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

CHAPTER 15 EQUAL RIGHTS

Humans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans as means to an end or nuisances to be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race or creed seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom, and sexuality of women.¹ People translate their discomfort with sexual nonconformity into moralistic condemnation.² We call these phenomena racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they have been rampant, to varying degrees, in most cultures throughout history. The disavowal of these evils is a large part of what we call civil rights or equal rights. The historical expansion of these rights—the stories of Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall—is a stirring chapter in the story of human progress.³

The rights of racial minorities, women, and gay people continue to advance, each recently emblazoned on a milestone. The year 2017 saw the completion of two terms in office by the first African American president, an achievement movingly captured by First Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” Barack Obama was succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a presidential election, less than a century after American women were even allowed to vote; she won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were it not for peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that election year. In a parallel universe very similar to this one until November 8, 2016, the world’s three most influential nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women.⁴ And in 2015, just a dozen years after it ruled that homosexual activity may not be criminalized, the Supreme Court guaranteed the right of marriage to same-sex couples.

But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come. An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society—which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing after decades of struggle.

Like other forms of progressophobia, the denial of advances in rights has been abetted by sensational headlines. A string of highly publicized killings by American police officers of unarmed African American suspects, some of them caught on smartphone videos, has led to a sense that the country is suffering an epidemic of racist attacks by police on black men. Media coverage of athletes who have assaulted their wives or girlfriends, and of episodes of rape on college campuses, has suggested to many that we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. And one of the most heinous crimes in American history took place in 2016 when Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding another fifty-three.

The belief in an absence of progress has been fortified by the recent history of the universe we do live in, where Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton was the beneficiary of the American electoral system in 2016. During his campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim insults that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy followers he encouraged at his rallies were even more offensive. Some commentators worried that his victory represented a turning point in the nation’s progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that we had never made progress in the first place.

The goal of this chapter is to plumb the depths of the current that carries equal rights along. Is it an illusion, a turbulent whirlpool atop a stagnant pond? Does it easily change direction and flow backwards? Or does justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a mighty stream?⁵ I’ll end with a coda about progress in the rights of the most easily victimized sector of humanity, children.

By now you should be skeptical about reading history from the headlines, and that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.⁶ (American police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue.) A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing. And to this day it is unclear whether the Orlando nightclub massacre was committed out of homophobia, sympathy for ISIS, or the drive for posthumous notoriety that motivates most rampage shooters.

Better first drafts of history can be gleaned from data on values and from vital statistics. The Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have undergone a “fundamental shift” toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly widespread prejudices sinking into oblivion.⁷ The shift is visible in figure 15-1, which plots reactions to three survey statements that are representative of many others.

Figure 15-1: Racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions, US, 1987–2012

Source: Pew Research Center 2012b. The arrows point to the most recent years plotted in Pinker 2011 for similar questions: Blacks, 1997 (fig. 7–7); Women, 1995 (fig. 7–11); Homosexuals, 2009 (fig. 7–24).

Other surveys show the same shifts.⁸ Not only has the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before it.⁹ As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as they age, so the Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less prejudiced than the national average, tell us which way the country is going.¹⁰

Of course one can wonder whether figure 15-1 displays a decline in prejudice or simply a decline in the social acceptability of prejudice, with fewer people willing to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster. The problem has long haunted social scientists, but recently the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has discovered an indicator of attitudes that is the closest we’ve come to a digital truth serum.¹¹ In the privacy of their keyboards and screens, people query Google with every curiosity, anxiety, and guilty pleasure you can imagine, together with many you can’t imagine. (Common searches include “How to make my penis bigger” and “My vagina smells like fish.”) Google has amassed big data on the strings that people search for in different months and regions (though not the identity of the searchers), together with tools for analyzing them. Stephens-Davidowitz discovered that searches for the word nigger (mostly in pursuit of racist jokes) correlate with other indicators of racial prejudice across regions, such as vote totals for Barack Obama in 2008 that were lower than expected for a Democrat.¹² He suggests that these searches can serve as an unobtrusive indicator of private racism.

