The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (25 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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Another biological contribution to frontier violence was neurobiological rather than sociobiological, namely the ubiquity of liquor. Alcohol interferes with synaptic transmission throughout the cerebrum, especially in the prefrontal cortex (see figure 8–3), the region responsible for self-control. An inebriated brain is less inhibited sexually, verbally, and physically, giving us idioms like
beer goggles
,
roaring drunk
, and
Dutch courage
. Many studies have shown that people with a tendency toward violence are more likely to act on it when they are under the influence of alcohol.
105
beer goggles
,
roaring drunk
, and
Dutch courage
. Many studies have shown that people with a tendency toward violence are more likely to act on it when they are under the influence of alcohol.
105
The West was eventually tamed not just by flinty-eyed marshals and hanging judges but by an influx of women.
106
The Hollywood westerns’ “prim pretty schoolteacher[s] arriving in Roaring Gulch” captures a historical reality. Nature abhors a lopsided sex ratio, and women in eastern cities and farms eventually flowed westward along the sexual concentration gradient. Widows, spinsters, and young single women sought their fortunes in the marriage market, encouraged by the lonely men themselves and by municipal and commercial officials who became increasingly exasperated by the degeneracy of their western hellholes. As the women arrived, they used their bargaining position to transform the West into an environment better suited to their interests. They insisted that the men abandon their brawling and boozing for marriage and family life, encouraged the building of schools and churches, and shut down saloons, brothels, gambling dens, and other rivals for the men’s attention. Churches, with their coed membership, Sunday morning discipline, and glorification of norms on temperance, added institutional muscle to the women’s civilizing offensive. Today we guffaw at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (with its ax-wielding tavern terrorist Carrie Nation) and at the Salvation Army, whose anthem, according to the satire, includes the lines “We never eat cookies ‘cause cookies have yeast / And one little bite turns a man to a beast.” But the early feminists of the temperance movement were responding to the very real catastrophe of alcohol-fueled bloodbaths in maledominated enclaves.
106
The Hollywood westerns’ “prim pretty schoolteacher[s] arriving in Roaring Gulch” captures a historical reality. Nature abhors a lopsided sex ratio, and women in eastern cities and farms eventually flowed westward along the sexual concentration gradient. Widows, spinsters, and young single women sought their fortunes in the marriage market, encouraged by the lonely men themselves and by municipal and commercial officials who became increasingly exasperated by the degeneracy of their western hellholes. As the women arrived, they used their bargaining position to transform the West into an environment better suited to their interests. They insisted that the men abandon their brawling and boozing for marriage and family life, encouraged the building of schools and churches, and shut down saloons, brothels, gambling dens, and other rivals for the men’s attention. Churches, with their coed membership, Sunday morning discipline, and glorification of norms on temperance, added institutional muscle to the women’s civilizing offensive. Today we guffaw at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (with its ax-wielding tavern terrorist Carrie Nation) and at the Salvation Army, whose anthem, according to the satire, includes the lines “We never eat cookies ‘cause cookies have yeast / And one little bite turns a man to a beast.” But the early feminists of the temperance movement were responding to the very real catastrophe of alcohol-fueled bloodbaths in maledominated enclaves.
The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology. A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes. This difference alone cannot tell us whether marriage keeps men away from crime or career criminals are less likely to get married, but the sociologists Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer have shown that marriage really does seem to be a pacifying cause. When they held constant all the factors that
typically
push men into marriage, they found that
actually
getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter.
107
The causal pathway has been pithily explained by Johnny Cash: Because you’re mine, I walk the line.
typically
push men into marriage, they found that
actually
getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter.
107
The causal pathway has been pithily explained by Johnny Cash: Because you’re mine, I walk the line.
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, evangelical 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.
DECIVILIZATION IN THE 1960sBut when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out . . . in.
—John Lennon, “Revolution 1”
For all the lags and mismatches between the historical trajectories of the United States and Europe, they did undergo one trend in synchrony: their rates of violence did a U-turn in the 1960s.
108
Figures 3–1 through 3–4 show that European countries underwent a bounce in homicide rates that brought them back to levels they had said goodbye to a century before. And figure 3–10 shows that in the 1960s the homicide rate in America went through the roof. After a three-decade free fall that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Americans multiplied their homicide rate by more than two and a half, from a low of 4.0 in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980.
