear, and disgust–can occur in various combinations…

…But genocide has another fateful component. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology…

…Many of the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries were guided by utopian images of ethnic groups flourishing in their native homelands, often based on myths of ancestral tribes who settled the territory at the dawn of time…

…Utopian leadership selects for monumental narcissism and ruthlessness…

…The indispensability of leaders to 20th-century genocide is made plain by the fact that when the leaders died or were removed by force, the killings stopped.

page 343 

The appearance of Marxist ideology in particular was a historical tsunami that is breathtaking in its total human impact. It led to the dekamegamurders by Marxist regimes IN THE he Soviet Union and China, and more circuitously, it contributed to the one committed by the Nazi regime in Germany. Hitler read Marx in 1913, and although he detested Marxist socialism, his National Socialism substituted races for classes in its ideology of a dialectical struggle toward utopia, which is why some historians consider the two ideologies ‘fraternal twins.’…The point is not that Marxism should be morally blamed for these unintended consequences, just that any historical narrative must acknowledge the sweeping repercussions of this single idea. Valentino notes that no small part of the decline of genocide is the decline of communism… 

…The ideologies prepared the ground and attracted the men, the absence of democracy gave them the opportunity, but tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals. [Hitler, Stalin, and Mao] 

page 345

…terrorism is generally understood as premeditated violence perpetrated by a nonstate actor against noncombatants (civilians or off-duty soldiers) in pursuit of a political, religious, or social goal, designed to coerce a government or to intimidate or convey a message to a larger audience…

…Terrorism is a form of asymmetrical warfare–a tactic of the weak against the strong–which leverages the psychology of fear to create emotional damage that is disproportionate to its damage in lives or property.

page 349 

Attacks on civilians can doom terrorists not just by alienating potential sympathizers but by galvanizing the public into supporting an all-out crackdown…Any willingness to compromise with the group or to recognize the legitimacy of their grievance evaporated.

page 355 

One of the reasons chimpanzees, unlike other primates, engage in cooperative raidings is that the females, rather than the males, disperse from the troop at sexual maturity, so the males in a troop tend to be related. 

…Studies of military psychology have discovered that soldiers fight above all out of loyalty to their platoonmates. 

page 356 

But they opted for the higher risk of an unpredictable death over the lower risk of a death that would be preceded by a lengthy period of doom. How do the engineers of suicide terrorism overcome this obstacle?….Atran concluded that many of the motives may be found in nepotistic altruism.

page 363  Islam

The laws and practices of many Muslim countries seem to have missed out on the Humanitarian Revolution…Islamic countries were the last to abolish slavery…Violence is sanctioned in the Islamic world not just by religious superstition but by a hyperdeveloped culture of honor.

page 366

The results confirm that most Islamic states will not become secular liberal democracies anytime soon.

page 367

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.

page 368   Sharia

Some will try to muddle through the oxymoron of a Sharia democracy.

page 368

This leaves three reasonably foreseeable dangers to the New Peace:  nuclear terrorism, the regime in Iran, and climate change.

page 372 Pakistan

And contrary to rumor, security experts consider the chance that Pakistan’s government and military command will fall under the control of Islamist extremists to be essentially nil.

page 374

There is a parsimonious alternative explanation of Iran’s behavior. In 2002 George w. Bush identified Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as the ‘axis of evil’ and proceeded to invade Iraq and depose its leadership. North Korea’s leaders saw the writing on the wall and promptly developed a nuclear capability, which (as they no doubt anticipated) has put an end to any musings about the US invading them too. Shortly afterward Iran put its nuclear program into high gear, aiming to create enough ambiguity as to whether it possesses nuclear weapons, or could assemble them quickly, to squelch any thought of an invasion in the mind of the Great Satan. 

pages 379-382

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. 

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…

…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.  … 

…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.

page 394

In THE BLANK SLATE I argued that an outsize fear of reintroducing racial hostility has distorted the social sciences by putting a heavy thumb on the nurture side of the nature-nurture scale…An irony is that a politicized denial of human nature betrays a tacit acceptance of a particularly dark theory of human nature: that human beings are perpetually on the verge of a descent into racial animus, so every resource of the culture must be mobilized against it.

page 395 

‘Thou shalt not rape’ is not one of the Ten Commandments, though the tenth one does reveal the status of a woman in that world: she is enumerated in a list of her husband’s chattels, after his house and before his servants and livestock…Rape was seen as an offense not against the woman but against a man…

page 396

As always, genes don’t pull the strings of behavior directly; they exert their influence by shaping the emotional repertoire of the brain, in this case, the emotion of sexual jealousy.

page 399 

In a 1700 essay Mary Astell took the arguments that had been leveled against despotism and slavery and extended them to the oppression of women…

page 405

In their book WARRIOR LOVERS, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, ‘To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes…The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children.’…Pornography for men is visual, anatomical, impulsive, floridly promiscuous, and devoid of context and character. Erotica for women is far more likely to be verbal, psychological, reflective, serially monogamous, and rich in context and character. Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. 

page 406

If I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate.

page 418

Finally, postpartum depression is only loosely tied to measured hormonal imbalances, suggesting that it is not a malfunction but a design feature.

page 423-424

Like the nuclear 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.’ 

page 425 

In 1527 a French priest wrote that ‘the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.’…

..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…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.

page 427

Opponents of abortion may see the decline in every form of violence but the killing of fetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy. But there is another explanation for the discrepancy. Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness…The current understand of the neural basis of consciousness ties it to reverberating neural activity between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, which begins at around twenty-six weeks of gestational age…At the same time, we might expect a general distaste for the destruction of any kind of living thing to turn people away from abortion even when they don’t equate it with murder. And that indeed has happened. 

page 430-431

Some degree of conflict between parent and offspring is rooted in the evolutionary genetics of the family…The theory of parent-offspring conflict says nothing about how much investment an offspring should want or how much a parent should be prepared to give. It says only that however much parents are willing to give, the offspring wants a bit more.

page 432

Another gestalt shift came from Rousseau, who replaced the Christian notion of original sin with the romantic notion of original innocence. 

pages 433-434  Abused children helped by  animal welfarists

The protection of abused children also benefited from an analogy–in this case, believe it or not, with animals.  In Manhattan in 1874, the neighbors of ten-year-old Mary Ellen McCormack…

…Similarly, in England the first legal case to protect a child against an abusive parent was taken up by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and out of it grew the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

page 442-443 

In another decade, the facetious treatment of bullying in the CALVIN AND HOBBES cartoon may become as offensive as the spank-the-wife coffee ads from the 1950s are to us today. 

