The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (41 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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Whether or not novels in general, or epistolary novels in particular, were the critical genre in expanding empathy, the explosion of reading may have contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution by getting people into the habit of straying from their parochial vantage points. And it may have contributed in a second way: by creating a hothouse for new ideas about moral values and the social order.
THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS AND ENLIGHTENMENT HUMANISMIn David Lodge’s 1988 novel
Small World
, a professor explains why he believes that the elite university has become obsolete:
Small World
, a professor explains why he believes that the elite university has become obsolete:
Information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people.... There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years . . . : jet travel, direct-dialing telephones and the Xerox machine.... As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters—the global campus.
142
Morris Zapp had a point, but he overemphasized the technologies of the 1980s. Two decades after his words were written, they have been superseded by e-mail, digital documents, Web sites, blogs, teleconferencing, Skype, and smartphones. And two centuries
before
they were written, the technologies of the day—the sailing ship, the printed book, and the postal service—had already made information and people portable. The result was the same: a global campus, a public sphere, or as it was called in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Republic of Letters.
before
they were written, the technologies of the day—the sailing ship, the printed book, and the postal service—had already made information and people portable. The result was the same: a global campus, a public sphere, or as it was called in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Republic of Letters.
Any 21st-century reader who dips into intellectual history can’t help but be impressed by the blogosphere of the 18th. No sooner did a book appear than it would sell out, get reprinted, get translated into half a dozen languages, and spawn a flurry of commentary in pamphlets, correspondence, and additional books. Thinkers like Locke and Newton exchanged tens of thousands of letters; Voltaire alone wrote more than eighteen thousand, which now fill fifteen volumes.
143
Of course this colloquy unfolded on a scale that by today’s standards was glacial—weeks, sometimes even months—but it was rapid enough that ideas could be broached, criticized, amalgamated, refined, and brought to the attention of people in power. A signature example is Beccaria’s
On Crimes and Punishments
, which became an instant sensation and the impetus for the abolition of cruel punishments throughout Europe.
143
Of course this colloquy unfolded on a scale that by today’s standards was glacial—weeks, sometimes even months—but it was rapid enough that ideas could be broached, criticized, amalgamated, refined, and brought to the attention of people in power. A signature example is Beccaria’s
On Crimes and Punishments
, which became an instant sensation and the impetus for the abolition of cruel punishments throughout Europe.
Given enough time and purveyors, a marketplace of ideas can not only disseminate ideas but change their composition. No one is smart enough to figure out anything worthwhile from scratch. As Newton (hardly a humble man) conceded in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The human mind is adept at packaging a complicated idea into a chunk, combining it with other ideas into a more complex assembly, packaging that assembly into a still bigger contrivance, combining it with still other ideas, and so on.
144
But to do so it needs a steady supply of plug-ins and subassemblies, which can come only from a network of other minds.
144
But to do so it needs a steady supply of plug-ins and subassemblies, which can come only from a network of other minds.
A global campus increases not only the complexity of ideas but their quality. In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die. Superstitions, dogmas, and legends ought to have a shorter half-life in a Republic of Letters, together with bad ideas about how to control crime or run a country. Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt. Executing a woman for copulating with devils and turning them into cats is equally inane. And unless you are a hereditary absolutist monarch, you are unlikely to be persuaded that hereditary absolutist monarchy is the optimal form of government.
The jet airplane is the only technology of Lodge’s small world of 1988 that has not been made obsolete by the Internet, and that reminds us that sometimes there is no substitute for face-to-face communication. Airplanes can bring people together, but people who live in a city are already together, so cities have long been crucibles of ideas. Cosmopolitan cities can bring together a critical mass of diverse minds, and their nooks and crannies can offer places for mavericks to seek refuge. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were also an age of urbanization. London, Paris, and Amsterdam became intellectual bazaars, and thinkers congregated in their salons, coffeehouses, and bookstores to hash out the ideas of the day.
Amsterdam played a special role as an arena of ideas. During the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century it became a bustling port, open to the flow of goods, ideas, money, and people. It accommodated Catholics, Anabaptists, Protestants of various denominations, and Jews whose ancestors had been expelled from Portugal. It housed many book publishers, who did a brisk business printing controversial books and exporting them to the countries in which they had been banned. One Amsterdammer, Spinoza, subjected the Bible to literary analysis and developed a theory of everything that left no room for an animate God. In 1656 he was excommunicated by his Jewish community, who, with memories of the Inquisition still fresh, were nervous about making waves among the surrounding Christians.
145
It was no tragedy for Spinoza, as it might have been if he had lived in an isolated village, because he just picked up and moved to a new neighborhood and from there to another tolerant Dutch city, Leiden. In both places he was welcomed into the community of writers, thinkers, and artists. John Locke used Amsterdam as a safe haven in 1683 after he had been suspected of taking part in a plot against King Charles II in England. René Descartes also changed addresses frequently, bouncing around Holland and Sweden whenever things got too hot.
145
It was no tragedy for Spinoza, as it might have been if he had lived in an isolated village, because he just picked up and moved to a new neighborhood and from there to another tolerant Dutch city, Leiden. In both places he was welcomed into the community of writers, thinkers, and artists. John Locke used Amsterdam as a safe haven in 1683 after he had been suspected of taking part in a plot against King Charles II in England. René Descartes also changed addresses frequently, bouncing around Holland and Sweden whenever things got too hot.