109
The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery, and theft, and lasted (with ups and downs) for three decades. The cities got particularly dangerous, especially New York, which became a symbol of the new criminality. Though the surge in violence affected all the races and both genders, it was most dramatic among black men, whose annual homicide rate had shot up by the mid-1980s to 72 per 100,000.
110
108
Figures 3–1 through 3–4 show that European countries underwent a bounce in homicide rates that brought them back to levels they had said goodbye to a century before. And figure 3–10 shows that in the 1960s the homicide rate in America went through the roof. After a three-decade free fall that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Americans multiplied their homicide rate by more than two and a half, from a low of 4.0 in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980.
109
The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery, and theft, and lasted (with ups and downs) for three decades. The cities got particularly dangerous, especially New York, which became a symbol of the new criminality. Though the surge in violence affected all the races and both genders, it was most dramatic among black men, whose annual homicide rate had shot up by the mid-1980s to 72 per 100,000.
110
The flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s reshaped American culture, the political scene, and everyday life. Mugger jokes became a staple of comedians, with mentions of Central Park getting an instant laugh as a well-known death trap. New Yorkers imprisoned themselves in their apartments with batteries of latches and deadbolts, including the popular “police lock,” a steel bar with one end anchored in the floor and the other propped up against the door. The section of downtown Boston not far from where I now live was called the Combat Zone because of its endemic muggings and stabbings. Urbanites quit other American cities in droves, leaving burned-out cores surrounded by rings of suburbs, exurbs, and gated communities. Books, movies, and television series used intractable urban violence as their backdrop, including
Little Murders, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, Fort Apache the Bronx, Hill Street Blues
, and
Bonfire of the Vanities
. Women enrolled in self-defense courses to learn how to walk with a defiant gait, to use their keys, pencils, and spike heels as weapons, and to execute karate chops or jujitsu throws to overpower an attacker, role-played by a volunteer in a Michelinman-tire suit. Red-bereted Guardian Angels patrolled the parks and the transit system, and in 1984 Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car. A fear of crime helped elect decades of conservative politicians, including Richard Nixon in 1968 with his “Law and Order” platform (overshadowing the Vietnam War as a campaign issue), George H. W. Bush in 1988 with his insinuation that Michael Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, had approved a prison furlough program that had released a rapist, and many senators and congressmen who promised to “get tough on crime.” Though the popular reaction was overblown—far more people are killed every year in car accidents than in homicides, especially among those who don’t get into arguments with young men in bars—the sense that violent crime had multiplied was not a figment of their imaginations.
Little Murders, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, Fort Apache the Bronx, Hill Street Blues
, and
Bonfire of the Vanities
. Women enrolled in self-defense courses to learn how to walk with a defiant gait, to use their keys, pencils, and spike heels as weapons, and to execute karate chops or jujitsu throws to overpower an attacker, role-played by a volunteer in a Michelinman-tire suit. Red-bereted Guardian Angels patrolled the parks and the transit system, and in 1984 Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car. A fear of crime helped elect decades of conservative politicians, including Richard Nixon in 1968 with his “Law and Order” platform (overshadowing the Vietnam War as a campaign issue), George H. W. Bush in 1988 with his insinuation that Michael Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, had approved a prison furlough program that had released a rapist, and many senators and congressmen who promised to “get tough on crime.” Though the popular reaction was overblown—far more people are killed every year in car accidents than in homicides, especially among those who don’t get into arguments with young men in bars—the sense that violent crime had multiplied was not a figment of their imaginations.
The rebounding of violence in the 1960s defied every expectation. The decade was a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs, not to mention medical advances that made victims more likely to survive being shot or knifed. Social theorists in 1962 would have happily bet that these fortunate conditions would lead to a continuing era of low crime. And they would have lost their shirts.
Why did the Western world embark on a three-decade binge of crime from which it has never fully recovered? This is one of several local reversals of the long-term decline of violence that I will examine in this book. If the analysis is on the right track, then the historical changes I have been invoking to explain the decline should have gone into reverse at the time of the surges.
An obvious place to look is demographics. The 1940s and 1950s, when crime rates hugged the floor, were the great age of marriage. Americans got married in numbers not seen before or since, which removed men from the streets and planted them in suburbs.