Indeed, in some ways the effort to protect children against violence has begun to overshoot its target and is veering into the realm of sacrament and taboo.

page 444 

The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase.

pages 454-474   Animal rights and the decline of cruelty to animals

Let me tell you about the worst thing I have ever done. In 1975, as a twenty-year-old sophomore, I got a summer job as a research assistant in an animal behavior lab. One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. All I had to do was throw the rat in the box, start the timers, and go home for the night. When I arrived back at the lab early the next morning, I would find a fully conditioned rat.

But that was not what looked back at me when I opened the box in the morning. The rat had a grotesque crook in its spine and was shivering uncontrollably. Within a few seconds, it jumped with a start. It was nowhere near the lever. I realized that the rat had not learned to press the lever and had spent the night being shocked every six seconds. When I reached in to rescue it, I found it cold to the touch. I rushed it to the veterinarian two floors down, but it was too late, and the rat died an hour later. I had tortured an animal to death.

 As the experiment was being explained to me, I had already sensed it was wrong. Even if the procedure had gone perfectly, the rat would have spent twelve hours in constant anxiety, and I had enough experience to know that laboratory procedures don’t always go perfectly. My professor was a radical behaviorist, for whom the question ‘What is it like to be a rat?’ was simply incoherent. But I was not, and there was no doubt in my mind that a rat could feel pain. The professor wanted me in his lab; I knew that if I refused, nothing bad would happen. But I carried out the procedure anyway, reassured by the ethically spurious but psychologically reassuring principle that it was standard practice. 

The resonance with certain episodes of 20th-century history is too close for comfort, and in the next chapter I will expand on the psychological lesson I learned that day. The reason I bring up this blot on my conscience is to show what was standard practice in the treatment of animals at the time. To motivate the animals to work for food, we starved them to 80 percent of their free-feeding weight, which in a small animal means a state of gnawing hunger. In the lab next door, pigeons were shocked through beaded keychains that were fastened around the base of their wings; I saw that the chains had worn right through their skin, exposing the muscle below. In another lab, rats were shocked through safety pins that pierced the skin of their chests. In one experiments on endorphins, animals were given unavoidable shocks described in the paper as ‘extremely intense, just subtetanizing’–that is, just short of the point where the animal’s muscles would seize up in a state of tetanus. The callousness extended outside the testing chambers. One researcher was known to show his anger by picking up the nearest unused rat and throwing it against a wall. Another shared a cold joke with me: a photograph, printed in a scientific journal, of a rat that had learned to avoid shocks by lying on its furry back while pressing the food lever with its forepaw. The caption: ‘Breakfast in bed.’

I’m relieved to say that just five years later, indifference to the welfare of animals among scientists had become unthinkable, indeed illegal. Beginning in the 1980s, any use of an animal for research or teaching had to be approved by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), and any scientist will confirm that these committees are not rubber stamps. The size of cages, the amount and quality of food and veterinary care, and the opportunities for exercise and social contact are strictly regulated. Researchers and their assistants must take a training course on the ethics of animal experimentation, attend a series of panel discussions, and pass an exam. Any experiment that would subject an animal to discomfort or distress is placed in a category governed by special regulations and must be justified by its likelihood of providing ‘a greater benefit to science and human welfare.’

Any scientist will also confirm that attitudes among scientists themselves have changed. Recent surveys have shown that animal researchers, virtually without exception, believe that laboratory animals feel pain. Today a scientist who was indifferent to the welfare of laboratory animals would be treated by his or her peers with contempt. 

The change in the treatment of laboratory animals is part of yet another rights revolution: the growing conviction that animals should not be subjected to unjustifiable pain, injury, and death. The revolution in animal rights is a uniquely emblematic instance of the decline of violence, and it is fitting that I end my survey of historical declines by recounting it. That is because the change has been driven purely by the ethical principle that one ought not to inflict suffering on a sentient being. Unlike the other Rights Revolutions, the movement for animal rights was not advanced by the affected parties themselves: the rats and pigeons were hardly in a position to press their case. Nor has it been a by-product of commerce, reciprocity, or any other positive-sum negotiation; the animals have nothing to offer us in exchange for our treating them more humanely. And unlike the revolution in children’s rights, it does not hold out the promise of an improvement in the makeup of its beneficiaries later in life. The recognition of animal interests was taken forward by human advocates on their behalf, who were moved by empathy, reason, and the inspiration of the other Rights Revolutions. Progress has been uneven, and certainly the animals themselves, if they could be asked, would not allow us to congratulate ourselves too heartily just yet. But the trends are real, and they are touching every aspect of our relationship with our fellow animals.

When we think of indifference to animal welfare, we tend to conjure up images of scientific laboratories and factory farms. But callousness toward animals is by no means modern. In the course of human history it has been the default. (The industrialization of death and suffering are however modern.—Eds.)

Killing animals to eat their flesh is a part of the human condition. Our ancestors have been hunting, butchering, and probably cooking meat for at least two million years, and our mouths, teeth, and digestive tracts are specialized for a diet that includes meat. The fatty acids and complete protein in meat enabled the evolution of our metabolically expensive brains, and the availability of meat contributed to the evolution of human sociality. The jackpot of a felled animal gave our ancestors something of value to share or trade and set the stage for reciprocity and cooperation, because a lucky hunter with more meat than he could consume on the spot had a reason to share it, with the expectation that he would be the beneficiary when fortunes reversed. And the complementary contributions of hunted meat from men and gathered plants from women created synergies that bonded men and women for reasons other than the obvious ones. Meat also provided men with an efficient way to invest in their offspring, further strengthening family ties.