Let’s use them to track recent trends in racism, and while we’re at it, private sexism and homophobia as well. Well into my adolescence, jokes featuring dumb Poles, ditzy dames, and lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals were common in network television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo in mainstream media. But do bigoted jokes remain a private indulgence, or have private attitudes changed so much that people feel offended, sullied, or bored by them? Figure 15-2 shows the results. The curves suggest that Americans are not just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than they used to be; they privately don’t find it as amusing.¹³ And contrary to the fear that the rise of Trump reflects (or emboldens) prejudice, the curves continue their decline through his period of notoriety in 2015–2016 and inauguration in early 2017.

Stephens-Davidowitz has pointed out to me that these curves probably underestimate the decline in prejudice because of a shift in who’s Googling. When the records began in 2004, Googlers were mostly young and urban. Older and rural people tend to be latecomers to technology, and if they are the ones who are likelier to search for the offensive terms, that would inflate the proportion in later years and conceal the extent of the decline in bigotry. Google doesn’t record the searchers’ ages or levels of education, but it does record where the searches come from. In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and less-educated populations. Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for “nigger jokes” and thirty times as likely to search for “fag jokes.” (“Google AdWords,” he told me apologetically, “doesn’t give data on ‘bitch jokes.’”) Stephens-Davidowitz also got his hands on a trove of search data from AOL, which, unlike Google, tracks the searches made by individuals (though not, of course, their identities). These threads confirmed that racists may be a dwindling breed: someone who searches for “nigger” is likely to search for other topics that appeal to senior citizens, such as “social security” and “Frank Sinatra.” The main exception was a sliver of teenagers who also searched for bestiality, decapitation videos, and child pornography—anything you’re not supposed to search for. But aside from these transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less prejudiced cohorts.

Figure 15-2: Racist, sexist, and homophobic Web searches, US, 2004–2017

Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends), searches for “nigger jokes,” “bitch jokes,” and “fag jokes,” United States, 2004–2017, relative to total search volume. Data (accessed Jan. 22, 2017) are by month, expressed as a percentage of the peak month for each search term, then averaged over the months of each year, and smoothed.

Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as “political correctness.” Today they can find each other on the Internet and coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.

Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion bellwethers but in data on people’s lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.¹⁴ Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).¹⁵ African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.¹⁶ As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in children’s readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the racial gap in happiness.¹⁷

Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since the FBI started amalgamating reports on hate crimes in 1996, as figure 15-1 shows. (Very few of these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.)¹⁸ The slight uptick in 2015 (the most recent year available) cannot be blamed on Trump, since it parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2), and hate crimes track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by politicians.¹⁹

Figure 15-3 shows that hate crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become rampant in America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following other Islamist terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.²⁰ At the time of this writing, FBI data from 2016 are not available, so it’s premature to accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes that year. The claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers; some of the incidents were ironic hoaxes, and many were boorish outbursts rather than actual crimes.²¹ Aside from post-terrorist and crime-related blips, the trend in hate crimes is downward.

Figure 15-3: Hate crimes, US, 1996–2015

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016b. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–4 of Pinker 2011.

Women’s status, too, is ascendant. As recently as my childhood, American women in most states could not take out a loan or credit card in their own names, had to look for jobs in the HELP WANTED—FEMALE section of the classified ads, and could not press charges of rape against their husbands.²² Today, women make up 47 percent of the labor force and a majority of university students.²³ Violence against women is best measured by victimization surveys, because they circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police; these instruments show that rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past (figure 15-4).²⁴ Too many of these crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by the fact that a heightened concern about violence against women is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress—which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still.

No form of progress is inevitable, but the historical erosion of racism, sexism, and homophobia are more than a change in fashion. As we will see, it seems to be pushed along by the tide of modernity. In a cosmopolitan society, people rub shoulders, do business, and find themselves in the same boat with other kinds of people, and that tends to make them more sympathetic to one another.²⁵ Also, as people are forced to justify the way they treat other people, rather than dominating them out of instinctive, religious, or historical inertia, any justification for prejudicial treatment will crumble under scrutiny.²⁶ Racial segregation, male-only suffrage, and the criminalization of homosexuality are literally indefensible: people tried to defend them in their times, and they lost the argument.

Figure 15-4: Rape and domestic violence, US, 1993–2014

Sources: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat, with additional data provided by Jennifer Truman of BJS. The gray line represents “Intimate partner violence” with female victims. The arrows point to 2005, the last year plotted in fig. 7–13, and 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–10, of Pinker 2011.

