Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (26 page)
After having been steadily beaten down by the informalizing process, the elites then suffered a second hit to their legitimacy. The civil rights movement had exposed a moral blot on the American establishment, and as critics shone a light on other parts of society, more stains came into view. Among them were the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the pervasiveness of poverty, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the many illiberal military interventions, particularly the Vietnam War, and later the despoliation of the environment and the oppression of women and homosexuals. The stated enemy of the Western establishment, Marxism, gained prestige as it made inroads in third-world “liberation” movements, and it was increasingly embraced by bohemians and fashionable intellectuals. Surveys of popular opinion from the 1960s through the 1990s showed a plummeting of trust in every social institution.
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The leveling of hierarchies and the harsh scrutiny of the power structure were unstoppable and in many ways desirable. But one of the side effects was to undermine the prestige of aristocratic and bourgeois lifestyles that had, over the course of several centuries, become less violent than those of the working class and underclass. Instead of values trickling down from the court, they bubbled up from the street, a process that was later called “proletarianization” and “defining deviancy down.”
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These currents pushed against the civilizing tide in ways that were celebrated in the era’s popular culture. The backsliding, to be sure, did not originate in the two prime movers of Elias’s Civilizing Process. Government control did not retreat into anarchy, as it had in the American West and in newly independent third-world countries, nor did an economy based on commerce and specialization give way to feudalism and barter. But the next step in Elias’s sequence—the psychological change toward greater self-control and interdependence—came under steady assault in the counterculture of the generation that came of age in the 1960s.
A prime target was the inner governor of civilized behavior, self-control. Spontaneity, self-expression, and a defiance of inhibitions became cardinal virtues. “If it feels good, do it,” commanded a popular lapel button.
Do It
was the title of a book by the political agitator Jerry Rubin. “Do It ’Til You’re Satisfied (Whatever It Is)” was the refrain of a popular song by BT Express. The body was elevated over the mind: Keith Richards boasted, “Rock and roll is music from the neck downwards.” And adolescence was elevated over adulthood: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” advised the agitator Abbie Hoffman; “Hope I die before I get old,” sang The Who in “My Generation.” Sanity was denigrated, and psychosis romanticized, in movies such as
A Fine Madness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
,
King of Hearts
, and
Outrageous
. And then of course there were the drugs.
Do It
was the title of a book by the political agitator Jerry Rubin. “Do It ’Til You’re Satisfied (Whatever It Is)” was the refrain of a popular song by BT Express. The body was elevated over the mind: Keith Richards boasted, “Rock and roll is music from the neck downwards.” And adolescence was elevated over adulthood: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” advised the agitator Abbie Hoffman; “Hope I die before I get old,” sang The Who in “My Generation.” Sanity was denigrated, and psychosis romanticized, in movies such as
A Fine Madness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
,
King of Hearts
, and
Outrageous
. And then of course there were the drugs.
Another target of the counterculture was the ideal that individuals should be embedded in webs of dependency that obligate them to other people in stable economies and organizations. If you wanted an image that contradicted this ideal as starkly as possible, it might be a rolling stone. Originally from a song by Muddy Waters, the image resonated with the times so well that it lent itself to
three
icons of the culture: the rock group, the magazine, and the famous song by Bob Dylan (in which he taunts an upper-class woman who has become homeless). “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” the motto of onetime Harvard psychology instructor Timothy Leary, became a watchword of the psychedelia movement. The idea of coordinating one’s interests with others in a job was treated as selling out. As Dylan put it:
three
icons of the culture: the rock group, the magazine, and the famous song by Bob Dylan (in which he taunts an upper-class woman who has become homeless). “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” the motto of onetime Harvard psychology instructor Timothy Leary, became a watchword of the psychedelia movement. The idea of coordinating one’s interests with others in a job was treated as selling out. As Dylan put it:
Well, I try my bestTo be just like I am,But everybody wants youTo be just like them.They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
Elias had written that the demands of self-control and the embedding of the self into webs of interdependence were historically reflected in the development of timekeeping devices and a consciousness of time: “This is why tendencies in the individual so often rebel against social time as represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many people come into conflict with themselves when they wish to be punctual.”
