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

CHAPTER 14 DEMOCRACY

Since the first governments appeared around five thousand years ago, humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most violent eras.¹ Early governments pacified the people they ruled, reducing internecine violence, but imposed a reign of terror that included slavery, harems, human sacrifice, summary executions, and the torture and mutilation of dissidents and deviants.² (The Bible has no shortage of examples.) Despotism has persisted through history not just because being a despot is nice work if you can get it, but because from the people’s standpoint the alternative was often worse. Matthew White, who calls himself a necrometrician, has estimated the death tolls of the hundred bloodiest episodes in 2,500 years of human history. After looking for patterns in the list, he reported this one as his first:

Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill hundreds of thousands, I found more and deadlier upheavals like the Time of Troubles [in 17th-century Russia], the Chinese Civil War [1926–37, 1945–49], and the Mexican Revolution [1910–20] where no one exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.³

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. For that reason alone, democracy is a major contributor to human flourishing. But it’s not the only reason: democracies also have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.⁴ If the world has become more democratic over time, that is progress.

In fact the world has become more democratic, though not in a steadily rising tide. The political scientist Samuel Huntington organized the history of democratization into three waves.⁵ The first swelled in the 19th century, when that great Enlightenment experiment, American constitutional democracy with its checks on government power, seemed to be working. The experiment, with local variations, was emulated by a number of countries, mainly in Western Europe, cresting at twenty-nine in 1922. The first wave was pushed back by the rise of fascism, and by 1942 had ebbed to just twelve countries. With the defeat of fascism in World War II, a second wave gathered force as colonies gained independence from their European overlords, pushing the number of recognized democracies up to thirty-six by 1962. Still, European democracies were sandwiched between Soviet-dominated dictatorships to the east and fascist dictatorships in Portugal and Spain to the southwest. And the second wave was soon pushed back by military juntas in Greece and Latin America, authoritarian regimes in Asia, and Communist takeovers in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.⁶ By the mid-1970s the prospects for democracy looked bleak. The West German chancellor Willy Brandt lamented that “Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship.” The American senator and social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan agreed, writing that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance to the future. It is where the world was, not where it is going.”⁷

Before the ink was dry on these lamentations, democratization’s third wave—more like a tsunami—erupted. Military and fascist governments fell in southern Europe (Greece in 1974, Spain in 1975, Portugal in 1976), Latin America (including Argentina in 1983, Brazil in 1985, and Chile in 1990), and Asia (including Taiwan and the Philippines around 1986, South Korea around 1987, and Indonesia in 1998). The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, freeing the nations of Eastern Europe to establish democratic governments, and communism imploded in the Soviet Union in 1991, clearing space for Russia and most of the other republics to make the transition. Some African countries threw off their strongmen, and the last European colonies to gain independence, mostly in the Caribbean and Oceania, opted for democracy as their first form of government. In 1989 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a famous essay in which he proposed that liberal democracy represented “the end of history,” not because nothing would ever happen again but because the world was coming to a consensus over the humanly best form of governance and no longer had to fight over it.⁸

Fukuyama coined a runaway meme: in the decades since his essay appeared, books and articles have announced “the end of” nature, science, faith, poverty, reason, money, men, lawyers, illness, the free market, and sex. But Fukuyama also became a punching bag as editorialists, commenting on the latest bit of bad news, gleefully announced “the return of history” and the rise of alternatives to democracy such as theocracy in the Muslim world and authoritarian capitalism in China. Democracies themselves appeared to be backsliding into authoritarianism with populist victories in Poland and Hungary and power grabs by Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia (the return of the sultan and the czar). Historical pessimists, with their customary schadenfreude, announced that the third wave of democratization had given way to an “undertow,” “recession,” “erosion,” “rollback,” or “meltdown.”⁹ Democratization, they said, was a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.

Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? The very idea is doubtful for two reasons. Most obviously, in a country that is not democratic, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot. The other is the headline fallacy: crackdowns make the news more often than liberalizations, and the Availability bias could make us forget about all the boring countries that become democratic bit by bit.