The economist Edward Glaeser has credited the rise of cities with the emergence of liberal democracy.
146
Oppressive autocrats can remain in power even when their citizens despise them because of a conundrum that economists call the social dilemma or free-rider problem. In a dictatorship, the autocrat and his henchmen have a strong incentive to stay in power, but no individual citizen has an incentive to depose him, because the rebel would assume all the risks of the dictator’s reprisals while the benefits of democracy would flow diffusely to everyone in the country. The crucible of a city, however, can bring together financiers, lawyers, writers, publishers, and well-connected merchants who can collude in pubs and guild halls to challenge the current leadership, dividing the labor and diffusing the risk. Classical Athens, Renaissance Venice, revolutionary Boston and Philadelphia, and the cities of the Low Countries are examples of cities where new democracies were gestated, and today urbanization and democracy tend to go together.
146
Oppressive autocrats can remain in power even when their citizens despise them because of a conundrum that economists call the social dilemma or free-rider problem. In a dictatorship, the autocrat and his henchmen have a strong incentive to stay in power, but no individual citizen has an incentive to depose him, because the rebel would assume all the risks of the dictator’s reprisals while the benefits of democracy would flow diffusely to everyone in the country. The crucible of a city, however, can bring together financiers, lawyers, writers, publishers, and well-connected merchants who can collude in pubs and guild halls to challenge the current leadership, dividing the labor and diffusing the risk. Classical Athens, Renaissance Venice, revolutionary Boston and Philadelphia, and the cities of the Low Countries are examples of cities where new democracies were gestated, and today urbanization and democracy tend to go together.
The subversive power of the flow of information and people has never been lost on political and religious tyrants. That is why they suppress speech, writing, and association, and why democracies protect these channels in their bills of rights. Before the rise of cities and literacy, liberating ideas had a harder time being conceived and amalgamated, and so the rise of cosmopolitanism in the 17th and 18th centuries deserves part of the credit for the Humanitarian Revolution.
Bringing people and ideas together, of course, does not determine how those ideas will evolve. The rise of the Republic of Letters and the cosmopolitan city cannot, by themselves, explain why a humanitarian ethics arose in the 18th century, rather than ever-more-ingenious rationales for torture, slavery, despotism, and war.
My own view is that the two developments really are linked. When a large enough community of free, rational agents confers on how a society should run its affairs, steered by logical consistency and feedback from the world, their consensus will veer in certain directions. Just as we don’t have to explain why molecular biologists discovered that DNA has four bases—given that they were doing their biology properly, and given that DNA really does have four bases, in the long run they could hardly have discovered anything else—we may not have to explain why enlightened thinkers would eventually argue against African slavery, cruel punishments, despotic monarchs, and the execution of witches and heretics. With enough scrutiny by disinterested, rational, and informed thinkers, these practices cannot be justified indefinitely. The universe of ideas, in which one idea entails others, is itself an exogenous force, and once a community of thinkers enters that universe, they will be forced in certain directions regardless of their material surroundings. I think this process of moral discovery was a significant cause of the Humanitarian Revolution.
I am prepared to take this line of explanation a step further. The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism. (It is also sometimes called classical liberalism, though since the 1960s the word
liberalism
has acquired other meanings as well.) Here is a potted account of this philosophy—a rough but more or less coherent composite of the views of these Enlightenment thinkers.
liberalism
has acquired other meanings as well.) Here is a potted account of this philosophy—a rough but more or less coherent composite of the views of these Enlightenment thinkers.
It begins with skepticism.
147
The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good
reasons
for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty—all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.
147
The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good
reasons
for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty—all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.
Is there anything we can be certain of? Descartes gave as good an answer as any: our own consciousness. I know that I am conscious, by the very fact of wondering what I can know, and I can also know that my consciousness comprises several kinds of experience. These include the perception of an external world and of other people, and various pleasures and pains, both sensual (such as food, comfort, and sex) and spiritual (such as love, knowledge, and an appreciation of beauty).
We are also committed to reason. If we are asking a question, evaluating possible answers, and trying to persuade others of the value of those answers, then we are reasoning, and therefore have tacitly signed on to the validity of reason. We are also committed to whatever conclusions follow from the careful application of reason, such as the theorems of mathematics and logic.
Though we cannot logically
prove
anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have
confidence
in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science. The progress of science, with its dazzling success at explaining and manipulating the world, shows that knowledge of the universe is possible, albeit always probabilistic and subject to revision. Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.
prove
anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have
confidence
in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science. The progress of science, with its dazzling success at explaining and manipulating the world, shows that knowledge of the universe is possible, albeit always probabilistic and subject to revision. Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are
capable
of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
capable
of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Among the beliefs about the world of which we can be highly confident is that other people are conscious in the same way that we are. Other people are made of the same stuff, seek the same kinds of goals, and react with external signs of pleasure and pain to the kinds of events that cause pain and pleasure in each of us.
By the same reasoning, we can infer that people who are different from us in many superficial ways—their gender, their race, their culture—are like us in fundamental ways. As Shakespeare’s Shylock asks:
Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
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