The ecological importance of meat over evolutionary time left its mark in the psychological importance of meat in human lives. Meat tastes good, and eating it makes people happy. Many traditional cultures have a word for meat hunger, and the arrival of a hunter with a carcass was an occasion for village-wide rejoicing. Successful hunters are esteemed and have better sex lives, sometimes by dint of their prestige, sometimes by explicit exchanges of the carnal for the carnal. And in most cultures, a meal does not count as a feast unless meat is served.

With meat so important in human affairs, it’s not surprising that the welfare of the entities whose bodies provide the meat has been low on the list of human priorities. The usual signals that mitigate violence among humans are mostly absent in animals: they don’t have faces or expressions that elicit our sympathy. Conservationists are often exasperated that people care only about the charismatic mammals lucky enough to have faces to which humans respond, like grinning dolphins, sad-eyed pandas, and baby-faced juvenile seals. Ugly species are on their own.

The reverence for nature commonly attributed to foraging people in children’s books did not prevent them from hunting large animals to extinction or treating captive animals with cruelty. Hopi children, for example, were encouraged to capture birds and play with them by breaking their legs or pulling off their wings. A Web site for Native American cuisine includes the following recipe:

  Roast Turtle

            Ingredients:

                    One turtle

                      One campfire:

           Directions:

                     Put a turtle on his back on the fire.

                   When you hear the shell crack, he’s done. 

The cutting or cooking of live animals by traditional peoples is far from uncommon. The Masai regularly bleed their cattle and mix the blood with milk for a delicious beverage, and Asian nomads cut chunks of fat from the tails of living sheep that they have specially bred for that purpose. Pets too are treated harshly: a recent cross-cultural survey found that half the traditional cultures that keep dogs as pets kill them, usually for food, and more than half abuse them. Among the Mbuti of Africa, for example, ‘the hunting dogs, valuable as they are, get kicked around mercilessly from the day they are born to the day they die.’ When I asked an anthropologist friend about the treatment of animals by the hunter-gatherers she had worked with, she replied: ‘That is perhaps the hardest part of being an anthropologist. They sensed my weakness and would sell me all kinds of baby animals with descriptions of what they would do to them otherwise. I used to take them far into the desert and release them, they would track them, and bring them back to me for sale again!’ 

The early civilizations that depended on domesticated livestock often had elaborate moral codes on the treatment of animals, but the benefits to the animals were mixed at best. The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God’s first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ Though Adam and Eve were frugivores, after the flood the human diet switched to meat. God told Noah in Genesis 9:2-3: ‘The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.’ Until the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70 CE, vast numbers of animals were slaughtered by Hebrew priests, not to nourish the people but to indulge the superstition that God had to be periodically placated with a well-done steak. (The smell of charbroiled beef, according to the Bible, is ‘a soothing aroma’ and ‘a sweet savor’ to God.) 

Ancient Greece and Rome had a similar view of the place of animals in the scheme of things. Aristotle wrote that ‘plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of man.’ Greek scientists put this attitude into practice by dissecting live mammals, including, occasionally, Homo sapiens. (According to the Roman medical writer Celsus, physicians in Hellenic Alexandria ‘procured criminals out of prison by royal permission, and dissecting them alive, contemplated, while they were yet breathing, the parts which nature had before concealed.’) The Roman anatomist Galen wrote that he preferred to work with pigs rather than monkeys because of the ‘unpleasant expression’ on the monkeys’ faces when he cut into them. His compatriots, of course, delighted in the torture and slaughter of animals in the Colosseum, again not excluding a certain bipedal primate. In Christendom, Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas combined biblical with Greek views to ratify the amoral treatment of animals. Aquinas wrote, ‘By the divine providence {animals] are intended for man’s use…Hence it is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatsoever.’

When it came to the treatment of animals, modern philosophy got off to a bad start. Descartes wrote that animals were clockwork, so there was no one home to feel pain or pleasure. What sound to us like cries of distress were merely the output of a noisemaker, like a warning buzzer on a machine. Descartes knew that the nervous systems of animals and humans were similar, so from our perspective it’s odd that he could grant consciousness to humans while denying it to animals. But Descartes was committed to the existence of the soul, granted to humans by God, and the soul was the locus of consciousness. When he introspected on his own consciousness, he wrote, he could not ‘distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire…The faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. cannot be properly speaking said to be its parts, for it is one and the same mind which employs itself in willing and in feeling and understanding.’ Language too is a faculty of this indivisible thing we call mind or soul. Since animals lack language, they must lack souls; hence they must be without consciousness. A human has a clockwork body and brain, like an animal, but also a soul, which interacts with the brain through a special structure, the pineal gland.

From the standpoint of modern neuroscience, the argument is loopy. Today we know that consciousness depends, down to the last glimmer and itch, on the physiological activity of the brain. We also know that language can be dissociated from the rest of consciousness, most obviously in stroke patients who have lost their ability to speak but have not been turned into insensate robots. But aphasia would not be documented until 1861 (by Descartes’ compatriot Paul Broca), and the theory sounded plausible enough at the time. For centuries live animals would be dissected in medical laboratories, encouraged by the church’s disapproval of the dissection of human cadavers. Scientists cut the limbs off living animals to see if they would regenerate, drew out their bowels, pulled off their skin, and removed their organs, including their eyes.

