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

Together with anarchy, impulsiveness, and opportunity, a major trigger of criminal violence is contraband. Entrepreneurs in illegal goods and pastimes cannot file a lawsuit when they feel they have been swindled, or call the police when someone threatens them, so they have to protect their interests with a credible threat of violence. Violent crime exploded in the United States when alcohol was prohibited in the 1920s and when crack cocaine became popular in the late 1980s, and it is rampant in Latin American and Caribbean countries in which cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are trafficked today. Drug-fueled violence remains an unsolved international problem. Perhaps the ongoing decriminalization of marijuana, and in the future other drugs, will lift these industries out of their lawless underworld. In the meantime, Abt and Winship observe that “aggressive drug enforcement yields little anti-drug benefits and generally increases violence,” while “drug courts and treatment have a long history of effectiveness.”³⁸

Any evidence-based reckoning is bound to pour cold water on programs that seemed promising in the theater of the imagination. Conspicuous by their absence from the list of what works are bold initiatives like slum clearance, gun buybacks, zero-tolerance policing, wilderness ordeals, three-strikes-and-you’re-out mandatory sentencing, police-led drug awareness classes, and “scared straight” programs in which at-risk youths are exposed to squalid prisons and badass convicts. And perhaps most disappointing to those who hold strong opinions without needing evidence are the equivocal effects of gun legislation. Neither right-to-carry laws favored by the right, nor bans and restrictions favored by the left, have been shown to make much difference—though there is much we don’t know, and political and practical impediments to finding out more.³⁹

As I sought to explain various declines of violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature I put little stock in the idea that in the past “human life was cheap” and that over time it became more precious. It seemed woolly and untestable, almost circular, so I stuck to explanations that were closer to the phenomena, such as governance and trade. After sending in the manuscript, I had an experience that gave me second thoughts. To reward myself for completing that massive undertaking I decided to replace my rusty old car, and in the course of car shopping I bought the latest issue of Car and Driver magazine. The issue opened with an article called “Safety in Numbers: Traffic Deaths Fall to an All-Time Low,” and it was illustrated with a graph that was instantly familiar: time on the x-axis, rate of death on the y-axis, and a line that snaked from the top left to the bottom right.⁴⁰ Between 1950 and 2009, the rate of death in traffic accidents fell sixfold. Staring up at me was yet another decline in violent death, but this time dominance and hatred had nothing to do with it. Some combination of forces had been working over the decades to reduce the risk of death from driving—as if, yes, life had become more precious. As society became richer, it spent more of its income, ingenuity, and moral passion on saving lives on the roads.

Later I learned that Car and Driver had been conservative. Had they plotted the dataset from its first year, 1921, it would have shown an almost twenty-four-fold reduction in the death rate. Figure 12-3 shows the full time line—though not even the full story, since for every person who died there were others who were crippled, disfigured, and racked with pain.

Figure 12-3: Motor vehicle accident deaths, US, 1921–2015

Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, accessed from http://www.informedforlife.org/demos/FCKeditor/UserFiles/File/TRAFFICFATALITIES(1899-2005).pdf, http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx, and https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812384.