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 (32 page)

BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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A sanguinary god that hungers for indiscriminate human scapegoats is a rather crude theory of misfortune. When people outgrow it, they are still apt to look to supernatural explanations for bad things that happen to them. The difference is that their explanations become more finely tuned to their particulars. They still feel they have been targeted by supernatural forces, but the forces are wielded by a specific individual rather than a generic god. The name for such an individual is a witch.
Witchcraft is one of the most common motives for revenge among hunter-gatherer and tribal societies. In their theory of causation, there is no such thing as a natural death. Any fatality that cannot be explained by an observable cause Is explained by an unobservable one, namely sorcery.
16
It seems incredible to us that so many societies have sanctioned cold-blooded murder for screwball reasons. But certain features of human cognition, combined with certain recurring conflicts of interest, make it a bit more comprehensible. The brain has evolved to ferret out hidden powers in nature, including those that no one can see.
17
Once you start rummaging around in the realm of the unverifiable there is considerable room for creativity, and accusations of sorcery are often blended with self-serving motives. Tribal people, anthropologists have shown, often single out despised in-laws for allegations of witchcraft, a convenient pretext to have them executed. The accusations may also be used to cut a rival down to size (especially one who has boasted that he really does have magical powers), to claim to be holier than everyone else when competing in the local reputational sweepstakes, or to dispose of ornery, eccentric, or burdensome neighbors, especially ones who have no supporting relatives to avenge their deaths.
18
People may also use allegations of witchcraft to recoup some of the losses from a misfortune by holding another party liable—a bit like American accident victims who trip on a crack or spill hot coffee on themselves and sue everyone in sight. And perhaps the most potent motive is to deter adversaries from plotting against them and covering their tracks: the plotters may be able to disprove any physical connection to the attack, but they can never disprove a nonphysical connection. In Mario Puzo’s novel
The Godfather
, Vito Corleone is credited with the principle “Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” In the movie version, he spells it out to the heads of the other crime families: “I’m a superstitious man. And if some unlucky accident should befall my son, if my son is struck by a bolt of lightning, I will blame some of the people here.”
Moralistic accusations can sometimes escalate into denunciations of those who fail to make moralistic accusations, snowballing into extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
19
In the 15th century two monks published an exposé of witches called
Malleus Maleficarum
, which the historian Anthony Grafton has called “a strange amalgam of Monty Python and
Mein Kampf.
”
20
Egged on by its revelations, and inspired by the injunction in Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” French and German witch-hunters killed between 60,000 and 100,000 accused witches (85 percent of them women) during the next two centuries.
21
The executions, usually by burning at the stake, followed an ordeal of torture in which the women confessed to such crimes as eating babies, wrecking ships, destroying crops, flying on broomsticks on the Sabbath, copulating with devils, transforming their demon lovers into cats and dogs, and making ordinary men impotent by convincing them that they had lost their penises.
22
The psychology of witchcraft accusations can shade into other blood libels, such as the recurring rumors in medieval Europe that Jews poisoned the wells or killed Christian children during Passover to use their blood for matzo. Thousands of Jews were massacred in England, France, Germany, and the Low Countries during the Middle Ages, emptying entire regions of their Jewish populations.
23
Witch hunts are always vulnerable to common sense. Objectively speaking, it is impossible for a woman to fly on a broomstick or to turn a man into a cat, and these facts are not too hard to demonstrate if enough people are allowed to compare notes and question popular beliefs. Throughout the Middle Ages there were scattered clerics and politicians who pointed out the obvious, namely that there is no such thing as a witch, and so persecuting someone for witchcraft was a moral abomination. (Unfortunately, some of these skeptics ended up in the torture chambers themselves.)
24
These voices became more prominent during the Age of Reason, and included influential writers such as Erasmus, Montaigne, and Hobbes.
Some officials became infected with the scientific spirit and tested the witchcraft hypothesis for themselves. A Milanese judge killed his mule, accused his servant of committing the misdeed, and had him subjected to torture, whereupon the man confessed to the crime; he even refused to recant on the gallows for fear of being tortured again. (Today this experiment would not be approved by committees for the protection of human subjects in research.) The judge then abolished the use of torture in his court. The writer Daniel Mannix recounts another demonstration:
The Duke of Brunswick in Germany was so shocked by the methods used by Inquisitors in his duchy that he asked two famous Jesuit scholars to supervise the hearings. After a careful study the Jesuits told the Duke, “The Inquisitors are doing their duty. They are arresting only people who have been implicated by the confession of other witches.”
“Come with me to the torture chamber,” suggested the Duke. The priests followed him to where a wretched woman was being stretched on the rack. “Let me question her,” suggested the Duke. “Now woman, you are a confessed witch. I suspect these two men of being warlocks. What do you say? Another turn of the rack, executioners.”
“No, no!” screamed the woman. “You are quite right. I have often seen them at the Sabbat. They can turn themselves into goats, wolves, and other animals.”
“What else do you know about them?” demanded the Duke.
“Several witches have had children by them. One woman even had eight children whom these men fathered. The children had heads like toads and legs like spiders.”
The Duke turned to the astonished Jesuits. “Shall I put you to the torture until you confess, my friends?”
25
 
