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January 1 - January 1, 2020
Like Jesus, the early Christian saints found a place next to God by being tortured to death in ingenious ways. For more than a millennium, Christian martyrologies described these torments with pornographic relish.
Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, met his end on an X-shaped cross, the source of the diagonal stripes on the Union Jack.
By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe.
If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life:
And silencing a person before he can corrupt others, or making an example of him to deter the rest, is a responsible public health measure.
When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.
If the word saintly deserves a second look, so does the word chivalrous.
Today the British royal family is excoriated for shortcomings ranging from rudeness to infidelity. You’d think people would give them credit for not having had a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered.
Shakespeare’s tragedies depict a lot of violence.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales,
Punch and Judy
The television programs had 4.8 violent scenes per hour; the nursery rhymes had 52.2.44
The career of dueling showcases a puzzling phenomenon we will often encounter: a category of violence can be embedded in a civilization for centuries and then vanish into thin air.
Honor is a bubble that can be inflated by some parts of human nature, such as the drive for prestige and the entrenchment of norms, and popped by others, such as a sense of humor.
Take the decline of martial culture.50 The older cities in Europe and the United States are dotted with public works that flaunt the nation’s military might.
Our war memorials depict not proud commanders on horseback but weeping mothers, weary soldiers, or exhaustive lists of names of the dead.
a memorial to the thousand soldiers who were shot in that war for desertion—men who at the time were despised as contemptible cowards.
Conspicuous pacifism is especially striking in Germany, a nation that was once so connected to martial values that the words Teutonic and Prussian became synonyms for rigid militarism.
In earlier decades a man’s willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability.52 Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy.
Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin were nice men whose names became nasty adjectives. No one wants to live in a world that is Hobbesian or Darwinian (not to mention Malthusian, Machiavellian, or Orwellian).
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.
survival machines that are best suited for such competition.
The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war. Hobbes’s theory makes a testable prediction about the history of violence.
“nothing can be more gentle than [man] in his primitive state
Jane Goodall,
the possibility that the human lineage has been engaged in lethal raiding since the time of its common root with chimpanzees around six million years ago.
bonobos or pygmy chimps
The species we belong to, “anatomically modern Homo sapiens,” is said to be 200,000 years old. But “behaviorally modern” humans, with art, ritual, clothing, complex tools, and the ability to live in different ecosystems, probably evolved closer to 75,000 years ago in Africa before setting out to people the rest of the world.
the Neolithic (new stone age) Revolution, began around 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, China, India, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.
The historian William Eckhardt, who is often cited for his claim that violence has vastly increased over the course of history,
It is the sneaky raids, not the noisy battles, that kill in large numbers.
in most surveys the most commonly cited motive for warfare is vengeance, which serves as a crude deterrent to potential enemies by raising the anticipated long-term costs of an attack.
That is why they sometimes massacre every last member of a village they
raid: they anticipate that any survivors would seek revenge for their slain kinsmen.
The number of deaths per 100,000 people per year is the standard measure of homicide rates,
the safest place in human history, Western Europe at the turn of the 21st century, has a homicide rate in the neighborhood of 1 per 100,000 per year.
Among modern Western countries, the United States lies at the dangerous end of the range. In the worst years of the 1970s and 1980s, it had a homicide rate of around 10 per 100,000, and its notoriously violent cities, like Detroit, had a rate of around 45 per 100,000.61
The average annual rate of death in warfare for the nonstate societies is 524 per 100,000,
In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (preemptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids).
Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition
from foraging to agriculture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”
the first Leviathans solved one problem but created another. People were less likely to become victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptocrats.
Norbert Elias
The graph stunned almost everyone who saw it (including me—as I mentioned in the preface, it was the seed that grew into this book). The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present.
rates of male-on-male violence fluctuate more across different times and places than rates of domestic violence involving women or kin.
Macho violence among male acquaintances, in contrast, is fueled by contests of dominance that are more sensitive to circumstances.
In late medieval times, cutting off someone’s nose was the prototypical act of spite.
the unveiled intensity of this piety, belligerence, or cruelty
of the “childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse.”
Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions.