These forces can prevail over the long term even against the tug of populist backlash. The global momentum toward abolition of the death penalty (chapter 14), despite its perennial popular appeal, offers a lesson in the messy ways of progress. As indefensible or unworkable ideas fall by the wayside, they are removed from the pool of thinkable options, even among those who like to think that they think the unthinkable, and the political fringe is dragged forward despite itself. That’s why even in the most regressive political movement in recent American history there were no calls for reinstating Jim Crow laws, ending women’s suffrage, or recriminalizing homosexuality.

Racial and ethnic prejudice is declining not just in the West but worldwide. In 1950, almost half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against ethnic or racial minorities (including, of course, the United States). By 2003 fewer than a fifth did, and they were outnumbered by countries with affirmative action policies that favored disadvantaged minorities.²⁷ A huge 2008 survey by the World Public Opinion poll of twenty-one developed and developing nations found that in every one, large majorities of respondents (around 90 percent on average) say that it’s important for people of different races, ethnicities, and religions to be treated equally.²⁸ Notwithstanding the habitual self-flagellation by Western intellectuals about Western racism, it’s non-Western countries that are the least tolerant. But even in India, the country at the bottom of the list, 59 percent of the respondents affirmed racial equality, and 76 percent affirmed religious equality.²⁹

With women’s rights, too, the progress is global. In 1900, women could vote in only one country, New Zealand. Today they can vote in every country in which men can vote but one, Vatican City. Women make up almost 40 percent of the labor force worldwide and more than a fifth of the members of national parliaments. The World Opinion Poll and Pew Global Attitudes Project have each found that more than 85 percent of their respondents believe in full equality for men and women, with rates ranging from 60 percent in India, to 88 percent in six Muslim-majority countries, to 98 percent in Mexico and the United Kingdom.³⁰

In 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Since then most countries have implemented laws and public-awareness campaigns to reduce rape, forced marriage, child marriage, genital mutilation, honor killings, domestic violence, and wartime atrocities. Though some of these measures are toothless, there are grounds for optimism over the long term. Global shaming campaigns, even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.³¹ Female genital mutilation is an example: though still practiced in twenty-nine African countries (together with Indonesia, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and Yemen), a majority of both men and women in those countries believe it should stop, and over the past thirty years rates have fallen by a third.³² In 2016 the Pan-African Parliament, working with the UN Population Fund, endorsed a ban on the practice, together with child marriage.³³

Gay rights is another idea whose time has come. Homosexual acts used to be a criminal offense in almost every country in the world.³⁴ The first arguments that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business were formulated during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and Bentham. A smattering of countries decriminalized homosexuality soon thereafter, and the number shot up with the gay rights revolution of the 1970s. Though homosexuality is still a crime in more than seventy countries (and a capital crime in eleven Islamic ones), and despite backsliding in Russia and several African countries, the global trend, encouraged by the UN and every human rights organization, continues toward liberalization.³⁵ Figure 15-5 shows the time line: in the past six years, an additional eight countries have stricken homosexuality from their criminal codes.

Figure 15-5: Decriminalization of homosexuality, 1791–2016

Sources: Ottosson 2006, 2009. Dates for an additional sixteen countries were obtained from “LGBT Rights by Country or Territory,” Wikipedia, retrieved July 31, 2016. Dates for an additional thirty-six countries that currently allow homosexuality are not listed in either source. The arrow points to 2009, the last year plotted in fig. 7–23 of Pinker 2011.

The worldwide progress against racism, sexism, and homophobia, even with its bumpiness and setbacks, can feel like an overarching sweep. Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s image of an arc bending toward justice. Parker confessed that he could not complete the arc by sight but could “divine it by conscience.” Is there a more objective way of determining whether there is a historical arc toward justice, and if so, what bends it?

One view of the moral arc is provided by the World Values Survey, which has polled 150,000 people in more than ninety-five countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population over a span of several decades. In his book Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Welzel (building on a collaboration with Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and others) has proposed that the process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.”³⁶ As societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more eager to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life. This shifts their values toward greater freedom for themselves and others. The transition is consistent with the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of needs from survival and safety to belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (and with Brecht’s “Grub first, then ethics”). People begin to prioritize freedom over security, diversity over uniformity, autonomy over authority, creativity over discipline, and individuality over conformity. Emancipative values may also be called liberal values, in the classical sense related to “liberty” and “liberation” (rather than the sense of political leftism).

