Nearly everyone in Norway owns a cell phone, so when the shooting started on the island of Utøya, at around five o’clock in the afternoon on July 22nd, calls immediately went out. Panicked teen-agers attending a Labor Party summer camp on the island dialled the Norwegian equivalent of 911 only to find themselves cut off. Operators were reportedly trying to keep the lines open for calls related to the bombing of a government office building in downtown Oslo. By the time the message got through to the police, the massacre at the camp had already been under way for about half an hour.
Utøya sits in a lake twenty-five miles northwest of Oslo, and by helicopter the trip should take around ten minutes. But the Oslo police force has only one helicopter, and its crew was on holiday the day of the shootings. Officers from the force’s emergency-preparedness unit pulled on their gear and jumped into a Mercedes van. Forty minutes later, they reached the shore of the lake, where a motorboat was waiting. When the officers, with all their gear, piled onto the craft, it started to sink. Then the motor stalled. The police had to bail out and find a new boat.
Meanwhile, the gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, was methodically working his way around the island. Tall, blond, and wearing a police uniform, Breivik looked the part of a Norwegian safety officer, and when he told campers that he’d been sent to speak to them about the Oslo bombings they readily believed him. Then he opened fire. Breivik was carrying two weapons—a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock pistol. (He seems to have obtained the rifle legally, by claiming that he was going to use it for deer hunting, and then equipped it with high-capacity ammunition magazines ordered from the United States.) Several teen-agers jumped into the water to try to get away from him. Breivik shot them as they swam. Others ran into their tents; Breivik nudged open the flaps and fired inside. Wounded campers lay alongside their dead friends, pretending to be dead themselves. Survivors later said that the killer seemed to be enjoying himself.
“It was as though he had done this kind of thing before, as if going around and shooting people was totally normal,” a young man who was wounded in the shoulder told Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten. At half past six, when the police at last arrived on the island, in two borrowed speedboats, traumatized campers assumed that they were Breivik’s accomplices and refused to come out of hiding. By this point, sixty-nine people on Utøya were dead. Another eight people were killed in Oslo by Breivik’s fertilizer bombs.
In the weeks following the slaughter, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to make sense of what had happened. Many used the occasion to warn of the dangers of homegrown terrorism: writing on the Op-Ed page of the Times, Russell Jacoby, a historian at U.C.L.A., observed that although we prefer “to imagine threats as emanating from aliens and foreigners,” in fact “most threats and violence tend to emerge from within a society, not from outside it.” Others argued that the shootings revealed the growing menace of nativist rhetoric. “Recent election results for nationalist and anti-Islam parties have shown how poisoned the thinking in Europe already is,” Felix Steiner, an editor at Germany’s Deutsche Welle, wrote. Still others maintained that the problem was peculiarly Norwegian, a combination of inept policing and misguided pacifism.
“How long would the Norway gunman have lasted in Texas, or any state where concealed-carry laws are on the books?” Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s oldest son, asked in a widely reprinted opinion piece. “I ran a survey while on a cruise: in Texas, three minutes; in Montana, seven to eight minutes; in Arizona, two minutes; and in Nevada, three to five minutes. . . . There’s a lot of truth in the old adage that, if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will carry guns.”
Another possible take on Utøya—admittedly not a popular one—is that the whole incident was blown way out of proportion. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” (Viking; $40), Steven Pinker didn’t get a chance to comment on the Utøya shootings, since the volume went to press before the attack took place. Yet the book can be read as a long argument—a seven-hundred-page-long argument—for this last proposition.
Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor and best-selling science writer, wants to correct what he sees as a basic misperception. Fed on a steady diet of gruesome news—terrorist bombings, schoolyard shootings, deadly riots—people have come to think of life in modern, industrialized societies as dangerous, when just the opposite is true. Western Europe is not only the safest place to live in the world today; it is probably the safest, most peaceful place in the history of humankind. “The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species,” Pinker writes.