Agriculture was no more humane. Practices like gelding, branding, piercing, and the docking of ears and tails have been common in farms for centuries. And cruel practices to fatten animals or tenderize their meat (familiar to us today from protests against foie gras and milk-fed veal) are by no means a modern invention. A history of the British kitchen describes some of the methods of tenderization in the 17th century: ‘Poultry, in order to put on flesh after its long journey from the farms, was sewn up by the gut…; turkey were bled to death by hanging them upside down with a small incision in the vein of the mouth; geese were nailed to the floor; salmon and carp were hacked into collops while living to make their flesh firmer; eels were skinned alive, coiled around skewers and fixed through the eye so they could not move…The flesh of the bull, it was believed, was indigestible and unwholesome if the animal was killed without being baited…Calves and pigs were whipped to death with knotted ropes to make the meat more tender, rather than our modern practice of beating the flesh when dead. “Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death,” begins one…recipe.’

Factory farming is also not a phenomenon of the 20th century: ‘The Elizabethan method of “brawning” or fattening pigs was “to keep them in so close a room that they cannot turn themselves round about…whereby they are forced always to lie on their bellies.” “They feed in pain,” said a contemporary, “lie in pain and sleep in pain.” Poultry and game-birds were often fattened in darkness and confinement, sometimes being blinded as well…Geese were thought to put on weight if the webs of their feet were nailed to the floor, and it was the custom of some seventeenth-century housewives to cut the legs off living fowl in the belief that it made their flesh more tender. In 1686 Sir Robert Southwell announced a new invention of “an oxhouse, where the cattle are to eat and drink in the same crib and not to stir until they be fitted for the slaughter.” Dorset lambs were specially reared for the Christmas tables of the gentry by being imprisoned in little dark cabins.’ 

Many other millennia-old practices are thoroughly indifferent to animal suffering. Fishhooks and harpoons go back to the stone age, and even fishnets kill by slow suffocation. Bits, whips, spurs, yokes, and heavy loads made life miserable for beasts of burden, especially those who spent their days pushing rive shafts in dark mills and pumping stations. Any reader of MOBY DICK knows about the age-old cruelties of whaling. And then there were the blood sports that we saw in chapters 3 and 4, such as head-butting a cat nailed to a post, clubbing a pig, baiting a bear, and watching a cat burn to death.

During this long history of exploitation and cruelty, there had always been forces that pushed for restraint in the treatment of animals. But the driving motive was rarely an empathic concern for their inner lives. Vegetarianism, antivivisectionism, and other pro-animal movements have always had a wide range of rationales. Let’s consider a few of them.

I have mentioned in a number of places the mind’s tendency to moralize the disgust-purity continuum.  The equation holds at both ends of the scale: at one pole, we equate immorality with filth, carnality, hedonism, and dissoluteness; at the other, we equate virtue with purity, chastity, asceticism, and temperance. This cross talk affects our emotions about food. Meat-eating is messy and pleasurable, therefore bad; vegetarianism is clean and abstemious, therefore good. 

Also, since the human mind is prone to essentialism, we are apt to take the cliche ‘you are what you eat’ a bit too literally. Incorporating dead flesh into one’s body can feel like a kind of contamination, and ingesting a concentrate of animality can threaten to imbue the eater with beastly traits. Even Ivy League university students are vulnerable to the illusion. The psychologist Paul Rozin has shown that students are apt to believe that a tribe that hunts turtles for their meat and wild boar for their bristles are probably good swimmers, whereas a tribe that hunts wild boar for their meat and turtles for their shells are probably tough fighters.

People can be turned against meat by romantic ideologies as well. Prelapsarian, pagan, and blood-and-soil creeds can depict the elaborate process of procuring and preparing animals as a decadent artifice, and vegetarianism as a wholesome living off the land. For similar reasons, a concern over the use of animals in research can feed off an antipathy toward science and intellect in general, as when Wordsworth wrote in ‘The Tables Turned’: ‘Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect, Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–We murder to dissect.’

Finally, since different subcultures treat animals in different ways, a moralistic concern with how the other guy treats his animals (while ignoring the way we do) can be a form of social one-upmanship. Blood sports in particular offer satisfying opportunities for class warfare, as when the middle class lobbies to outlaw the cockfighting enjoyed by the lower classes and the foxhunts enjoyed by the upper ones. Thomas Macaulay’s remark that ‘the Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators’ can mean that campaigns against violence tend to target the mindset of cruelty rather than just the harm to victims. But it also captures the insight that zoophily can shade into misanthropy. 

The Jewish dietary laws are an ancient example of the confused motives behind taboos on meat. Leviticus and Deuteronomy present the laws as unadorned diktats, since God is under no obligation to justify his commandments to mere mortals. But according to later rabbinical interpretations, the laws foster a concern with animal welfare, if only by forcing Jews to stop and think about the fact that the source of their meat is a living thing, ultimately belonging to God. Animals must be dispatched by a professional slaughterer who severs the animal’s carotid artery, trachea, and esophagus with a clean swipe of a nick-free knife. This indeed may have been the most humane technology of the time, and was certainly better than cutting parts off a living animal or roasting it alive.  But it is far from a painless death, and some humane societies today have sought to ban the practice. The commandment not to ‘seethe a kid in its mother’s milk’, the basis for the prohibition of mixing meat with dairy products, has also been interpreted as an expression of compassion for animals. But when you think about it, it’s really an expression of the sensibilities of the observer. To a kid that is about to be turned into stewing meat, the ingredients of the sauce are the least of its concerns. 

Cultures that have gone all the way to vegetarianism are also driven by a mixture of motives. In the 6th century BCE Pythagoras started a cult that did more than measure the sides of triangles: he and his followers avoided meat, largely because they believed in the transmigration of souls from body to body, including those of animals. Before the word vegetarian was coined in the 1840s, an abstention from meat and fish was called ‘the Pythagorean diet.’ The Hindus too based their vegetarianism on the doctrine of reincarnation, though cynical anthropologists like Marvin Harris have offered a more prosaic explanation: cattle in India were more precious as plow animals and dispensers of milk and dung (used as fuel and fertilizer) than they would have been as the main ingredient in beef curry. The spiritual rationale of Hindu vegetarianism was carried over into Buddhism and Jainism, though with a more explicit concern for animals rooted in a philosophy of nonviolence. Jain monks sweep the ground in front of them so as not to tread on insects, and some wear masks to avoid killing microbes by inhaling them.