Welzel derived a way to capture a commitment to emancipative values in a single number, based on his discovery that the answers to a cluster of survey items tend to correlate across people, countries, and regions of the world with a common history and culture. The items embrace gender equality (whether people feel that women should have an equal right to jobs, political leadership, and a university education), personal choice (whether they feel that divorce, homosexuality, and abortion may be justified), political voice (whether they believe that people should be guaranteed freedom of speech and a say in government, communities, and the workplace), and childrearing philosophy (whether they feel that children should be encouraged to be obedient or independent and imaginative). The correlations among these items are far from perfect—abortion, in particular, divides people who agree on much else—but they tend to go together and collectively predict many things about a country.

Before we look at historical changes in values, we have to keep in mind that the passage of time doesn’t simply flip the pages of the calendar. As time goes by, people get older, and eventually they die and are replaced by a new generation. Any secular (in the sense of historical or long-term) change in human behavior, then, can take place for three reasons.³⁷ The trend can be a Period Effect: a change in the times, the zeitgeist, or the national mood that lifts or lowers all the boats. It can be an Age (or Life Cycle) Effect: people change as they grow from mewling infant to whining schoolboy to sighing lover to round-bellied justice, and so on. Since there are booms and busts in a nation’s birthrate, the population average will automatically change with the changing proportion of young, middle-aged, and old people, even if the prevailing values at each age are the same. Finally, the trend can be a Cohort (or Generational) Effect: people born at a certain time may be stamped with traits they carry through their lives, and the average for the population will reflect the changing mixture of cohorts as one generation exits the stage and another enters. It’s impossible to disentangle the effects of age, period, and cohort perfectly, because as one period transitions into the next, each cohort gets older. But by measuring a trait across a population in several periods, and separating the data from the different cohorts in each one, one can make reasonable inferences about the three kinds of change.

Let’s first look at the history of the most developed nations, such as those of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Figure 15-6 shows the trajectory of emancipative values over a span of a century. It plots survey data collected from adults (ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-five), at two periods (1980 and 2005), representing cohorts born between 1895 and 1980. (American cohorts are commonly divided into the GI Generation, born between 1900 and 1924; the Silent Generation, 1925–45; the Baby Boomers, 1946–64; Generation X, 1965–79; and the Millennials, 1980–2000.) The cohorts are arranged along the horizontal axis by birth year; each of the two testing years is plotted on a line. (Data from 2011 to 2014, which extend the series to late Millennials born through 1996, are similar to those of 2005.)

The graph displays a historical trend that is seldom appreciated in the hurly-burly of political debate: for all the talk about right-wing backlashes and angry white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry).³⁸ The line for 2005 is higher than the line for 1980 (showing that everyone got more liberal over time), and both curves rise from left to right (showing that younger generations in both periods were more liberal than older generations). The rises are substantial: about three-quarters of a standard deviation apiece for the twenty-five years of passing time and for each twenty-five-year generation. (The rises are also unappreciated: a 2016 Ipsos poll showed that in almost every developed country, people think their compatriots are more socially conservative than they really are.)³⁹ A critical discovery displayed in the graph is that the liberalization does not reflect a growing bulge of liberal young people who will backslide into conservatism as they get older. If that were true, the two curves would sit side by side instead of one floating above the other, and a vertical line representing a given cohort would impale the 2005 curve at a lower value, reflecting conservative old age, rather than the higher value we see, reflecting the more liberal zeitgeist. Young people take their emancipative values with them as they age, a finding we’ll return to when we ponder the future of progress in chapter 20.⁴⁰

Figure 15-6: Liberal values across time and generations, developed countries, 1980–2005

Source: Welzel 2013, fig. 4.1. World Values Survey data are from Australia, Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (each country weighted equally).

The liberalization trends shown in figure 15-6 come from the Prius-driving, chai-sipping, kale-eating populations of post-industrial Western countries. What about the rest of humanity? Welzel grouped the ninety-five countries in the World Values Survey into ten zones with similar histories and cultures. He also took advantage of the absence of a life-cycle effect to extrapolate emancipative values backwards: the values of a sixty-year-old in 2000, adjusted for the effects of forty years of liberalization in his or her country as a whole, provide a good estimate of the values of a twenty-year-old in 1960. Figure 15-7 shows the trends in liberal values for the different parts of the world over a span of almost fifty years, combining the effects of the changing zeitgeist in each country (like the jump between curves in figure 15-6) with the changing cohorts (the rise along each curve).