Our species has a pretty long history—around two hundred thousand years. For much of this time—roughly a hundred and ninety-five thousand years—people left behind no written records and, once they started to do so, such records were pretty sketchy. So comparing rates of violence across the ages is difficult. During the past couple of decades, though, there has been a surge of research on prehistoric mayhem, and Pinker’s claims grow out of a great deal of this recent work in what might be called atrociology.
In a classic atrociological study, published in 1991, anthropologists from Penn State and the University of Kentucky sifted through the entire contents of a pre-Columbian cemetery at a site known as Norris Farms No. 36, in west-central Illinois. The cemetery contained two hundred and sixty-four skeletons. Of these, the researchers determined, forty-three—or nearly one in six—had died violently. Many had bits of arrowhead embedded in their bones; others had skull fractures, evidently from being hit in the head with stone axes. Most of the victims had been mutilated after death; some had been decapitated, others scalped. The smooth skulls of three skeletons—all female—suggested that they’d been scalped while still alive and had somehow managed to survive the ordeal.
The grisly findings at Norris Farms No. 36 match discoveries at a number of other sites. A 1994 study of prehistoric burial grounds in British Columbia revealed that one out of five people interred at the sites had died violently. A survey of a Mesolithic burial ground in southern Sweden yielded a rate of violent death of one in twelve. And an analysis of remains at two Native American sites in southern Colorado came to the chilling conclusion that half of the inhabitants of one village and two-thirds of the inhabitants of the second had been murdered in some kind of raid.
The results of archival research, while not quite as horrific, are still plenty disturbing. An examination of English court records showed that in the fourteenth century London’s homicide rate was around fifty-five per hundred thousand, and Oxford’s a hundred per hundred thousand. A study of coroners’ records found that in the fifteenth century the homicide rate in Amsterdam hovered around fifty per hundred thousand, and a recent survey of medical records from Italy suggests that in the late sixteenth century Rome’s homicide rate ran to between thirty and seventy per hundred thousand. To put this in a contemporary perspective, Oslo’s murder rate is typically around two per hundred thousand. (Even Breivik’s shooting spree this year will probably bring it to no more than sixteen per hundred thousand.) London’s homicide rate is also normally around two per hundred thousand, and Rome’s around one per hundred thousand.
As is frequently the case with the so-called human sciences, the latest thinking recalls some of the very oldest. The savages, it turns out, really were savage! The medievals did, in fact, go medieval! But there’s more to “The Better Angels of Our Nature” than reviving such politically incorrect notions. Pinker doesn’t just want to prove that rates of violence have fallen; he wants to explain why. By his own reckoning, his theory features “six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.” A theory with twenty different moving parts is hard to summarize. But here are some of the highlights.
The first trend—or perhaps it’s a historical force—is the emergence of the state. In the millennia before power was centralized in some form of ruling authority, it was, Pinker claims, if not quite “war of all against all,” then pretty close to it. (Pinker thinks that Thomas Hobbes basically got things right.) Good government, bad government—all these are better than no government. “States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes,” Pinker writes.
Another key development in Pinker’s narrative is the rise of cities, which in turn demanded stricter codes of conduct. Practices that had long been considered acceptable, such as blowing your nose into your hands and spitting onto the floor, ceased to be so. Relying heavily on the German sociologist Norbert Elias, who in the nineteen-thirties wrote a book on the subject titled “The Civilizing Process,” Pinker argues that, over time, the new rules became so internalized that people’s basic psychology changed. They found it easier to control their impulses, which made them more considerate of others, which made them even more civilized, and so on.
Other trends that Pinker invokes include the spread of literacy, which, he argues, led to an expanding “circle of empathy” and made practices like flogging and pillorying seem intolerable, and the many rights movements of the twentieth century—women’s, gay, civil, animal—which transformed everyday sorts of violence (beating the wife, kicking the dog) into antisocial behavior. Pinker argues that trade, which turns potential enemies into paying customers, eliminates one key motive for violence, and that democracy, which relies on the idea that even the bitterest of opponents can resolve their differences peaceably, reduces another. Finally, Pinker names thinking itself as the ultimate pacifier. “One would expect that as collective rationality is honed over the ages, it will progressively whittle away at the shortsighted and hot-blooded impulses toward violence, and force us to treat a greater number of rational agents as we would have them treat us,” he writes.
