We might think of manners, care for the vulnerable, the degree of enthusiasm for war, the sophistication of state institutions or the valuing of community interest over self-interest. There are many possible ways to measure civilisation, however, the one considered here is the degree of violence. The proposition is that more civilised societies are less violent ones. Furthermore, homicide rates are used as a proxy for general violence. Societies with low homicide rates have a correspondingly low rate of general violence.
There has always been change, but not quite at the rate of recent times. In earlier times change was often driven by technological innovations such as fire, foraging tools, hunting tools, wheels and agriculture. The changes related to these innovations came over centuries and when they came the impact was immeasurably small from generation to generation. The change would not have been perceptible. Generally, grandchildren did what their grandparents did.
There is though another class of changes that is just as important as technological ones, and perhaps much more interesting. They are, the things that fundamentally changed who we are, that propelled us on the course to civilisation and toward what we would accept today as humanity. These were innovations like the pen and paper, the mirror, money, a state’s monopoly on violence, separation of church and state, novels and importantly that women could contribute equally to our society.
It is these changes that have led the way from our more violent past to the relatively peaceful times we find ourselves in today. I often get comments about the claim that things are relatively peaceful. Well, they are! Homicide rates in the most peaceful countries, which include New Zealand by the way, are approximately 1 per 100,000 per year. This compares with recent homicide rates of around 28 in Sao Paulo and 69 in South Africa and a global average of 8.8.
However, the homicide rates in the worst places today compare well with tribal or hunter-gatherer communities where the rates were in the many 100s and occasionally in times of conflict rose as high as 1,500. Frankly, today’s low homicide rates are unprecedented in history and it is not just homicide rates that have fallen, virtually every measure of violence has followed the same trajectory. Even when including the deaths from two world wars, atrocities involving millions of deaths, flu pandemics and famines in the homicide statistics, the last century was the most peaceful ever!
This is not to say, though, that there is not more work to be done.
It is worth pondering on what has changed in the last fifty years or so. For example, it is no longer acceptable to beat an errant wife or child. Consider how attitudes to drink-driving, discipline in schools, mistreatment of animals, bullying in the workplace, polluting streams, homosexuality, gender, speeding, and racism have changed. It was not national news in the late 70s when someone shot my cat with a slug gun (the boy next door, I have not forgotten you) and certainly no one went to jail for it.
The changes are both massive and across a broad range of fronts. It is clear that some fundamental things have changed and that this change is happening at an ever-increasing rate.
To get a clearer picture let’s wind the clock back 700 years. You may be familiar with just how disgusting some aspects of life were in the Middle Ages. For example, it was acceptable to defecate in public, even while in mid conversation. The word “chunder” is actually a contraction of “watch under” which people were required to call when emptying their chamber pots out of the window, occasionally onto passers by. Table manners were nowhere to be seen. Large knives were used at the table for serving and eating and occasionally for settling a dispute. Eventually they were replaced by forks and blunt, short knives - and in some countries wooden chopsticks.
Torture was routine and by today’s standards would be considered gruesome. Capital punishment was routinely handed out for trivial offences, often for victim-less crimes like defaming the king or queen, or criticising the church. Capital punishment always involved torture, whenever possible this was strung out over several days. At times even one slight hint you were a witch or warlock could end your life. Consequently, the homicide rates were 100s of times higher than in the peaceful countries of today. Murder was a well accepted response to being offended or infringed in some manner, duels to the death were commonplace. Duels to death were a leading cause of death for aristocratic males for some time.
Just out of interest what ended the business of duelling was ridicule. When a duel was declared and the posters put up. People started to turn up and throw rotten fruit (and worse) to put the duelling parties off their shot. The spectators took to ridiculing the duellers and treating the event as entertainment, rather than a solemn proof of one’s manliness.
But this all began to change and one of the reasons for the change was an idea of a greedy king to get more money. His great idea was that instead of his peasants killing one another in cycles of retribution, or demanding money in lieu of violence, that the offending peasants would instead make a payment to the king. The king in return would have his knights deliver justice of sorts. This triggered a massive change.
This new arrangement required the knights to shift from being violent warlords to skilled negotiators. The knights now had to gain the trust of the king’s accountants and develop social and political skills to keep their positions and of course to keep their heads. This was perhaps the greatest contribution to what we would today call manners and self restraint, this is where the term “courtly manners” arose. This also led to what we now readily accept as a state monopoly on violence.
