Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online

Authors: Steven Pinker

Tags: #Sociology, #Psychology, #Science, #Amazon.com, #21st Century, #Crime, #Anthropology, #Social History, #Retail, #Criminology

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (9 page)

Another major change we have lived through is an intolerance of displays of force in everyday life. In earlier decades a man’s willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability.
⁵²Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy.

An incident from 1950 illustrates the change. President Harry Truman had seen an unkind review in the
Washington Post
of a performance by his daughter, Margaret, an aspiring singer. Truman wrote to the critic on White House stationery: “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below.” Though every writer can sympathize with the impulse, today a public threat to commit aggravated assault against a critic would seem buffoonish, indeed sinister, if it came from a person in power. But at the time Truman was widely admired for his paternal chivalry.

And if you recognize the expressions “ninety-seven-pound weakling” and “get sand kicked in your face,” you are probably familiar with the iconic ads for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding program, which ran in magazines and comic books starting in the 1940s. In the typical storyline, an ectomorph is assaulted on the beach in front of his girlfriend. He skulks home, kicks a chair, gambles a ten-cent stamp, receives instructions for an exercise program, and returns to the beach to wreak revenge on his assailant, restoring his standing with the beaming young woman (figure 1–1).

When it came to the product, Atlas was ahead of his time: the popularity of bodybuilding soared in the 1980s. But when it came to marketing, he belonged to a different era. Today the ads for gyms and exercise paraphernalia don’t feature the use of fisticuffs to restore manly honor. The imagery is narcissistic, almost homoerotic. Bulging pectorals and rippling abdominals are shown in arty close-up for both sexes to admire. The advantage they promise is in beauty, not might.

FIGURE 1–1.
Everyday violence in a bodybuilding ad, 1940s

Even more revolutionary than the scorn for violence between men is the scorn for violence against women. Many baby boomers are nostalgic for
The Honeymooners
, a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Gleason as a burly bus driver whose get-rich-quick schemes are ridiculed by his sensible wife, Alice. In one of the show’s recurring laugh lines, an enraged Ralph shakes his fist at her and bellows, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days . . . POW, right in the kisser!” (Or sometimes “Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!”) Alice always laughs it off, not because she has contempt for a wife-beater but because she knows that Ralph is not man enough to do it. Nowadays our sensitivity to violence against women makes this kind of comedy in a mainstream television program unthinkable. Or consider the
Life
magazine ad from 1952 in figure 1–2.

Today this ad’s playful, eroticized treatment of domestic violence would put it beyond the pale of the printable. It was by no means unique. A wife is also spanked in a 1950s ad for Van Heusen shirts, and a 1953 ad for Pitney-Bowes postage meters shows an exasperated boss screaming at a stubborn secretary with the caption “Is it always illegal to kill a woman?”
⁵³

FIGURE 1–2.
Domestic violence in a coffee ad, 1952

And then there’s the longest-running musical,
The Fantasticks
, with its Gilbert-and-Sullivan-like ditty “It Depends on What You Pay” (whose lyrics were based on a 1905 translation of Edmond Rostand’s play
Les Romanesques
)
.
Two men plot a kidnapping in which the son of one will rescue the daughter of the other:

You can get the rape emphatic.
You can get the rape polite.
You can get the rape with Indians:
A very charming sight.
You can get the rape on horseback;
They’ll all say it’s new and gay.
So you see the sort of rape
Depends on what you pay.

Though the word
rape
referred to abduction rather than sexual assault, between the opening of the play in 1960 and the end of its run in 2002 sensibilities about rape changed. As the librettist Tom Jones (no relation to the Welsh singer) explained to me:

As time went on, I began to feel anxious about the word. Slowly, ever so slowly, things began to register on me. Headlines in the papers. Accounts of brutal gang rapes. And of “date rapes” too. I began to think: “this isn’t funny.” True, we weren’t talking about “real rape,” but there is no doubt that part of the laughter came from the shock value of using the word in this comic manner.