But any intuition that vegetarianism and humanitarianism go together was shattered in the 20th-century by the treatment of animals under Nazism.  [note refers to ‘Some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals,’ by H. Herzog, New York, HarperCollins, 2010′; and ‘ The bloodless revolution: a cultural history of vegetarianism from 1600 to modern times, by T. Stuart, New York, Norton,  2006’]    Hitler and many of his henchmen were vegetarians, not so much out of compassion for animals as from an obsession with purity, a pagan desire to reconnect to the soil, and a reaction to the anthropocentrism and meat rituals of Judaism. In an unsurpassed display of the human capacity for moral compartmentalization, the Nazis, despite their unspeakable experiments on living humans, instituted the strongest laws for the protection of animals in research that Europe had ever seen. Their laws also mandated humane treatment of animals in farms, movie sets, and restaurants, where fish had to be anesthetized and lobsters killed swiftly before they were cooked. Ever since that bizarre chapter in the history of animal rights, advocates of vegetarianism have had to retire one of their oldest arguments: that eating meat makes people aggressive, and abstaining from it makes them peaceful. 

Some of the early expressions of a genuinely ethical concern for animals took place in the Renaissance. Europeans had become curious about vegetarianism when reports came back from India of entire nations that lived without meat. Several writers, including Erasmus and Montaigne, condemned the mistreatment of animals in hunting and butchery, and one of them, Leonardo da Vinci, became a vegetarian himself.

But it was in the 18th and 19th centuries that arguments for animal rights began to catch on. Part of the impetus was scientific. Descartes’ substance dualism, which considered consciousness a free-floating entity that works separately from the brain, gave way to theories of monism and property dualism that equated, or at least intimately connected, consciousness with brain activity. This early neurobiological thinking had implications for animal welfare. As Voltaire wrote: ‘There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins. You discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering?’

And as we saw in chapter 4, Jeremy Bentham’s laser-beam analysis of morality led him to pinpoint the issue that should govern our treatment of animals: not whether they can reason or talk, but whether they can suffer.  By the early 19th century, the Humanitarian Revolution had been extended from humans to other sentient beings, first targeting the most conspicuous form of sadism toward animals, blood sports, followed by the abuse of beasts of burden, livestock on farms, and laboratory animals. When the first of these measures, a ban on the abuse of horses, was introduced into the British Parliament in 1821, it elicited howls of laughter from MPs who said that it would lead to the protection of dogs and even cats. Within two decades that is exactly what happened. Throughout 19th-century Britain, a blend of humanitarianism and romanticism led to antivivisection leagues, vegetarian movements, and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Biologists’ acceptance of the theory of evolution following the publication of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES in 1859 made it impossible for them to maintain that consciousness was unique to humans, and by the end of the century in Britain, they had acceded to laws banning vivisection.

The campaign to protect animals lost momentum during the middle decades of the 20th century. The austerity from the two world wars had created a meat hunger, and the populace was so grateful for the flood of cheap meat from factory farming that it gave little thought to where the meat came from. Also, beginning in the nineteen-teens, behaviorism took over psychology and philosophy and decreed that the very idea of animal experience was a form of unscientific naiveté: the cardinal sin of anthropomorphism. Around the same time the animal welfare movement, like the pacifist movements of the 19th century, developed an image problem and became associated with do-gooders and health food nuts. Even one of the greatest moral voices of the 20th century, George Orwell, was contemptuous of vegetarians: ‘One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England…The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcass; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.’

All this changed in the 1970s. The plight of livestock in factory farms was brought to light in Britain in a 1964 book by Ruth Harrison called ANIMAL MACHINES. Other public figures soon took up the cause. Brigid Brophy has been credited with the term animal rights, which she deliberately coined by analogy: she wanted to associate ‘the case for non-human animals with that clutch of egalitarian or libertarian ideas which have sporadically, though quite often with impressively actual political results, come to the rescue of other oppressed classes, such as slaves or homosexuals or women.’

The real turning point was the philosopher Peter Singer’s 1975 book ANIMAL LIBERATION, the so-called bible of the animal rights movement. The sobriquet is doubly ironic because Singer is a secularist and a utilitarian, and utilitarians have been skeptical of natural rights ever since Bentham called the idea ‘nonsense on stilts.’ But following Bentham, Singer laid out a razor-sharp argument for a full consideration of the interests of animals, while not necessarily granting them ‘rights.’ The argument begins with the realization that it is consciousness rather than intelligence or species membership that makes a being worthy of moral consideration. It follows that we should not inflict avoidable pain on animals any more than we should inflict it on young children or the mentally handicapped. And a corollary is that we should all be vegetarians. Humans can thrive on a modern vegetarian diet, and animals’ interests in a life free of pain and premature death surely outweigh the marginal increase in pleasure we get from eating their flesh. The fact that humans ‘naturally’ eat meat, whether by cultural tradition, biological evolution, or both, is morally irrelevant.

Like Brophy, Singer made every effort to analogize the animal welfare movement to the other Rights Revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. The analogy began with his title, an allusion to colonial liberation, women’s liberation, and gay liberation, and it continued with his popularization of the term speciesism, a sibling of racism and sexism. Singer quoted an 18th-century critic of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft who argued that if she was right about women, we would also have to grant rights to ‘brutes.’ The critic had intended it as a reductio ad absurdum, but Singer argued that it was a sound deduction. For Singer, these analogies are far more than rhetorical techniques. In another book, THE EXPANDING CIRCLE, he advanced a theory of moral progress in which human beings were endowed by natural selection with a kernel of empathy toward kin and allies, and have gradually extended it to wider and wider circles of living things, from family and village to clan, tribe, nation, species, and all of sentient life. The book you are reading owes much to this insight.