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In the opening scene of the 1969 movie
Easy Rider
, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conspicuously toss their wristwatches into the dirt before setting off on their motorcycles to find America. That same year, the first album by the band Chicago (when they were known as the Chicago Transit Authority) contained the lyrics “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can’t imagine why.” All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: “How can you be a mensch without a zager?” She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day.
119
In the opening scene of the 1969 movie
Easy Rider
, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conspicuously toss their wristwatches into the dirt before setting off on their motorcycles to find America. That same year, the first album by the band Chicago (when they were known as the Chicago Transit Authority) contained the lyrics “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can’t imagine why.” All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: “How can you be a mensch without a zager?” She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day.
Together with self-control and societal connectedness, a third ideal came under attack: marriage and family life, which had done so much to domesticate male violence in the preceding decades. The idea that a man and a woman should devote their energies to a monogamous relationship in which they raise their children in a safe environment became a target of howling ridicule. That life was now the soulless, conformist, consumerist, materialist, tickytacky, plastic, white-bread,
Ozzie and Harriet
suburban wasteland.
Ozzie and Harriet
suburban wasteland.
I don’t remember anyone in the 1960s blowing his nose into a tablecloth, but popular culture did celebrate the flouting of standards of cleanliness, propriety, and sexual continence. The hippies were popularly perceived as unwashed and malodorous, which in my experience was a calumny. But there’s no disputing that they rejected conventional standards of grooming, and an enduring image from Woodstock was of naked concertgoers frolicking in the mud. One could trace the reversal of conventions of propriety on album covers alone (figure 3–17). There was
The Who Sell Out
, with a sauce-dribbling Roger Daltrey immersed in a bath of baked beans; the Beatles’
Yesterday and Today,
with the lovable moptops adorned with chunks of raw meat and decapitated dolls (quickly recalled); the Rolling Stones’
Beggars Banquet
, with a photo of a filthy public toilet (originally censored); and
Who’s Next
, in which the four musicians are shown zipping up their flies while walking away from a urinespattered wall. The flouting of propriety extended to famous live performances, as when Jimi Hendrix pretended to copulate with his amplifier at the Monterey Pop Festival.
The Who Sell Out
, with a sauce-dribbling Roger Daltrey immersed in a bath of baked beans; the Beatles’
Yesterday and Today,
with the lovable moptops adorned with chunks of raw meat and decapitated dolls (quickly recalled); the Rolling Stones’
Beggars Banquet
, with a photo of a filthy public toilet (originally censored); and
Who’s Next
, in which the four musicians are shown zipping up their flies while walking away from a urinespattered wall. The flouting of propriety extended to famous live performances, as when Jimi Hendrix pretended to copulate with his amplifier at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Throwing away your wristwatch or bathing in baked beans is, of course, a far cry from committing actual violence. The 1960s were supposed to be the era of peace and love, and so they were in some respects. But the glorification of dissoluteness shaded into an indulgence of violence and then into violence itself. At the end of every concert, The Who famously smashed their instruments to smithereens, which could be dismissed as harmless theater were it not for the fact that drummer Keith Moon also destroyed dozens of hotel rooms, partly deafened Pete Townshend by detonating his drums onstage, beat up his wife, girlfriend, and daughter, threatened to injure the hands of a keyboardist of the Faces for dating his ex-wife, and accidentally killed his bodyguard by running over him with his car before dying himself in 1978 of the customary drug overdose.
FIGURE 3–17.