One of the Jesuits, Father Friedrich Spee, was so impressed that he wrote a book in 1631 that has been credited with ending witchcraft accusations in much of Germany. The persecution of witches began to subside during the 17th century, when several European states abolished it. The year 1716 was the last time a woman was hanged as a witch in England, and 1749 was the last year a woman was burned as a witch anywhere in Europe.
26
In most of the world, institutionalized superstitious killing, whether in human sacrifice, blood libel, or witch persecution, has succumbed to two pressures. One is intellectual: the realization that some events, even those with profound personal significance, must be attributed to impersonal physical forces and raw chance rather than the designs of other conscious beings. A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with “Love thy neighbor” and “All men are created equal,” is the one on the bumper sticker: “Shit happens.”
The other pressure is harder to explain but just as forceful: an increased valuation of human life and happiness. Why are we taken aback by the experiment in which a judge tortured his servant to prove that torture was immoral, harming one to help many? It is because we sympathize with other humans, even if we don’t know them, by virtue of the fact that they
are
human, and we parlay that sympathy into bright lines that outlaw the imposition of suffering on an identifiable human being. Even if we have not eliminated the features of human nature that tempt us to blame others for our misfortunes, we have increasingly prevented that temptation from erupting in violence. An increased valuation of the well-being of other people, we shall see, was a common thread in the abandonment of other barbaric practices during the Humanitarian Revolution.
SUPERSTITIOUS KILLING: VIOLENCE AGAINST BLASPHEMERS, HERETICS, AND APOSTATES
 
Human sacrifice and witch-burnings are just two examples of the harm that can result from people pursuing ends that involve figments of their imagination. Another may be seen in psychotics who kill in pursuit of a delusion, such as Charles Manson’s plan to hasten an apocalyptic race war, and John Hinckley’s scheme to impress Jodie Foster. But the greatest damage comes from religious beliefs that downgrade the lives of flesh-and-blood people, such as the faith that suffering in this world will be rewarded in the next, or that flying a plane into a skyscraper will earn the pilot seventy-two virgins in heaven. As we saw in chapter 1, the belief that one may escape from an eternity in hell only by accepting Jesus as a savior makes it a moral imperative to coerce people into accepting that belief and to silence anyone who might sow doubt about it.
A broader danger of unverifiable beliefs is the temptation to defend them by violent means. People become wedded to their beliefs, because the validity of those beliefs reflects on their competence, commends them as authorities, and rationalizes their mandate to lead. Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali was the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them—or worse, who credibly rebut them—they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.
The human toll of the persecution of heretics and nonbelievers in medieval and early modern Christendom beggars the imagination and belies the conventional wisdom that the 20th century was an unusually violent era. Though no one knows exactly how many people were killed in these holy slaughters, we can get a sense from numerical estimates by atrocitologists such as the political scientist R. J. Rummel in his books
Death by Government
and
Statistics of Democide
and the historian Matthew White in his
Great Big Book of Horrible Things
and his “Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness” Web site.
27
They have tried to put numbers on the death tolls of wars and massacres, including those for which conventional statistics are unavailable, by combing the available sources, assessing their credibility with sanity checks and allowances for bias, and selecting a middle value, often the geometric mean of the lowest and the highest credible figures. I’ll present Rummel’s estimates for this era, which are generally lower than White’s.
28
Between 1095 and 1208 Crusader armies were mobilized to fight a “just war” to retake Jerusalem from Muslim Turks, earning them remission from their sins and a ticket to heaven. They massacred Jewish communities on the way, and after besieging and sacking Nicea, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, they slaughtered their Muslim and Jewish populations. Rummel estimates the death toll at 1 million. The world had around 400 million people at the time, about a sixth of the number in the mid-20th century, so the death toll of the Crusader massacres as a proportion of the world population would today come out at around 6 million, equivalent to the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews.
29
In the 13th century the Cathars of southern France embraced the Albigensian heresy, according to which there are two gods, one of good and one of evil. An infuriated papacy, in collusion with the king of France, sent waves of armies to the region, which killed around 200,000 of them. To give you a sense of the armies’ tactics, after capturing the city of Bram in 1210 they took a hundred of the defeated soldiers, cut off their noses and upper lips, gouged out the eyes of all but one, and had him lead the others to the city of Cabaret to terrorize its citizens into surrendering.
30
The reason you have never met a Cathar is that the Albigensian Crusade exterminated them. Historians classify this episode as a clear instance of genocide.
31
BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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