As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify. This raises the question of what counts as a “democracy,” a word that has developed such an aura of goodness as to have become almost meaningless. A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one. Nor is it helpful to ask the citizens of undemocratic states what they think the word means: almost half think it means “The army takes over when the government is incompetent” or “Religious leaders ultimately interpret the laws.”¹⁰ Ratings by experts have a related problem when their checklists embrace a hodgepodge of good things such as “freedom from socioeconomic inequalities” and “freedom from war.”¹¹ Yet another complication is that countries vary continuously in the different components of democracy such as freedom of speech, the openness of the political process, and the constraints on its leaders’ power, so any tally that dichotomizes nations into “democracies” and “autocracies” will fluctuate from year to year depending on arbitrary choices about where to place the countries that hover near the boundary (a problem exacerbated when the raters’ standards rise over time, a phenomenon we will return to).¹² The Polity Project deals with these obstacles by using a fixed set of criteria to assign a score between –10 and 10 to every country in every year indicating how autocratic or democratic it is, focusing on citizens’ ability to express political preferences, constraints on the power of the executive, and a guarantee of civil liberties.¹³ The sum for the world since 1800, spanning the three waves of democratization, is shown in figure 14-1.

Figure 14-1: Democracy versus autocracy, 1800–2015

Source: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/f1/2560, based on Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800–2015, Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016. Scores are summed over sovereign states with a population greater than 500,000, and range from –10 for a complete autocracy to 10 for a perfect democracy. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 5–23 of Pinker 2011.

The graph shows that the third wave of democratization is far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the world had 52 democracies (defined by the Polity Project as countries with a score of 6 or higher on their scale), up from 31 in 1971. After swelling in the 1990s, this third wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.¹⁴ Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number continued to grow. As of 2015, the most recent year in the dataset, the total stood at 103. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded that year to a coalition of organizations in Tunisia that solidified a transition to democracy, a success story from the Arab Spring of 2011. It also saw transitions to democracy in Myanmar and Burkina Faso, and positive movements in five other countries, including Nigeria and Sri Lanka. The world’s 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56 percent of the world’s population, and if we add the 17 countries that were more democratic than autocratic, we get a total of two-thirds of the world’s population living in free or relatively free societies, compared with less than two-fifths in 1950, a fifth in 1900, seven percent in 1850, and one percent in 1816. Of the people living in the 60 nondemocratic countries today (20 full autocracies, 40 more autocratic than democratic), four-fifths reside in a single country, China.¹⁵

Though history has not ended, Fukuyama had a point: democracy has proved to be more attractive than its eulogizers acknowledge.¹⁶ After the first wave of democratization broke, there were theories “explaining” how democracy could never take root in Catholic, non-Western, Asian, Muslim, poor, or ethnically diverse countries, each refuted in turn. It is true that stable, top-shelf democracy is likelier to be found in countries that are richer and more highly educated.¹⁷ But governments that are more democratic than not are a motley collection: they are entrenched in most of Latin America, in floridly multiethnic India, in Muslim Malaysia, Indonesia, Niger, and Kosovo, in fourteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa (including Namibia, Senegal, and Benin), and in poor countries elsewhere such as Nepal, Timor-Leste, and most of the Caribbean.¹⁸

Even the autocracies of Russia and China, which show few signs of liberalizing, are incomparably less repressive than the regimes of Stalin, Brezhnev, and Mao.¹⁹ Johan Norberg summarizes life in China: “The Chinese people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labor camp, travel abroad freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule unopposed). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.”²⁰

Why has the tide of democratization repeatedly exceeded expectations? The various backslidings, reversals, and black holes for democracy have led to theories which posit onerous prerequisites and an agonizing ordeal of democratization. (This serves as a convenient pretext for dictators to insist that their countries are not ready for it, like the revolutionary leader in Woody Allen’s Bananas who upon taking power announces, “These people are peasants. They are too ignorant to vote.”) The awe is reinforced by a civics-class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference.

By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future. Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs, and by the tenuous connection of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives.²¹ Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts, such as what the major branches of government are, who the United States fought in World War II, and which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on “welfare” but too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it should “use military force” but not “go to war.” When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. But it hardly matters, because once in office politicians vote the positions of their party regardless of the opinions of their constituents.

Nor does voting even provide much of a feedback signal about a government’s performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods, even shark attacks. Many political scientists have concluded that most people correctly recognize that their votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and so they prioritize work, family, and leisure over educating themselves about politics and calibrating their votes. They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for their kind of people.

