The Better Angels of Our Nature

Turn on a news channel on any given day, and you are likely to hear some truly horrific stories: a drive-by shooting that struck an innocent child, a terrorist bombing that killed dozens of civilians, or perhaps some poor African nation that has been ravaged by civil war. Given this portrayal of our modern world, it is understandable why many people believe that we are living in a particularly violent era. On the other hand, we often reminisce of an idyllic past in which life was simple, front doors were unlocked, and mothers could allow their children to roam around the neighborhood alone without fear of abduction. But is this an accurate description of history? Is the present really that awful relative to the past?

Oh, how short our historical memories are. The truth is that we are living in arguably the most peaceful time of humanity’s existence. Many of you are probably hesitant to accept this claim, given all of the violence you hear about in the news. Indeed, there seems to be strong resistance, even hostility, to the idea that things are getting better, as if recognizing that fact would be an insult to all those who are victims of violence in today’s world. Keep in mind, however, that I am not arguing that the present is especially peaceful, only that it is not as violent as the past. Still, I think it is important to understand and appreciate just how much progress our species has made.

First, I would like to point out that assessing the state of the world based on the number of violent news stories you hear leads to a distorted image. We tend to estimate the probabilities of things according to how frequently we hear of them, which can be very different from how frequently they actually occur. This is why many of us are afraid of terrorist attacks but not pools or bathtubs despite the fact that far more people drown to death than are killed by terrorists. The media can lead us to hold patently irrational beliefs just by sensationalizing a few rare stories that make for good coverage. And today the population is so large that there will essentially always be enough violent stories to fill the news hour no matter how peaceful we become.

The only accurate method to answer the question of whether things have gotten better or worse is to look at the big picture, not just isolated incidents. We need to set aside our biases and seek the truth using data, numbers, and graphs. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University, has taken up the challenge in his book The Better Angels of our Nature, published in 2011. Pinker’s book is a scholarly masterpiece: a thoroughly researched, in-depth evaluation of the evidence on this topic which establishes that the long term trend in violence undeniably points downward. I will present an overview of this book to convince you that the modern world, despite all of its failures, is not as bad as it used to be. For the sake of brevity, I will not discuss the reasons why violence declined in various instances, although Pinker does present some compelling hypotheses, and I encourage anyone who is interested to read the book.

Pinker begins by examining violence in prehistoric peoples and hunter gatherers. Using evidence from 21 archaeological sites, researchers averaged the percentage of deaths due to warfare in each of these tribal groups and came up with about 15 percent. Compare this to the 20^th century, the so-called “bloody century.” Even if we bend over backwards and include indirect war-related deaths from famine and disease, only about 3 percent of 20^th century deaths were due to warfare. And today, you would have a difficult time manipulating the numbers to come up with anything close to 1 percent. Homicide rates (which usually correlate with rates of other violent crimes) have plummeted as well, from hundreds per 100,000 people per year in pre-state societies to the double digit rates in medieval Europe to a worldwide average of 8.8 as of 2000, including rates lower than 1 in some Western European nations.

During what Pinker refers to as the Humanitarian Revolution, practices that were once commonplace became unthinkable. Human sacrifice, which was practiced among traditional Hawaiians, Scandinavians, Incas, Celts, and especially the Aztecs, who sacrificed around 1.2 million people from 1440 to 1524, is today nearly unanimously considered repulsive. During the Middle Ages, people were routinely tortured to death for imaginary crimes such as witchcraft, blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy using methods such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, being sawed in half, impalement, and disembowelment. Fortunately, modern people have largely abandoned these superstitious laws and would be horrified at the thought of inflicting such grotesque suffering on another person. Even for secular crimes, judicial torture and capital punishment have been in decline. Only one European country, Belarus, still performs executions, and even in those countries where it is still legal, such as the United States, the execution rate has plummeted, and the methods used have become far more humane. Slavery, which for most of civilization has been the norm, has gradually been abolished worldwide, and even debt bondage is no longer considered to be a legitimate use of legal coercion.

The decline in violence is evident even in much smaller timescales. In the decades since the end of World War II, we have seen unprecedented spans of peace, which Pinker calls “The Long Peace.” Perhaps you think it is just too convenient to begin looking at data right after the deadliest war in human history, but actually if deaths are measured as a proportion of world population as opposed to absolute numbers, World War II is dwarfed in destructiveness by several previous atrocities. Number one on that list is the An Lushan Revolt, an eight-year rebellion in 8^th century China which killed 36 million people, a sixth of the world’s population at that time. (It is very difficult to count casualties from battles in the distant past, so of course accept this information with caution.) Now, in the decades since World War II, some spectacular progress has been made. None of the major powers have gone to war against each other since the Korean War, which pit China against the United States, ended in 1953. No interstate wars have been fought in Europe or between any of the major developed countries (the 44 with the highest per-capita income) since a brief Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Consider the fact that up until that point, European states had started an average of 2 armed conflicts per year since 1400, and any claim that we are simply in the middle of a “lucky streak” sounds preposterous. Also, the last time any country has conquered even parts of another country was 1975. Indeed, Pinker notes, “…two entire categories of war-the imperial war to acquire colonies, and the colonial war to keep them-no longer exist.”