Figure 15-7: Liberal values across time (extrapolated), world’s culture zones, 1960–2006

Source: World Values Survey, as analyzed in Welzel 2013, fig. 4.4, updated with data provided by Welzel. Emancipative value estimates for each country in each year are calculated for a hypothetical sample of a fixed age, based on each respondent’s birth cohort, the year of testing, and a country-specific period effect. The labels are geographic mnemonics for Welzel’s “culture zones” and do not literally apply to every country in a zone. I have renamed some of the zones: Protestant Western Europe corresponds to Welzel’s “Reformed West.” US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand = “New West.” Catholic & Southern Europe = “Old West.” Central & Eastern Europe = “Returned West.” East Asia = “Sinic East.” Former Yugoslavia & USSR = “Orthodox East.” South & Southeast Asia = “Indic East.” Countries in each zone are weighted equally.

The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.

What is surprising, though, is that in every part of the world, people have become more liberal. A lot more liberal: young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s. Though in every culture both the zeitgeist and the generations became more liberal, in some, like the Islamic Middle East, the liberalization was driven mainly by the generational turnover, and it played an obvious role in the Arab Spring.⁴¹

Can we identify the causes that differentiate the world’s regions and liberalize them all over time? Many society-wide traits correlate with emancipative values, and—in a problem we encounter repeatedly—they tend to correlate with each other, a nuisance for social scientists who want to distinguish causation from correlation.⁴² Prosperity (measured as GDP per capita) correlates with emancipative values, presumably because as people become healthier and more secure they can experiment with liberalizing their societies. The data show that more liberal countries are also, on average, better educated, more urban, less fecund, less inbred (with fewer marriages among cousins), more peaceful, more democratic, less corrupt, and less crime- and coup-ridden.⁴³ Their economies, now and in the past, tend to be built on networks of commerce rather than large plantations or the extraction of oil and minerals.

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies).⁴⁴ Welzel found that the Knowledge Index accounts for seventy percent of the variation in emancipative values across countries, making it a far better predictor than GDP.⁴⁵ The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.

Any tour of progress in rights must look at the most vulnerable sector of humanity, children, who cannot agitate for their own interests but depend upon the compassion of others. We’ve already seen that children the world over have become better off: they are less likely to enter the world motherless, die before their fifth birthday, or grow up stunted for lack of food. Here we’ll see that in addition to escaping these natural assaults, children are increasingly escaping human-made ones: they are safer than they were before, and likelier to enjoy a true childhood.

The well-being of children is yet another case in which lurid headlines terrify news readers even as they have less to be terrified about. Media reports of school shootings, abductions, bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, date rape, and sexual and physical abuse make it seem as if children are living in increasingly perilous times. The data say otherwise. Teenagers’ retreat from dangerous drugs, mentioned in chapter 12, is just one example. In a 2014 review of the literature on violence against children in the United States, the sociologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues reported, “Of 50 trends in exposure examined, there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization.”⁴⁶ Three of those trends are shown in figure 15-8.

Figure 15-8: Victimization of children, US, 1993–2012

Sources: Physical abuse and Sexual abuse (mainly by caregivers): National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, http://www.ndacan.cornell.edu/, analyzed by Finkelhor 2014; Finkelhor et al. 2014. Violent victimization at school: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat. Rates for physical and sexual abuse are per 100,000 children younger than 18. Rates for violent victimization at school are per 10,000 children aged 12–17. The arrows point to 2003 and 2007, the last years plotted in fig. 7–22 and fig. 7–20 in Pinker 2011, respectively.

Another declining form of violence against children is corporal punishment—the spanking, smacking, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and other crude methods of behavior modification that parents and teachers have inflicted on helpless children at least since the 7th-century-BCE advisory “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Corporal punishment has been condemned in several United Nations resolutions and has been outlawed in more than half the world’s countries. The United States, once again, is an outlier among advanced democracies in allowing children to be paddled in schools, but even here, approval of all forms of corporal punishment is in slow but steady decline.⁴⁷

Nine-year-old Oliver Twist’s stint at picking oakum out of tarry ropes in an English workhouse is a fictional glimpse at one of the most widespread abuses of children, child labor. Together with Dickens’s novel, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” and many journalistic exposés awakened 19th-century readers to the horrific conditions under which children were forced to work in that era. Small children stood on boxes to tend dangerous machinery in mills, mines, and canneries, breathing air thick with cotton or coal dust, kept awake by splashes of cold water in their faces, collapsing into sleep after exhausting shifts with food still in their mouths.