The scope of Pinker’s attentions is almost entirely confined to Western Europe. There is little discussion in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” about trends in violence in Asia or Africa or South America. Indeed, even the United States poses difficulties for him. Murder rates in the U.S. are, over all, significantly higher than those in Europe, and in some parts of this country they’re so high as to be positively medieval. The homicide rate in New Orleans last year was forty-nine per hundred thousand, roughly what Amsterdam’s was six hundred years ago. St. Louis’s and Detroit’s murder rates in 2010 were about forty per hundred thousand, around the rate of London in the fourteenth century. (Detroit’s 2010 murder rate, it should be noted, actually represents a big improvement; in the late nineteen-eighties, it was more than sixty per hundred thousand.)
Do these cities lag behind in “the civilizing process” because they’re poor or educationally disadvantaged? No, Pinker argues; the key factor is that they have large African-American populations. Low-income blacks in the U.S. are “effectively stateless,” living in a sort of Hobbesian dystopia beyond the reach of law enforcement. It doesn’t help that cities like New Orleans and St. Louis are in the South; according to Pinker, the entire region is several steps behind, as “the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe.”
As Pinker’s views on African-Amer icans and Southerners probably indicate, there is much in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” that is confounding. Those developments which might seem to fit into his schema—a steady rise in the percentage of Britons who identify themselves as vegetarians, for instance—are treated in detail. Yet other episodes that one would think are more relevant to a history of violence are simply glossed over. Pinker is virtually silent about Europe’s bloody colonial adventures. (There’s not even an entry for “colonialism” in the book’s enormous index.) This is a pretty serious omission, both because of the scale of the slaughter and because of the way it troubles the distinction between savage and civilized. What does it reveal about the impulse control of the Spanish that, even as they were learning how to dispose of their body fluids more discreetly, they were systematically butchering the natives on two continents? Or about the humanitarianism of the British that, as they were turning away from such practices as drawing and quartering, they were shipping slaves across the Atlantic? And what does it say about the French that they liked to refer to their colonial project as la mission civilisatrice?
When Pinker does take on aspects of European history that challenge his thesis, the results are, if anything, even more exasperating. Consider his discussion of the war to end war and the war that followed just after. More than fifteen million people were killed in the First World War, and more than fifty million in the Second World War. “The 20th century would seem to be an insult to the very suggestion that violence has declined over the course of history,” Pinker acknowledges. But, here again, it’s all a matter of perspective. The Battle of Verdun, the Battle of the Somme, the invasion of Poland, the siege of Leningrad, Gallipoli, the Battle of the Bulge—all these loom too large in our imaginations because we stand too close to them.
“When we are judging the density of killings in different centuries, anyone who doesn’t consult the numbers is apt to overweight the conflicts that are most recent, most studied, or most sermonized,” Pinker cautions. As a proportion of global population, the casualties of the Second World War, he maintains, are easily outdone by other, less well remembered bloodbaths, including the battles leading up to and following the fall of Rome, the Mongol conquests, and the campaigns of Timur Lenk, otherwise known as Tamerlane. Pinker’s math here is, at best, fishy. According to his own calculations, the Second World War was, proportionally speaking, the ninth-deadliest conflict of all time—in absolute terms, it was far and away the deadliest—yet the war lasted just six years. The Arab slave trade, which ranks as No. 3 on Pinker’s hit list, was an atrocity that took more than a millennium to unfold. The Mongol conquests, coming in at No. 2, spanned nearly a century.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we accept that the Second World War was only the ninth-bloodiest conflict in the history of our species, and the First World War the sixteenth. Isn’t this still a problem? The heart of Pinker’s argument is that the trends and historical forces associated with modernity have steadily diminished violence. Though he hesitates to label the Second World War an out-and-out fluke, he is reduced to claiming that, as far as his thesis is concerned, it doesn’t really count. Accidents happen, and the Nazis’ rise to power was one of them. A series of unfortunate events ensued, but it’s important not to rush to judgment. “There is no indication that anyone but Hitler and a few fanatical henchmen thought it was a good idea for the Jews to be exterminated,” Pinker notes. In any event, “when a genocide is carried out, only a fraction of the population, usually a police force, military unit, or militia, actually commits the murders.”