It is no longer okay to settle scores yourself. If having a dispute with your neighbour would you beat them up or call the police?
If you are among those who would call the police then your risk of being a victim of violence is greatly reduced. Even today some folk live outside the protective umbrella of a state monopoly on violence and they suffer for it.
Would you still call the police if you had some marijuana growing out the back? Or if your partner or flatmate had been receiving stolen goods?
The idea of a state monopoly on violence was a huge step forward towards what we would call civilisation today. Two key components of this monopoly are the judiciary and the police.
Money itself was a very interesting innovation. It was not just barter with bucks. The use of money led to an explosion of relationships that would never have eventuated through barter alone.
Money let transactions be conducted over greater distances and between otherwise unrelated parties and it let value be dispersed over time. A summer crop could be sold to many parties in a short space of time and the gains spent over an entire year.
Money meant that it was in each person’s interest to be trusted, to be preferred over another trader. Money meant that there was an advantage to behaving in a more civilised manner.
The idea of empathy would have really confused a typical inhabitant of the Middle Ages. Life was tough enough without worrying about others. Even maternal and paternal empathy was not what is today, perhaps in part due to the infant mortality rate and to prevailing attitudes to children at the time.
In general, people did not care about one another in a meaningful way and without this changing, we would never have got to where we are today. The fact that Germany protected horses was debated in the House of Commons. During this debate some suggested that if England were to grant protection to horses, that one day this might extend to the protection of cats. This suggestion caused the Lords to descend to unrestrained laughter as it seemed preposterous that cats could ever be granted legal protection.
So what led to an increase in empathy? Well a few things, but the biggest impact was probably from novels. It took around one hundred years after Gutenberg’s first press (1448) for the concept of a novel to properly get going and another two hundred years for the novel to be part of everyday life.
It is not possible to enjoy, or perhaps even understand, a novel without thinking from someone else’s perspective, without walking in their shoes, dreaming their dreams, thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. To enjoy a novel the reader needed to consider the perspective of others.
Novels had the unexpected impact of awakening empathy within humanity. When novels became popular there was a surge of suicides amongst readers as they struggled to come to terms with the plight of other less fortunate people.
For sure, novels changed the world.
Well quite deep actually. It is possible to see the physical differences in the brains of those who did the bulk of their learning pre-Internet from those who did their learning post-Internet. The brain is so plastic that during its development, it has been able to take account of the easy accessibility of information from the Internet and refocus its own storage on data relationships, rather than bulk data storage. When this research first went public there were plenty of “oh no” responses, “the kids will be getting even dumber”. But really?
Many of the people alive today would have gone to school before calculators were ubiquitous - or in some cases even available. They learnt to add a column of numbers in a flash, a skill that has since largely been lost. Or was it a loss? Maybe it was a swap. Maybe the skill was replaced by a better one, but we just could not see this possibility at the time. The availability of calculators allowed the focus to move from manually manipulating numbers to solving problems.
Nonetheless, whatever the impact of the calculator on how our brains worked, it was trivial compared to the impact of the pencil and paper. The impact of the pencil and paper was massive. Just think about how far you would get with a task like long division without a pencil and paper! Think about how you would explain complex ideas or a new innovation without a pen and paper - or even remember the shopping list.
The seemingly simple innovation of the pencil and paper changed not only the course of civilisation, but the rate at which ideas were developed and disseminated.
Back in the 80s it was considered quite a laugh by computer boffins that the computer, which had been imagined as a number-crunching machine, would revolutionise word processing! This was a big surprise, no one I knew saw that coming and we certainly never imagined the evolution of social media and the impact it would have.
Despite the impact of money and trade on peace and manners, it may yet be overshadowed by the impact of social media in the years to come.
Selfies aren’t new. When mirrors hit the scene some people would spend all day in front of their mirrors, some still do. Every budding Kim Kardashian starts with a mirror. Mirrors have had an under-appreciated impact on humanity. With mirrors, self-adulation was propelled to a whole new level. In fact, the whole idea of self took off once mirrors were in the sticky, tight grip of the narcissists. Mirrors did nothing for the development of empathy and compassion.