Singer’s moral arguments were not the only forces that made people sympathetic to animals. In the 1970s it was a good thing to be a socialist, fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist, and feminist, sometimes all at the same time.  The compassion-based argument for vegetarianism was soon fortified with other arguments: that meat was fattening, toxic, and artery-hardening; that growing crops to feed animals rather than people was a waste of land and food; and that the effluvia of farm animals was a major pollutant, particularly methane, the greenhouse gas that comes out of both ends of a cow.

Whether you call it animal liberation, animal rights, animal welfare, or the animal movement, the decades since 1975 in Western culture have seen a growing intolerance of violence toward animals. Changes are visible in at least half a dozen ways.

I’ve already mentioned the first: the protection of animals in laboratories. Not only are live animals now protected from being hurt, stressed, or killed in the conduct of science [NOT TRUE], but in high school biology labs the venerable custom of dissecting pickled frogs has gone the way of inkwells and slide rules. [NOT TRUE]  (In some schools it has been replaced by V-Frog, a virtual reality dissection program.) And in commercial laboratories the routine use of animals to test cosmetics and household products has come under fire. Since the 1940s, following reports of women being blinded by mascara containing coal tar, many household products have been tested for safety with the infamous Draize procedures, which applies a compound to the eyes of rabbits and looks for signs of damage. Until the 1980s few people had heard of the Draize test, and until the 1990s few would have recognized the term cruelty-free, the designation for products that avoid it. Today the term is emblazoned on thousands of consumer goods and has become familiar enough that the label ‘cruelty-free condoms’ does not raise an eyebrow. Animal testing in consumer product labs continues, but has been increasingly regulated and reduced.

Another conspicuous change is the outlawing of blood sports. I have already mentioned that since 2005 the British aristocracy has had to retire its bugles and bloodhounds [NOT TRUE], and in 2008 Louisiana became the last American state to ban cockfights, a sport that had been popular throughout the world for centuries. Like many prohibited vices, the practice continues, particularly among immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia, but it has long been in decline in the US and has been outlawed in many other countries as well.

Even the proud bullfight has been threatened.  In 2004 the city of Barcelona outlawed the deadly contests between matador and beast, and in 2010 the ban was extended to the entire region of Catalonia. The state-run Spanish television network had already ended live coverage of bullfights because they were deemed too violent for children. The European Parliament has considered a continent-wide ban as well. Like formal duelings and other violent customs sanctified by pomp and ceremony, bullfighting may eventually bite the dust, not because compassion condemns it or governments outlaw it, but because detraction will not suffer it. In his 1932 book DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, Ernest Hemingway explained the primal appeal of the bullfight: ‘[The matador] must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Once you accept the rule of death, “Thou shalt not kill” is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bull-fight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.’

Thirty years later, Tom Lehrer described his experience of a bullfight a bit differently. ‘There is surely nothing more beautiful in this world,’ he exclaimed, ‘than the sight of a lone man facing singlehandedly a half a ton of angry pot roast.’ In the climactic verse of his ballad, he sang: ‘I cheered at the bandilleros’ display, As they stuck the bull in their own clever way, For I hadn’t had so much fun since the day, My brother’s dog Rover, Got run over.’

‘Rover was killed by a Pontiac,’ Lehrer added, ‘and it was done with such grace and artistry that the witnesses awarded the driver both ears and the tail.’ The reaction of young Spaniards today is closer to Lehrer’s than to Hemingway’s. Their heroes are not matadors but singers and football players who become famous without the spiritual and aesthetic pride of killing anything. While bullfighting retains a loyal following in Spain, the crowds are middle-aged and older. 

Hunting is another pastime that has been in decline. Whether it is from compassion for Bambi or an association with Elmer Fudd, fewer Americans shoot animals for fun. Figure 7-26 shows the declining proportion of Americans in the past three decades who have told the General Social Survey that either they or their spouses hunts.  Other statistics show that the average age of hunters is steadily creeping upward.

It’s not just that Americans are spending more time behind video screens and less in the great outdoors. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, in the decade between 1996 and 2006, while the number of hunters, days of hunting, and dollars spent on hunting declined by about 10 to 15 percent, the number of wildlife watchers, days of wildlife watching, and dollars spent on wildlife watching increased by 10 to 20 percent. People still like to commune with animals; they would just rather look at them than shoot them. It remains to be seen whether the decline will be reversed by the locavore craze, in which young urban professionals have taken up hunting to reduce their food miles and harvest their own free-range, grass-fed, sustainable, “humanely” slaughtered meat.

It’s hard to imagine that fishing could ever be considered a humane sport, but anglers are doing their best. Some of them take catch-and-release a step further and release the catch before it even breaks the surface, because exposure to the air is stressful to a fish. Better still is hookless fly-fishing: the angler watches the trout take the fly, feels a little tug on the line, and that’s it. One of them describes the experience: ‘I entered the trout’s world and got among them in a much more natural way than ever before. I didn’t interrupt their feeding rhythms. They took the fly continually, and I still got that little jolt of pleasure you feel when a fish takes your fly. I don’t want to harass or harm trout anymore, so now there’s a way for me to do that and still keep fishing. 

And do you recognize this trope?…It comes from the trademarked certification of the American Humane Association that no animals were harmed in the making of a motion picture, displayed in the rolling credits after the names of the gaffer and key grip….The AHA boasts that ‘since the introduction of the Guidelines, animal accidents, illnesses and deaths on the set have sharply declined.’ They back it up with numbers, and since I like to tell my story with graphs, figure 7-27 is one that shows the number of films per year designated as ‘unacceptable’ because of mistreatment of animal actors.