Pinker presents “The Better Angels of Our Nature” as a corrective to the notion, once popular in academic circles, that in prehistoric cultures violence, if practiced at all, was largely for show. He dismisses purveyors of this idea as “anthropologists of peace,” or as the “Peace and Harmony Mafia.” And, to the extent that anyone still subscribes to this notion, the volume makes a forceful if not especially original contribution. (Lawrence H. Keeley’s “War Before Civilization,” published in 1996, and Azar Gat’s “War in Human Civilization,” from 2006, both of which Pinker cites repeatedly, explore similar territory more thoroughly.) We will probably never have totally reliable figures on violence among hunter-gatherer societies, but the best available evidence suggests that many of them fought fiercely and often. If the past is a foreign country, it is a notably bloody one.
Pinker is also right to argue that the relative calm of the past half century is a phenomenon worth trying to understand. If, fifty years ago, someone had predicted that the Soviet Union would dissolve peacefully, that the Europeans would adopt a common currency, and that a reunified Germany would terrify no one, that person would have been viewed as a kook. After spending five hundred years fighting more or less incessantly, the nations of Western Europe have not taken up arms against one another since 1945. But to refute one moralistic history of violence in favor of another is no great step forward.
In addition to trade and democracy and control over body fluids, a key feature of modernity is rapid technological innovation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the development of tools of destruction. In terms of the weapons we carry—or have our drones carry—Westerners are more violent than any other group that has ever come along. And we have passed these weapons on, often to devastating effect. Choose a country almost at random, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, and you’ll find people killing one another with machines built in France, Germany, Britain, and the U.S. One of the bloodiest wars in recent years was the Second Congo War, which began in 1998 and cost some five million lives. (Hostilities related to the war continue to this day.) Of the nine African nations involved, eight had, at one point or another, been provided with arms and military training by the U.S. government. Manufacturers and weapons dealers from all over Europe supplied additional munitions. The current standoff between Pakistan and India is, thanks to the West, a nuclear one. (India developed its first bomb using a reactor provided by the Canadians; Pakistan’s was developed with the help of plans stolen from the Netherlands.)
And along with the deadly weapons have come the deadly ideas. Though Pinker would like to pretend otherwise, Fascism and Communism are inventions that are every bit as modern as women’s rights and the eurozone. When you add Mao and Stalin to Hitler, the death toll from mid-twentieth-century atrocities rises to well over a hundred million. Before Pol Pot invented the killing fields, he studied in Paris, where he developed a taste not just for Marx but also for the classics of French literature.
Any adequate history of violence has to acknowledge the two-sidedness of it. Name a force, a trend, or a “better angel” that has tended to reduce the threat, and someone else can name a force, a trend, or an “inner demon” pushing back the other way. And such is the logic of the dialectic that these two sides are, as often as not, connected. Perhaps the most compelling explanation for Europe’s past half century of peace is the prospect of the alternative. “It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation,” Winston Churchill observed in 1955.
We have grown so used to this “sublime irony” that we barely talk about it anymore. Yet it informs our perceptions. As a proportion of the world’s population, or even just Norway’s, the sixty-nine casualties on Utøya hardly register. By Pinker’s method of accounting, they received far too much coverage; in an average year in Norway, some three hundred people die from accidental poisoning. But the shootings illustrate in nightmare fashion what we all know to be the case. Hate and madness and cruelty haven’t disappeared, and they aren’t going to. Systems break down and, worse still, can be subverted. This is one of the lessons of Auschwitz, and it’s why, since 1945, most people have hesitated to argue that modernity and violence are opposed. ♦