Over the last fifty years, the degree of empathy of school leavers has been slowly, but steadily increasing. This is great news. However over the last 15 years the change has levelled off, then started to drop, then started to crash. So what is going on? Well there are two candidates, the first is the drop off in reading novels. Watching movies, sitcoms and YouTube clips do not seem to do the job of developing empathy that reading novels can.
Secondly, the explosion of social media has meant that communication is often asynchronous and not face to face. You don’t get to see the look in someone’s eye when you emotionally impact them and therefore do not receive the feedback to moderate your own behaviour. This is perhaps most evident in the cases of online abuse that have hit the headlines. Sadly we are reversing some progress here.
There are also patches around the world where we have been drifting backwards for a while. Over the last decade, Somalia, Russia, Syria and their peers have provided too much evidence for what the rest of us are getting right.
Today though, ISIS takes the dubious prize for winning the race back to the Middle Ages. This is not so much a clash of religions, or even ideologies, it is a clash of time zones. Once upon a time, we were all this bad.
So is our future destined to be a continual drift to better and better?
Are there limits to the nature and boundaries of our behavioural change?
Well, we have done the easy bits. Given our poor behaviour, we had a much better chance of improving things than making them worse. Amazingly most of the changes were by chance, no one was steering the bus and civilisation spread, primarily from Britain by good fortune.
Money was not invented to develop relationships across borders and entwine warring parties to a degree that war had an all new downside - the loss of a trading partner. Gutenberg’s ambition was not to develop mankind’s empathy through the reading of novels. Similarly, no one imagined the impact of the pencil and paper, mirrors, calculators etc. The changes we have covered today were all fortuitous.
However, as usual, what follows the easy bits are the hard bits. There are many problematic areas in our communities where improvements have levelled off and some areas where problems are getting worse and entirely new problems are arising. There are in fact sections of the community who are effectively stateless and they often behave accordingly. At some stage we are going to have to start steering the bus, and this will mean political and social change.
For example, in the US there is a consistent difference in homicide rates between Democrat and Republican voting states. Or in other terms, between the more secular and more religious states. The homicide rates are lower in the more secular, Democrat voting states. But why? There are a number of contributing factors. Morals might be good, but imposing them on others is not. When people start asserting their moral positions, such as abhorrence of homosexuality, then they start on the path of demeaning others, attempting to marginalise others’ rights and inevitably this creates a sense of permission for some to act on their disapproval, or even hatred, of those with differing views.
At the time of writing, there is a concerted effort being made by the political leadership in the US to undermine trust in the mainstream media and state institutions. Reducing trust in state institutions reduces confidence in a state monopoly on violence.
Some people have a strong belief in personal freedom and a right to express or assert one’s views irrespective of the impact on others. This sense of individual freedom can be in conflict with the idea of a state monopoly on violence and the idea that we should value the community over our own needs.
Pakistan provides a stark example of the problems of religious righteousness driving violence. Atheists are routinely murdered in mob attacks. Even devout Muslims accused of blasphemy are routinely murdered. There is little chance of getting to court and even if you did the chances are that you would be convicted and your family would need to go into hiding.
There are still many countries where being exposed as a homosexual will get you flogged, imprisoned or murdered.
There is another telling trend in the US. The homicide rates are higher in the Southern states than the Northern states, even when religiosity is accounted for. There is something else going on. That something else can be summed up as manliness. The problem with manliness is that it needs to be backed up. Looking the part will work most of the time, but what if you meet someone just as manly and there is a disagreement? If you back down you diminish your manliness and may not get it back. Manliness needs to be reinforced with violence from time to time.
As to the question: Are there boundaries to change? Well yes, there are. We are wired to behave in a certain social way, these rules have been honed and wired into our biology over millions of years of evolution. This is the science of sociobiology.
We cannot behave like social insects: ants, bees, wasps and termites. Their biology is different, they are haplodiploidic, so they behave accordingly. Sometimes people imagine utopian futures of happy, hand-holding communities with rows of pretty and homogeneous housing. This is not going to happen. We are noisy and ornery primates with one foot in the community camp and the other foot firmly in the self-interest camp. This tension will always be a part of humanity and we will always need to manage it. If our society provides opportunities for members to behave with unbridled self-interest that impacts negatively on others, then those opportunities will be exploited.
Our challenge as individuals is to understand what drives the trend to a more civilised society and to choose political leaders who have the insight and the will to take us there.