And if that is not enough to convince you that animal rights have been taken to a new level, consider the events of June 16, 2009, as recounted in a NEW YORK TIMES article entitled, ‘What’s White, Has 132 Rooms, and Flies?’ The answer to the riddle is the White House, which had recently become infested with the bugs. During a televised interview a large fly orbited President Obama’s head. When the Secret Service did not wrestle it to the ground, the president took matters into his own hands, using one of them to smack the fly on the back of the other. ‘I got the sucker,’ boasted the exterminator in chief. The footage became a YouTube sensation but drew a complaint from PETA. They noted on their blog, ‘It can’t be said that President Obama wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ and sent over one of their Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catchers ‘in the event of future insect incidents.’

And we finally get to meat. If someone were to count up every animal that has lived on earth in the past fifty years and tally the harmful acts done to them, he or she might argue that no progress has been made in the treatment of animals. The reason is that the Animal Rights Revolution has been partly canceled out by another development, the Broiler Chicken Revolution. The 1928 campaign slogan ‘A chicken in every pot’ reminds us that chicken was once thought of as a luxury. The market responded by breeding meatier chickens and raising them more efficiently, if less humanely: factory-farmed chickens have spindly legs, live in cramped cages, breathe fetid air, and are handled roughly when transported and slaughtered. In the 1970s consumers became convinced that white meat was healthier than red (a trend exploited by the National Pork Board when it came up with the slogan ‘The Other White Meat’). And since poultry are small-brained creatures from a different biological class, many people have a vague sense that they are less fully conscious than mammals. The result was a massive increase in the demand for chicken, surpassing, by the early 1990s, the demand for beef. The unintended consequence was that billions more unhappy lives had to be brought into being and snuffed out to meet the demand, because it takes two hundred chickens to provide the same amount of meat as a single cow. Now, factory farming and cruel treatment of poultry and livestock go back centuries, so the baleful trend was not a backsliding of moral sensibilities or an increase in callousness. It was a stealthy creeping up of the numbers, driven by changes in economics and taste, which had gone undetected because a majority of people had always been incurious about the lives of chickens. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the animals that provide us with the other white meat.

But the tide has begun to turn. One sign is the increase in vegetarianism. I’m sure I was not the only dinner host in the 1990s to have had one of my guests announce as he sat down at the table, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. I don’t eat dead animals.’ Since that era the question ‘Do you have any food restrictions?’ has become a part of the etiquette of a dinner invitation, and participants at conference dinners can now tick a box that will replace a plate of rubber chicken with a plate of sodden eggplant. The trend was noted in 2002, when TIME magazine ran a cover story entitled: ‘Should You Be a Vegetarian? Millions of Americans are going Meatless.‘

The food industry has responded with a cornucopia of vegetarian and vegan products…The technological and verbal ingenuity is testimony both to the popularity of the new vegetarianism and to the persistence of ancient meat hunger. Those who enjoy a hearty breakfast can serve their…The ultimate replacement for meat would be animal tissue grown in culture, sometimes called meat without feet. The ever-optimistic PETA has offered a million-dollar prize to the first scientist who brings cultured chicken meat to market.

For all the visibility of vegetarianism, pure vegetarians still make up just a few percentage points of the population. It’s not easy being green. Vegetarians are surrounded by dead animals and the carnivores who love them, and meat hunger has not been bred out of them. It’s not surprising that many fall off the wagon: at any moment there are three times as many lapsed vegetarians as observant ones. Most of those who continue to call themselves vegetarians have convinced themselves that a fish is a vegetable, because they partake of fish and seafood and sometimes even chicken. Others parse their dietary restrictions like Conservadox Jews in a Chinese restaurant, allowing themselves exemptions for narrowly defined categories or for food eaten outside the home. The demographic sector with the largest proportion of vegetarians is teenage girls, and their principal motive may not be compassion for animals. Vegetarianism among teenage girls is highly correlated with eating disorders.

But is vegetarianism at least trending upward? As best we can tell, it is. In the UK the Vegetarian Society gathers up the results of every opinion poll it can find and presents the data on its information sheets. In figure 7-28 I’ve plotted the results of all the questions that ask a national sample of respondents whether they are vegetarians. The best-fitting straight line suggests that over the past two decades, vegetarianism has more than tripled, from about 2 percent of the population to about 7 percent. In the US, the Vegetarian Resource Group has commissioned polling agencies to ask Americans the more stringent question of whether they eat meat, fish, or fowl, excluding the flexitarians and those with creative Linnaean taxonomies. The numbers are smaller, but the trend is similar, more than tripling in about fifteen years.

With all the signs of increasing concern with animal welfare, it may be surprising that the percentage of vegetarians, though rising, is still so low. But it really shouldn’t be. Being a vegetarian and being concerned with animal welfare are not the same thing. Not only do vegetarians have motives other than animal welfare–health, taste, ecology, religion, driving their mothers crazy–but people who are concerned with animal welfare may wonder whether the symbolic statement of vegetarianism is the best way to reduce animal suffering. They may feel that the hamburgers they altruistically forgo are unlikely to register amid the noise in the vast national demand for meat or to lead to the sparing of the lives of any cows. And even if they did, the lives of the remaining cows would be no more pleasant. Changing the practices of the food industry is a collective action dilemma, in which individuals are tempted to shirk from private sacrifices that have marginal effects on aggregate welfare.

The increase in vegetarianism, though, is a symbolic indicator of a broader concern for animals that an be seen in other forms. People who don’t abstain from meat as a matter of principle may still eat less of it. (American consumption of meat from mammals has declined since 1980.) Restaurants and supermarkets increasingly inform their patrons about what their main course fed on and how freely it ranged while it was still on the hoof or claw. Two of the major poultry processors in the US announced in 2010 that they were switching to a more humane method of slaughtering, in which the birds are knocked out by carbon dioxide before being hung by their feet to have their throats slit. The marketers have to walk a fine line. Diners are happy to learn that their entree was humanely treated until its last breath, but they would rather not know the details of exactly how it met its end. And even the most humane technique has an image problem. As one executive said ‘I don’t want the public to say we gas our chickens.’ 