So despite the widespread belief that elections are the quintessence of democracy, they are only one of the mechanisms by which a government is held responsible to those it governs, and not always a constructive one. When an election is a contest between aspiring despots, rival factions fear the worst if the other side wins and try to intimidate each other from the ballot box. Also, autocrats can learn to use elections to their advantage. The latest fashion in dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist, or patronal authoritarian regime.²² (Putin’s Russia is the prototype.) The incumbents use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives, manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration, and jigger the elections themselves. (Patronal authoritarians, for all that, are not invulnerable—the color revolutions sent several of them packing.)

If neither voters nor elected leaders can be counted on to uphold the ideals of democracy, why should this form of government work so not-badly—the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried, as Churchill famously put it? In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.²³ The political scientist John Mueller broadens the idea from a binary Judgment Day to continuous day-to-day feedback. Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain: “It comes about when the people effectively agree not to use violence to replace the leadership, and the leadership leaves them free to try to dislodge it by any other means.”²⁴ He explains how this can work:

If citizens have the right to complain, to petition, to organize, to protest, to demonstrate, to strike, to threaten to emigrate or secede, to shout, to publish, to export their funds, to express a lack of confidence, and to wheedle in back corridors, government will tend to respond to the sounds of the shouters and the importunings of the wheedlers: that is, it will necessarily become responsive—pay attention—whether there are elections or not.²⁵

Women’s suffrage is an example: by definition, they could not vote to grant themselves the vote, but they got it by other means.

The contrast between the messy reality of democracy and the civics-class ideal leads to perennial disillusionment. John Kenneth Galbraith once advised that if you ever want a lucrative book contract, just propose to write The Crisis of American Democracy. Reviewing the history, Mueller concludes that “inequality, disagreement, apathy, and ignorance seem to be normal, not abnormal, in a democracy, and to a considerable degree the beauty of the form is that it works despite these qualities—or, in some important respects, because of them.”²⁶

In this minimalist conception, democracy is not a particularly abstruse or demanding form of government. Its main prerequisite is that a government be competent enough to protect people from anarchic violence so they don’t fall prey to, or even welcome, the first strongman who promises he can do the job. (Chaos is deadlier than tyranny.) That’s one reason why democracy has trouble getting a toehold in extremely poor countries with weak governments, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, and in countries whose government has been decapitated, such as Afghanistan and Iraq following the American-led invasions. As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “State failure brings violence and instability; it almost never brings democratization.”²⁷

Ideas matter, too. For democracy to take root, influential people (particularly people with guns) have to think that it is better than alternatives such as theocracy, the divine right of kings, colonial paternalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat (in practice, its “revolutionary vanguard”), or authoritarian rule by a charismatic leader who directly embodies the will of the people. This helps explain other patterns in the annals of democratization, such as why democracy is less likely to take root in countries with less education, in countries that are remote from Western influence (such as in Central Asia), and in countries whose regimes were born of violent, ideologically driven revolutions (such as China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam).²⁸ Conversely, as people recognize that democracies are relatively nice places to live, the idea of democracy can become contagious and the number can increase over time.

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won’t punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.

A series of international agreements beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 drew red lines around thuggish governmental tactics, particularly torture, extrajudicial killings, the imprisonment of dissidents, and the ugly transitive verb coined during the Argentinian military regime of 1974–84, to disappear someone. These red lines are not the same as electoral democracy, since a majority of voters may be indifferent to government brutality as long as it isn’t directed at them. In practice, democratic countries do show greater respect for human rights.²⁹ But the world also has some benevolent autocracies, like Singapore, and some repressive democracies, like Pakistan. This leads to a key question about whether the waves of democratization are really a form of progress. Has the rise in democracy brought a rise in human rights, or are dictators just using elections and other democratic trappings to cover their abuses with a smiley-face?

The US State Department, Amnesty International, and other organizations have monitored violations of human rights over the decades. If one were to look at their numbers since the 1970s, it would appear that governments are as repressive as ever—despite the spread of democracy, human rights norms, international criminal courts, and the watchdog organizations themselves. This has led to pronouncements (delivered with alarm by rights activists and with glee by cultural pessimists) that we have reached “the endtimes of human rights,” “the twilight of human rights law,” and, of course, “the post–human rights world.”³⁰

But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years, we become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past. Moreover, activist organizations feel they must always cry “crisis” to keep the heat up (though the strategy can backfire, implying that decades of activism have been a waste of time). The political scientist Kathryn Sikkink calls this the information paradox: as human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find more of it—but if we don’t compensate for their keener powers of detection, we can be misled into thinking that there is more abuse to detect.³¹

