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

But in a sweeping historical development that the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the Civilizing Process, Western Europeans, starting in the 14th century, began to resolve their disputes in less violent ways.⁶ Elias credited the change to the emergence of centralized kingdoms out of the medieval patchwork of baronies and duchies, so that the endemic feuding, brigandage, and warlording were tamed by a “king’s justice.” Then, in the 19th century, criminal justice systems were further professionalized by municipal police forces and a more deliberative court system. Over those centuries Europe also developed an infrastructure of commerce, both physical, in the form of better roads and vehicles, and financial, in the form of currency and contracts. Gentle commerce proliferated, and the zero-sum plundering of land gave way to a positive-sum trade of goods and services. People became enmeshed in networks of commercial and occupational obligations laid out in legal and bureaucratic rules. Their norms for everyday conduct shifted from a macho culture of honor, in which affronts had to be answered with violence, to a gentlemanly culture of dignity, in which status was won by displays of propriety and self-control.

The historical criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled datasets on homicide in Europe which put numbers to the narrative that Elias had published in 1939.⁷ (Homicide rates are the most reliable indicator of violent crime across different times and places because a corpse is always hard to overlook, and rates of homicide correlate with rates of other violent crimes like robbery, assault, and rape.) Eisner argues that Elias’s theory was on the right track, and not just in Europe. Whenever a government brings a frontier region under the rule of law and its people become integrated into a commercial society, rates of violence fall. In figure 12-1, I show Eisner’s data for England, the Netherlands, and Italy, with updates through 2012; the curves for other Western European countries are similar. I have added lines for parts of the Americas in which law and order came later: colonial New England, followed by a region in the “Wild West,” followed by Mexico, notorious for its violence today but far more violent in the past.

When I introduced the concept of progress I noted that no progressive trend is inexorable, and violent crime is a case in point. Starting in the 1960s, most Western democracies saw a boom in personal violence that erased a century of progress.⁸ It was most dramatic in the United States, where the rate of homicide shot up by a factor of two and a half, and where urban and political life were upended by a widespread (and partly justified) fear of crime. Yet this reversal of progress has its own lessons for the nature of progress.

During the high-crime decades, most experts counseled that nothing could be done about violent crime. It was woven into the fabric of a violent American society, they said, and could not be controlled without solving the root causes of racism, poverty, and inequality. This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core.⁹ The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data. So complex, in fact, that treating the symptoms may be the best way of dealing with the problem, because it does not require omniscience about the intricate tissue of actual causes. Indeed, by seeing what really does reduce the symptoms, one can test hypotheses about the causes, rather than just assuming them to be true.

Figure 12-1: Homicide deaths, Western Europe, US, and Mexico, 1300–2015

Sources: England, Netherlands & Belgium, Italy,1300–1994: Eisner 2003, plotted in fig. 3–3 of Pinker 2011. England, 2000–2014: UK Office for National Statistics. Italy and Netherlands, 2010–2012: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014. New England (New England, whites only, 1636–1790, and Vermont and New Hampshire, 1780–1890): Roth 2009, plotted in fig. 3–13 of Pinker 2011; 2006 and 2014 from FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Southwest US (Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico), 1850 and 1914: Roth 2009, plotted in fig. 3–16 of Pinker 2011; 2006 and 2014 from FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Mexico: Carlos Vilalta, personal communication, originally from Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía 2016 and Botello 2016, averaged over decades until 2010.