Flouting conventions of cleanliness and propriety in the 1960s
Flouting conventions of cleanliness and propriety in the 1960s
Personal violence was sometimes celebrated in song, as if it were just another form of antiestablishment protest. In 1964 Martha Reeves and the Vandellas sang “Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street.” Four years later the Rolling Stones replied that the time was right for
fighting
in the street. As part of their “satanic majesty” and “sympathy for the devil,” the Stones had a theatrical ten-minute song, “Midnight Rambler,” which acted out a rape-murder by the Boston Strangler, ending with the lines “I’m gonna smash down on your plate-glass window / Put a fist, put a fist through your steel-plated door / I’ll . . . stick . . . my . . . knife . . . right . . . down . . . your . . . throat!” The affectation of rock musicians to treat every thug and serial killer as a dashing “rebel” or “outlaw” was satirized in
This Is Spinal Tap
when the band speaks of their plans to write a rock musical based on the life of Jack the Ripper. (Chorus: “You’re a naughty one, Saucy Jack!”)
fighting
in the street. As part of their “satanic majesty” and “sympathy for the devil,” the Stones had a theatrical ten-minute song, “Midnight Rambler,” which acted out a rape-murder by the Boston Strangler, ending with the lines “I’m gonna smash down on your plate-glass window / Put a fist, put a fist through your steel-plated door / I’ll . . . stick . . . my . . . knife . . . right . . . down . . . your . . . throat!” The affectation of rock musicians to treat every thug and serial killer as a dashing “rebel” or “outlaw” was satirized in
This Is Spinal Tap
when the band speaks of their plans to write a rock musical based on the life of Jack the Ripper. (Chorus: “You’re a naughty one, Saucy Jack!”)
Less than four months after Woodstock, the Rolling Stones held a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, for which the organizers had hired the Hell’s Angels, romanticized at the time as “outlaw brothers of the counterculture,” to provide security. The atmosphere at the concert (and perhaps the 1960s) is captured in this description from Wikipedia:
A huge circus performer weighing over 350 pounds and hallucinating on LSD stripped naked and ran berserk through the crowd toward the stage, knocking guests in all directions, prompting a group of Angels to leap from the stage and club him unconscious.
[
citation needed
]
No citation is needed for what happened next, since it was captured in the documentary
Gimme Shelter
. A Hell’s Angel beat up the guitarist of Jefferson Airplane onstage, Mick Jagger ineffectually tried to calm the increasingly obstreperous mob, and a young man in the audience, apparently after pulling a gun, was stabbed to death by another Angel.
Gimme Shelter
. A Hell’s Angel beat up the guitarist of Jefferson Airplane onstage, Mick Jagger ineffectually tried to calm the increasingly obstreperous mob, and a young man in the audience, apparently after pulling a gun, was stabbed to death by another Angel.
When rock music burst onto the scene in the 1950s, politicians and clergymen vilified it for corrupting morals and encouraging lawlessness. (An amusing video reel of fulminating fogies can be seen in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.) Do we now have to—gulp—admit they were right? Can we connect the values of 1960s popular culture to the actual rise in violent crimes that accompanied them? Not directly, of course. Correlation is not causation, and a third factor, the pushback against the values of the Civilizing Process, presumably caused both the changes in popular culture and the increase in violent behavior. Also, the overwhelming majority of baby boomers committed no violence whatsoever. Still, attitudes and popular culture surely reinforce each other, and at the margins, where susceptible individuals and subcultures can be buffeted one way or another, there are plausible causal arrows from the decivilizing mindset to the facilitation of actual violence.
One of them was a self-handicapping of the criminal justice Leviathan. Though rock musicians seldom influence public policy directly, writers and intellectuals do, and they got caught up in the zeitgeist and began to rationalize the new licentiousness. Marxism made violent class conflict seem like a route to a better world. Influential thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman tried to merge Marxism or anarchism with a new interpretation of Freud that connected sexual and emotional repression to political repression and championed a release from inhibitions as part of the revolutionary struggle. Troublemakers were increasingly seen as rebels and nonconformists, or as victims of racism, poverty, and bad parenting. Graffiti vandals were now “artists,” thieves were “class warriors,” and neighborhood hooligans were “community leaders.” Many smart people, intoxicated by radical chic, did incredibly stupid things. Graduates of elite universities built bombs to be set off at army social functions, or drove getaway cars while “radicals” shot guards during armed robberies. New York intellectuals were conned by Marxobabblespouting psychopaths into lobbying for their release from prison.
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