Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The ideas trickled down from a thin stratum of philosophers and intellectuals to the educated upper classes, particularly liberal professionals like doctors, lawyers, writers, and journalists. Abolition was soon folded into a portfolio of other progressive causes, including mandatory education, universal suffrage, and workers’ rights. It was also sacralized under the halo of “human rights” and held out as a symbol of “the kind of society we choose to live in and the kind of people we choose to be.” The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy. The penal codes of their countries were drafted by committees of renowned scholars, passed into law by legislators who thought of themselves as a natural aristocracy, and implemented by appointed judges who were lifelong civil servants. It was only after a couple of decades had elapsed and people saw that their country had not fallen into chaos—at which point it would have taken a concerted effort to reintroduce capital punishment—that the populace came around to seeing it as unnecessary.

But the United States, for better or worse, is closer to having government by the people for the people. Other than for a few federal crimes like terrorism and treason, the death penalty is decided upon by individual states, voted on by legislators who are close to their constituents, and in many states sought and approved by prosecutors and judges who have to stand for reelection. Southern states have a longstanding culture of honor, with its ethos of justified retaliation, and not surprisingly, American executions are concentrated in a handful of Southern states, mainly Texas, Georgia, and Missouri—indeed, in a handful of counties in those states.³⁷

Yet the United States, too, has been swept by the historical current, and capital punishment is on the way out despite its continuing popular appeal (with 61 percent in favor in 2015).³⁸ Seven states have repealed the death penalty in the past decade, an additional sixteen have moratoria, and thirty have not executed anyone in five years. Even Texas executed only seven prisoners in 2016, compared with forty in 2000. Figure 14-4 shows the steady decline of the use of the death penalty in the United States, with what may be a final slide to zero visible in the rightmost segment. And true to the pattern in Europe, as the practice becomes obsolescent, public opinion straggles behind: in 2016, popular support for the death penalty slipped just below 50 percent for the first time in almost fifty years.³⁹

Figure 14-4: Executions, US, 1780–2016

Sources: Death Penalty Information Center 2017. Population estimates from US Census Bureau 2017. The arrow points to 2010, the last year plotted in fig. 4–4 of Pinker 2011.

How can the United States be doing away with capital punishment almost despite itself? Here we see another path along which moral progress can take place. Though the American political system is more populist than those of its Western peers, it still falls short of being a direct participatory democracy like ancient Athens (which, pointedly, put Socrates to death). With the historical expansion of sympathy and reason, even the staunchest fans of capital punishment have lost their stomach for lynch mobs, hanging judges, and rowdy public executions, and insist that the practice be carried out with a modicum of dignity and care. That requires an intricate apparatus of death and a team of mechanics to run and repair it. As the machine wears out and the mechanics refuse to maintain it, it becomes increasingly unwieldy and invites being scrapped.⁴⁰ The American death penalty is not so much being abolished as falling apart, piece by piece.