The political scientist Christopher Fariss has cut this knot with a mathematical model that compensates for more dogged reporting over time and estimates the actual amount of human rights abuse in the world. Figure 14-2 shows his scores for four countries from 1949 to 2014 and for the world as a whole. The graph displays numbers spat out by a mathematical model, so we should not take the exact values too seriously, but they do indicate differences and trends. The top line is for a country that represents a gold standard for human rights. As with most measures of human flourishing, it is Scandinavian, in this case Norway, and it started high and has grown higher. We see diverging lines for the two Koreas: North, which started low and sank even lower, and South, which rose from a right-wing autocracy during the Cold War into positive territory today. In China, human rights hit bottom during the Cultural Revolution, shot up after the death of Mao, and crested during the 1980s democracy movement before the government cracked down after the Tiananmen Square protests, though they are still well above the Maoist-era lowlands. But the most significant curve is the one for the world as a whole: for all its setbacks, the arc of human rights bends upward.

Figure 14-2: Human rights, 1949–2014

Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016i, graphing an index devised by Fariss 2014, which estimates protection from torture, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearances. “0” is the mean over all countries and years; the units are standard deviations.

How does the curtailment of government power unfold in real time? An unusually clear window into the machinery of human progress is the fate of the ultimate exercise of violence by the state: deliberately killing its citizens.

Capital punishment was once ubiquitous among countries, and it was applied to hundreds of misdemeanors in gruesome public spectacles of torture and humiliation.³² (The crucifixion of Jesus together with two common thieves is as good a reminder as any.) After the Enlightenment, European countries stopped executing people for any but the most heinous crimes: by the middle of the 19th century, Britain had reduced the number of capital offenses from 222 to 4. And the countries looked for methods of execution such as drop hanging that were as humane as such a gruesome practice could pretend to be. After World War II, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inaugurated a second humanitarian revolution, capital punishment was abolished altogether in country after country, and in Europe today it lingers only in Belarus.

The abolition of capital punishment has gone global (figure 14-3), and today the death penalty is on death row.³³ In the last three decades, two or three countries have abolished it every year, and less than a fifth of the world’s nations continue to execute people. (While ninety countries retain capital punishment in their law books, most have not put anyone to death in at least a decade.) The UN Special Rapporteur on executions, Christopher Heyns, points out that if the current rate of abolition continues (not that he’s prophesying it will), capital punishment will vanish from the face of the earth by 2026.³⁴

Figure 14-3: Death penalty abolitions, 1863–2016

Source: “Capital Punishment by Country: Abolition Chronology,” Wikipedia, retrieved Aug. 15, 2016. Several European countries abolished the death penalty in their mainland earlier than indicated here, but the time line records the last abolition in any territory under their jurisdiction. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 4–3 of Pinker 2011.

The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies. This American exceptionalism illuminates the tortuous path by which moral progress proceeds from philosophical arguments to facts on the ground. It also showcases the tension between the two conceptions of democracy we have been examining: a form of government whose power to inflict violence on its citizens is sharply circumscribed, and a form of government that carries out the will of the majority of its people. The reason the United States is a death-penalty outlier is that it is, in one sense, too democratic.

In his history of the abolition of capital punishment in Europe, the legal scholar Andrew Hammel points out that in most times and places the death penalty strikes people as perfectly just: if you take a life, you deserve to lose your own.³⁵ It was only with the Enlightenment that forceful arguments against the death penalty began to appear.³⁶ One argument was that the state’s mandate to exercise violence may not breach the sacred zone of human life. Another was that the deterrent effect of capital punishment can be achieved with surer and less brutal penalties.

The ideas trickled down from a thin stratum of philosophers and intellectuals to the educated upper classes, particularly liberal professionals like doctors, lawyers, writers, and journalists. Abolition was soon folded into a portfolio of other progressive causes, including mandatory education, universal suffrage, and workers’ rights. It was also sacralized under the halo of “human rights” and held out as a symbol of “the kind of society we choose to live in and the kind of people we choose to be.” The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy. The penal codes of their countries were drafted by committees of renowned scholars, passed into law by legislators who thought of themselves as a natural aristocracy, and implemented by appointed judges who were lifelong civil servants. It was only after a couple of decades had elapsed and people saw that their country had not fallen into chaos—at which point it would have taken a concerted effort to reintroduce capital punishment—that the populace came around to seeing it as unnecessary.