111
One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1970 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent.
112
Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent too.
111
One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1970 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent.
112
Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent too.
Many criminologists have concluded that the 1960s crime surge cannot be explained by the usual socioeconomic variables but was caused in large part by a change in cultural norms. Of course, to escape the logical circle in which people are said to be violent because they live in a violent culture, it’s necessary to identify an exogenous cause for the cultural change. The political scientist James Q. Wilson has argued that demographics were an important trigger after all, not because of the absolute numbers of young people but because of their relative numbers. He makes the point by commenting on a quotation from the demographer Norman Ryder:
“There is a perennial invasion of barbarians who must somehow be civilized and turned into contributors to fulfillment of the various functions requisite to societal survival.” That “invasion” is the coming of age of a new generation of young people. Every society copes with this enormous socialization process more or less successfully, but occasionally that process is literally swamped by a quantitative discontinuity in the number of persons involved.... In 1950 and still in 1960 the “invading army” (those aged fourteen to twenty-four) were outnumbered three to one by the size of the “defending army” (those aged twenty-five to sixty-four). By 1970 the ranks of the former had grown so fast that they were only outnumbered two to one by the latter, a state of affairs that had not existed since 1910.
113
Subsequent analyses showed that this explanation is not, by itself, satisfactory. Age cohorts that are larger than their predecessors do not, in general, commit more crimes.
114
But I think Wilson was on to something when he linked the 1960s crime boom to a kind of intergenerational decivilizing process. In many ways the new generation tried to push back against the eightcentury movement described by Norbert Elias.
114
But I think Wilson was on to something when he linked the 1960s crime boom to a kind of intergenerational decivilizing process. In many ways the new generation tried to push back against the eightcentury movement described by Norbert Elias.
The baby boomers were unusual (I know, we baby boomers are always saying we’re unusual) in sharing an emboldening sense of solidarity, as if their generation were an ethnic group or a nation. (A decade later it was pretentiously referred to as “Woodstock Nation.”) Not only did they outnumber the older generation, but thanks to new electronic media, they felt the strength of their numbers. The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up with television. And television, especially in the three-network era, allowed them to know that other baby boomers were sharing their experiences, and to know that the others knew that they knew. This common knowledge, as economists and logicians call it, gave rise to a horizontal web of solidarity that cut across the vertical ties to parents and authorities that had formerly isolated young people from one another and forced them to kowtow to their elders.
115
Much like a disaffected population that feels its strength only when it assembles at a rally, baby boomers saw other young people like themselves in the audience of
The Ed Sullivan Show
grooving on the Rolling Stones and knew that every other young person in America was grooving at the same time, and knew that the others knew that they knew.
115
Much like a disaffected population that feels its strength only when it assembles at a rally, baby boomers saw other young people like themselves in the audience of
The Ed Sullivan Show
grooving on the Rolling Stones and knew that every other young person in America was grooving at the same time, and knew that the others knew that they knew.
The baby boomers were bonded by another new technology of solidarity, first marketed by an obscure Japanese company called Sony: the transistor radio. The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios. I can still remember the thrill of tuning in to signals from New York radio stations bouncing off the late-night ionosphere into my bedroom in Montreal, listening to Motown and Dylan and the British invasion and psychedelia and feeling that something was happening here, but Mr. Jones didn’t know what it was.
A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds 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. The informalization affected the way people dressed, as they abandoned hats, gloves, ties, and dresses for casual sportswear. It affected the language, as people started to address their friends with first names instead of
Mr.
and
Mrs.
and
Miss
. And it could be seen in countless other ways in which speech and demeanor became less mannered and more spontaneous.
116
The stuffy high-society lady, like the Margaret Dumont character in the Marx Brothers movies, became a target of ridicule rather than emulation.
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. The informalization affected the way people dressed, as they abandoned hats, gloves, ties, and dresses for casual sportswear. It affected the language, as people started to address their friends with first names instead of
Mr.
and
Mrs.
and
Miss
. And it could be seen in countless other ways in which speech and demeanor became less mannered and more spontaneous.
116
The stuffy high-society lady, like the Margaret Dumont character in the Marx Brothers movies, became a target of ridicule rather than emulation.
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