But the cruelties of child labor did not begin in Victorian factories.⁴⁸ Children have always been set to work as farmhands and domestics, and they were commonly hired out as servants to other people or as laborers in cottage industries, often from the age when they could walk. In the 17th century, for example, children put to work in a kitchen would crank a spit with a slab of meat for hours, protected from the fire only by a bale of wet hay.⁴⁹ No one thought of child labor as exploitation; it was a form of moral education, protecting children from idleness and sloth.

Starting with influential treatises by John Locke in 1693 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, childhood was reconceptualized.⁵⁰ A carefree youth was now considered a human birthright. Play was an essential form of learning, and the early years of life shaped the adult and determined the future of society. In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, childhood was “sacralized,” as the economist Viviana Zelizer has put it, and children achieved their current status as “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”⁵¹ Under pressure from children’s advocates, and helped along by affluence, smaller families, an expanding circle of sympathy, and an increasing premium on education, Western societies gradually did away with child labor. A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled “Keep the Boy in School”:

The pressure of urgent Spring work is often the cause of keeping the boy out of school for several months. It may seem necessary—but it isn’t fair to the boy! You are placing a life handicap in his path if you deprive him of education. In this age, education is becoming more and more essential for success and prestige in all walks of life, including farming.

Should you feel that your own education was neglected, through no fault of yours, then you naturally will want your children to enjoy the benefits of a real education—to have some things you may have missed.

With the help of a Case Kerosene Tractor it is possible for one man to do more work, in a given time, than a good man and an industrious boy, together, working with horses. By investing in a Case Tractor and Ground Detour Plow and Harrow outfit now, your boy can get his schooling without interruption, and the Spring work will not suffer by his absence.

Keep the boy in school—and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place in the field. You’ll never regret either investment.⁵²

In many countries the coup de grâce was legislation that made schooling compulsory and thus made child laborers conspicuously illegal. Figure 15-9 shows that the proportion of children in the labor force in England was halved between 1850 and 1910, before child labor was outlawed altogether in 1918, and the United States followed a similar trajectory.

Figure 15-9: Child labor, 1850–2012

Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016a, and the following. England: Percentage of children aged 10–14 recorded as working, Cunningham 1996. United States: Whaples 2005. Italy: Child work incidence, ages 10–14, Tonioli & Vecchi 2007. World ILO-EPEAP (International Labour Organization Programme on Estimates and Projections of the Economically Active Population): Child Labor, ages 10–14, Basu 1999. World ILO-IPEC (International Labour Organization International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour): Child Labor, ages 5–17, International Labour Organization 2013.

The graph also shows the precipitous decline in Italy, together with two recent time series for the world. The lines are not commensurable because of differences in the age ranges and definitions of “child labor,” but they show the same trend: downward. In 2012, 16.7 percent of the world’s children worked an hour a week or more, 10.6 percent engaged in objectionable “child labor” (long hours or tender age), and 5.4 percent engaged in hazardous work—far too many, but less than half the rate of just a dozen years before. Child labor, now as always, is concentrated not in manufacturing but in agriculture, forestry, and fishing, and it goes with national poverty, as both cause and effect: the poorer the country, the larger the percentage of its children who work.⁵³ As wages rise, or when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.⁵⁴

As with other crimes and tragedies of the human condition, progress in ending child labor has been powered both by the global rise of affluence and by humanistic moral campaigns. In 1999, 180 countries ratified the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. The “worst forms” that were banned include hazardous labor and the exploitation of children in slavery, human trafficking, debt bondage, prostitution, pornography, drug trafficking, and war. Though the International Labour Organization’s target of eliminating the worst forms by 2016 was not met, the momentum is unmistakable. The cause was symbolically ratified in 2014 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kailash Satyarthi, the activist against child labor, who had been instrumental in the adoption of the 1999 resolution. He shared the prize with Malala Yousafzai, the heroic advocate for girls’ education. And that brings us to yet another advance in human flourishing, the expansion of access to knowledge.