More significantly,  a majority of people support legal measures that would solve the collective action problem by approving laws that force farmers and meatpackers to treat animals more humanely. In a 2000 poll 80 percent of Britons said ‘they would like to see better welfare conditions for Britain’s farm animals. Even Americans, with their more libertarian temperament, are willing to empower the government to enforce such conditions. In a 2003 Gallup poll, a remarkable 96 percent of Americans said that animals deserve at least some protection from harm and exploitation, and only 3 percent said that they need no protection ‘since they are just animals.’ Though Americans oppose bans on hunting or on the use of animals in medical research and product testing, 62 percent support ‘strict laws concerning the treatment of farm animals’ And when given the opportunity, they translate their opinions into votes. Livestock rights have been written into the laws of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon, and in 2008, 63 percent of California voters approved the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which bans veal crates, poultry cages, and sow gestation crates that prevent the animals from moving around. There is a cliche in American politics: as California goes, so goes the country.

And perhaps as Europe goes, so goes California. The European Union has elaborate regulations on animal care “that start with the recognition that animals are sentient beings. The general aim is to ensure that animals need not endure avoidable pain or suffering and obliges the owner/keeper of animals to respect minimum welfare requirements.’ Not every country has gone so far as Switzerland, which enacted 150 pages of regulations that force dog owners to attend a four-hour ‘theory’ course and legislate how pet owners may house, feed, walk, play with, and dispose of their pets. (No more flushing live goldfish down the toilet.) But even the Swiss balked at a 2010 referendum that would have nationalized a Zurich policy that pays an ‘animal advocate’ to haul offenders into criminal court, including an angler who boasted to a local newspaper that he took ten minutes to land a large pike. (The angler was acquitted; the pike was eaten.) All this may sound like American conservatives’ worst nightmare, but they too are willing to allow the government to regulate animal welfare. In the 2003 poll, a majority of Republicans favored passing ‘strict laws’ on the treatment of farm animals.

How far will it go? People often ask me whether I think the moral momentum that carried us from the abolition of slavery and torture to civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights will culminate in the abolition of meat-eating, hunting, and animal experimentation. Will our 22nd-century descendants be as horrified that we ate meat as we are that our ancestors kept slaves?

Maybe, but maybe not.  The analogy between oppressed people and oppressed animals has been rhetorically powerful, and insofar as we are all sentient beings, it has a great deal of intellectual warrant. But the analogy is not exact–African Americans, women, children, and gay people are not broiler chickens–and I doubt that the trajectory of animal rights will be a time-lagged copy of the one for human rights. [This in itself is a form of human supremacism, the belief in dominionism.—Eds] In his book SOME WE LOVE, SOME WE HATE, SOME WE EAT, the psychologist Hal Herzog lays out the many reasons why it’s so hard for us to converge on a coherent moral philosophy to govern our dealings with animals. I’ll mention a few that have struck me.

One impediment is meat hunger and the social pleasures that go with the consumption of meat. Though traditional Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains prove that a meatless society is possible, the 3 percent market share of vegetarian diets in the US shows that we are very far from a tipping point. While gathering the data for this chapter, I was excited to stumble upon a 2004 Pew Research poll in which 13 percent of the respondents were vegetarians. Upon reading the fine print, I discovered that it was a poll of supporters of the presidential candidacy of Howard Dean, the left-wing governor of Vermont. That means that even among the crunchiest granolas in Ben-and-Jerry land, 87 percent still eat meat.

But the impediments run deeper than meat hunger. Many interactions between humans and animals will always be zero-sum. Animals eat our houses, our crops, and occasionally our children. They make us itch and bleed. They are vectors for diseases that torment and kill us. They kill each other, including endangered species that we would like to keep around. Without their participation in experiments, medicine would be frozen at its current state, and billions of living and unborn people would suffer and die for the sake of mice. An ethical calculus that gave equal weight to any harm suffered by any sentient being, allowing no chauvinism toward our own species, would prevent us from trading off the well-being of animals for an equivalent well-being of humans–for example, shooting a wild dog to save a little girl. To be sure, the interests of humans could be given some extra points by virtue of our zoological peculiarities, such as that our big brains allow us to savor our lives, reflect on our past and future, dread death, and enmesh our well-being with those of others in dense social networks. But the human life taboo, which among other things protects the lives of mentally incompetent people just because they are people, would have to go. Singer himself unflinchingly accepts this implication of a species-blind morality. But it will not take over Western morality anytime soon. 

Ultimately the move toward animal rights will bump against some of the most perplexing enigmas in the space of human thoughts, a place where moral intuitions start to break down. One is the hard problem of consciousness, namely how sentience arises from neural information processing. Descartes was certainly wrong about mammals, and I am pretty sure he was wrong about fish. But was he wrong about oysters? Slugs? Termites? Earthworms? If we wanted ethical certainty in our cooking, gardening, home repair, and recreation, we would need nothing less than a solution to this philosophical conundrum. Another paradox is that human beings are simultaneously rational, moral agents and organism that are part of nature red in tooth and claw. Something in me objects to the image of a hunter shooting a moose. But why am I not upset by the image of a grizzly bear that renders it just as dead? Why don’t I think it’s a moral imperative to tempt the bear away with all-soy meatless moose patties? Should we arrange for the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, or even genetically engineer them into herbivores? We recoil from these thought experiments because, rightly or wrongly, we assign some degree of ethical weight to what we feel is ‘natural.’ But if the natural carnivory of other species counts for something, why not the natural carnivory of Homo sapiens–particularly if we deploy our cognitive and moral faculties to minimize animals’ suffering?

These imponderables, I suspect, prevent the animal rights movement from duplicating the trajectory of the other Rights Revolutions exactly. But for now the location of the finish line is beside the point. There are many opportunities in which enormous suffering by animals can be reduced at a small cost to humans. Given the recent changes in sensibilities, it is certain that the lives of animals will continue to improve.

¶

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