In the early 1970s, the producer of the play refused Jones’s request to rewrite the lyrics but allowed him to add an introduction to the song explaining the intended meaning of the word and to reduce the number of repetitions of it. After the play closed in 2002 Jones rewrote the lyrics from scratch for a 2006 restaging, and he has legally ensured that only the new version may be performed in any production of
The Fantasticks
anywhere in the world.
⁵⁴

Until recently, children too were legitimate targets of violence. Parents not only spanked their children—a punishment that today has been outlawed in many countries—but commonly used a weapon like a hairbrush or paddle, or exposed the child’s buttocks to increase the pain and humiliation. In a sequence that was common in children’s stories through the 1950s, a mother warned a naughty child, “Wait till your father gets home,” whereupon the stronger parent would remove his belt and use it to flog the child. Other commonly depicted ways of punishing children with physical pain included sending them to bed without dinner and washing their mouths out with soap. Children who were left to the mercy of unrelated adults were treated even more brutally. Within recent memory, many schoolchildren were disciplined in ways that today would be classified as “torture” and that would put their teachers in jail.
⁵⁵

People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we are apt to forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago, and to be blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out. In later chapters I will present numbers that show that the 1960s and 1970s were a vastly more brutal and menacing time than the one in which we live. But for now, in keeping with the spirit of this chapter, I will make the case impressionistically.

I graduated from university in 1976. Like most college alumni, I have no memory of the commencement speech that sent me into the world of adulthood. This gives me license to invent one today. Imagine the following forecast from an expert on the state of the world in the mid-1970s.

Mr. Principal, members of the faculty, family, friends, and Class of 1976. Now is a time of great challenges. But it is also a time of great opportunities. As you embark on your lives as educated men and women, I call on you to give something back to your community, to work for a brighter future, and to try to make the world a better place.
Now that we have that out of the way, I have something more interesting to say to you. I want to share my vision of what the world will be like at the time of your thirty-fifth reunion. The calendar will have rolled over into a new millennium, bringing you a world that is beyond your imagination. I am not referring to the advance of technology, though it will have effects you can barely conceive. I am referring to the advance of peace and human security, which you will find even harder to conceive.
To be sure, the world of 2011 will still be a dangerous place. During the next thirty-five years there will be wars, as there are today, and there will be genocides, as there are today, some of them in places no one would have predicted. Nuclear weapons will still be a threat. Some of the violent regions of the world will continue to be violent. But superimposed on these constants will be unfathomable changes.
First and foremost, the nightmare that has darkened your lives since your early memories of cowering in fallout shelters, a nuclear doomsday in a third world war, will come to an end. In a decade the Soviet Union will declare peace with the West, and the Cold War will be over without a shot being fired. China will also fall off the radar as a military threat; indeed, it will become our major trading partner. During the next thirty-five years no nuclear weapon will be used against an enemy. In fact, there will be no wars between major nations at all. The peace in Western Europe will continue indefinitely, and within five years the incessant warring in East Asia will give way to a long peace there as well.
There is more good news. East Germany will open its border, and joyful students will sledgehammer the Berlin Wall to smithereens. The Iron Curtain will vanish, and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe will become liberal democracies free of Soviet domination. The Soviet Union will not only abandon totalitarian communism but will voluntarily go out of existence. The republics that Russia has occupied for decades and centuries will become independent states, many of them democratic. In most of the countries this will happen with not a drop of blood being spilled.
Fascism too will vanish from Europe, then from much of the rest of the world. Portugal, Spain, and Greece will become liberal democracies. So will Taiwan, South Korea, and most of South and Central America. The generalissimos, the colonels, the juntas, the banana republics, and the annual military coups will depart the stage in most of the developed world.
The Middle East also has surprises in store. You have just lived through the fifth war between Israel and Arab states in twenty-five years. These wars have killed fifty thousand people and recently threatened to drag the superpowers into a nuclear confrontation. But within three years the president of Egypt will hug the prime minister of Israel in the Knesset, and they will sign a peace treaty that will last into the indefinite future. Jordan too will make a lasting peace with Israel. Syria will engage in sporadic peace talks with Israel, and the two countries will not go to war.
In South Africa, the apartheid regime will be dismantled, and the white minority will cede power to the black majority. This will happen with no civil war, no bloodbath, no violent recriminations against the former oppressors.
Many of these developments will be the results of long and courageous struggles. But some of them will just happen, catching everyone by surprise. Perhaps some of you will try to figure out how it all happened. I congratulate you on your accomplishments and wish you success and satisfaction in the years ahead.

How would the audience have reacted to this outburst of optimism? Those who were listening would have broken out in snickers and shared a suspicion that the speaker was still tripping on the brown acid from Woodstock. Yet in every case the optimist would have been right.

No sightseer can understand a country from a city-a-day tour, and I don’t expect this skitter across the centuries to have convinced you that the past was more violent than the present. Now that you’re back home, you are surely filled with questions. Don’t we still torture people? Wasn’t the 20th century the bloodiest in history? Haven’t new forms of war replaced the old ones? Aren’t we living in the Age of Terror? Didn’t they say that war was obsolete in 1910? What about all the chickens in factory farms? And couldn’t nuclear terrorists start a major war tomorrow?

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