But the United States, for better or worse, is closer to having government by the people for the people. Other than for a few federal crimes like terrorism and treason, the death penalty is decided upon by individual states, voted on by legislators who are close to their constituents, and in many states sought and approved by prosecutors and judges who have to stand for reelection. Southern states have a longstanding culture of honor, with its ethos of justified retaliation, and not surprisingly, American executions are concentrated in a handful of Southern states, mainly Texas, Georgia, and Missouri—indeed, in a handful of counties in those states.³⁷

Yet the United States, too, has been swept by the historical current, and capital punishment is on the way out despite its continuing popular appeal (with 61 percent in favor in 2015).³⁸ Seven states have repealed the death penalty in the past decade, an additional sixteen have moratoria, and thirty have not executed anyone in five years. Even Texas executed only seven prisoners in 2016, compared with forty in 2000. Figure 14-4 shows the steady decline of the use of the death penalty in the United States, with what may be a final slide to zero visible in the rightmost segment. And true to the pattern in Europe, as the practice becomes obsolescent, public opinion straggles behind: in 2016, popular support for the death penalty slipped just below 50 percent for the first time in almost fifty years.³⁹

Figure 14-4: Executions, US, 1780–2016

Sources: Death Penalty Information Center 2017. Population estimates from US Census Bureau 2017. The arrow points to 2010, the last year plotted in fig. 4–4 of Pinker 2011.

How can the United States be doing away with capital punishment almost despite itself? Here we see another path along which moral progress can take place. Though the American political system is more populist than those of its Western peers, it still falls short of being a direct participatory democracy like ancient Athens (which, pointedly, put Socrates to death). With the historical expansion of sympathy and reason, even the staunchest fans of capital punishment have lost their stomach for lynch mobs, hanging judges, and rowdy public executions, and insist that the practice be carried out with a modicum of dignity and care. That requires an intricate apparatus of death and a team of mechanics to run and repair it. As the machine wears out and the mechanics refuse to maintain it, it becomes increasingly unwieldy and invites being scrapped.⁴⁰ The American death penalty is not so much being abolished as falling apart, piece by piece.

First, advances in forensic science, particularly DNA fingerprinting, have shown that innocent people have almost certainly been put to death, a scenario that unnerves even ardent supporters of the death penalty. Second, the grisly business of snuffing out a life has evolved from the gory sadism of crucifixion and disembowelment, to the quick but still graphic ropes, bullets, and blades, to the invisible agents of gas and electricity, to the pseudo-medical procedure of lethal injection. But doctors refuse to administer it, pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply the drugs, and witnesses are disturbed by the death throes during botched attempts. Third, the chief alternative to the death penalty, life in prison, has become more reliable as escape-proof and riot-proof penitentiaries have been perfected. Fourth, as the rate of violent crime has plummeted (chapter 12), people feel less need for draconian remedies. Fifth, because the death penalty is seen as such a momentous undertaking, the summary executions of earlier eras have given way to a drawn-out legal ordeal. The sentencing phase after a guilty verdict is tantamount to a second trial, and a death sentence triggers a lengthy process of reviews and appeals—so lengthy that most death-row prisoners die of natural causes. Meanwhile, the billable hours from expensive lawyers cost the state eight times as much as life in prison. Sixth, social disparities in death sentences, with poor and black defendants disproportionately being put to death (“Those without the capital get the punishment”), have weighed increasingly on the nation’s conscience. Finally, the Supreme Court, which is repeatedly tasked with formulating a consistent rationale for this crazy quilt, has struggled to rationalize the practice, and has chipped away at it piece by piece. In recent years it has ruled that states may not execute juveniles, people with intellectual disabilities, or perpetrators of crimes other than murder, and it came close to ruling against the hit-and-miss method of lethal injection. Court watchers believe it is only a matter of time before the Justices are forced to confront the caprice of the whole macabre practice head on, invoke “evolving standards of decency,” and strike it down as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment once and for all.

The uncanny assemblage of scientific, institutional, legal, and social forces all pushing to strip government of its power to kill makes it seem as if there really is a mysterious arc bending toward justice. More prosaically, we are seeing a moral principle—Life is sacred, so killing is onerous—become distributed across a wide range of actors and institutions that have to cooperate to make the death penalty possible. As these actors and institutions implement the principle more consistently and thoroughly, they inexorably push the country away from the impulse to avenge a life with a life. The pathways are manifold and tortuous, the effects are slow and then sudden, but in the fullness of time an idea from the Enlightenment can transform the world.