Still, you might reasonably be wondering about other types of war, such as civil wars or wars involving poor countries. It turns out that even these types of war, as well as genocides, terrorism, and repression by autocratic governments, are all in decline: the “New Peace”. It is this claim that I suspect will be most difficult for people to accept. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the number of conflicts per year is actually greater than it used to be; however, the average destructiveness of each conflict has decreased by an even larger factor. Consider, for example, that the recent War in Iraq killed around 5,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis whereas the Vietnam War killed around 58,000 Americans and perhaps more than a million Vietnamese. In fact, since the late 1940s, the annual number of reported battle deaths has fallen by over 90%, from around half a million per year to around 30,000 per year in the early 2000s. Genocides and democides (murder by a government) have also become increasingly less deadly. Even recent examples such as Darfur and Rwanda merely represent spikes in a trend that is clearly downward; we have not seen atrocities of the same scale as the ones in Bangladesh or Cambodia since they occurred in the 1970s. The trend in terrorism is not quite as robust (there have been many ups and downs), but overall it appears that the last couple decades have seen terrorism in decline despite 9/11. Of course, deaths from terrorism have always been staggeringly low, so this is hardly a factor in the overall decline in violence anyways.

We have also witnessed an unprecedented drop in violence against minorities and even groups that cannot defend themselves. Throughout the 20^th century and continuing to the present day, groups that historically have been discriminated against and intimidated have protested (or others have protested on their behalf) and demanded fair treatment and equality, which Pinker refers to as the “Rights Revolutions.” Lynching, hate crimes, and racism in general against African-Americans are no longer tolerated in today’s society thanks to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. Women too have led a successful movement to oppose rape, battering, and domestic violence, as well as combat stereotypes that women belong in the home and not the workplace. As of 2008, the incidence of rape in the United States was just 20% of its 1973 level. The treatment of babies and children has improved as well. Infanticide, which has been common throughout human history, is today viewed as abhorrent. Public approval for spanking and corporal punishment in schools has dwindled, and physical and sexual abuse against children continues to fall. And what about the claim that children can no longer safely play outside unsupervised? In fact, the rate of child abductions in the US has halved since the 1990s. The gay rights movement is quickly gaining traction as the tolerant younger generations replace the bigoted older ones. Public opinion has been rapidly shifting, and complete acceptance of homosexuals is steadily becoming the norm. And finally, we come to animal rights. In this section, Pinker describes what he considers to be the worst thing he has ever done. As an undergraduate research assistant in an animal behavior lab, he tortured a rat to death. Fortunately, the experiment Pinker was conducting would not be approved by the ethics committees which are required to approve animal experimentation today. Animals on factory farms have benefited from stricter laws regarding cruel confinement practices, and the percentage of people who are vegetarian is slowly but surely on the rise. The circle of empathy has been expanding, and I am confident that one day it will include all sentient beings, for in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., adapted from the 19^th century minister Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The idea that violence has declined is a controversial one, and I suspect that many of you are itching to raise objections. But before you do, I urge you to consider whether your objection even makes sense. I am well aware, for example, that imaginary crimes such as apostasy and even witchcraft are still punishable by death in some parts of the world. But this is beside the point. Remember, my hypothesis is that violence has declined. As long as violence has declined in one part of the world (usually the West), without an equivalent or greater increase in the rest of the world (and there is no law of conservation of violence to suggest that it has), then it is still true to say that overall, violence has declined. I am also aware that slavery, despite being technically illegal everywhere, has not been obliterated from the face of the earth. But please, modern day human trafficking, as terrible as it is, is nothing like the horrors of the African slave trade. Even if you can think of appalling modern examples of violence, you must consider whether they are anything new. In most cases you will discover that that type of violence has been occurring for a long time, often at a greater degree of severity in the past than in the present, and therefore does not refute the hypothesis that violence has declined. One legitimate objection that I can think of is that despite an increase in vegetarianism, the absolute number of animals on factory farms has exploded in the last century, and perhaps this is enough to outweigh the decrease in other types of violence. However, I think it is important to point out that this increase in violence can be attributed to a practical change in circumstances, namely our increased wealth and population, rather than an actual reversal of moral progress. So, if you like, you can modify the hypothesis to say that throughout history, humans have made tremendous moral progress.

I can understand why many people might view me as a starry eyed youth who, in his naiveté, still thinks that he can change the world. Well, I've got news for all you cynics out there: the world is changing, and it’s changing decisively for the better. And it goes beyond a mere reduction in violence. The percentage of people living in extreme poverty (as defined by the World Bank) has more than halved in the last 30 years, from 42.9 in 1981 to 19.2 in 2008. And advances in technology have allowed us to live longer, healthier lives as well as retrieve unprecedented amounts of information almost instantaneously. Of course, we shouldn't be lulled into a false sense of security. The world is far from devoid of problems. There are still entire regions of the globe where the culture remains stuck in a state of medieval, primitive ignorance, and our treatment of animals is nothing short of barbaric. Even one war, one attack, or one murder is still one too many. So we've still got a long way to go. But that doesn't mean we don’t have reason to celebrate. So go outside, bask in the sunlight, feel the cool breeze rushing past you, and smile because today is the best day that’s ever happened.