So what happened in the mid-1960s that we had to start locking our cars and houses?, Steve Sailer asks:
Why did Watts and then so many other inner cities explode into rape and pillage?
This is a dangerous issue for Pinker, one he handles creatively. He praises the “Rights Revolutions” of the 1960s for reducing domestic death and destruction, but his graphs don’t actually show much evidence for that. His basic marker, the homicide rate, hit bottom in America in 1957 and started shooting up again about the time the 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed. A few years later, women’s lib legalized the abortion of tens of millions of fetuses.
(Impressively, Pinker acknowledges this objection to his paean to the pacific powers of feminism. He argues in response that, in the long view, abortion replaced infanticide. Okay, but when I was conceived in 1958, I was in far less danger of being exposed on a mountainside than anyone conceived in the 1970s was of being aborted. A better argument is Pinker’s last one: abortion has been in modest decline for the last two decades.)
Black and feminist leaders object forcefully to mention of any side effects of their ascents to power. Brilliantly, Pinker, who still wears his hair like Roger Daltrey of The Who, sidesteps these landmines by blaming the high crime rate of 1965-1995 on his own kind: the damn, dirty hippies.
While we don’t fully understand crime trends — perhaps lead poisoning played a role in the 1960s? — reducing the imprisonment rate while the murder rate was growing was the most characteristic cause of the 1960s disaster. Pinker notes that from 1962 to 1979, “the likelihood that a crime would lead to imprisonment fell… by a factor of five.” That America allowed rape and robbery to get out of control around 1964 reflected a shameful dereliction of duty by elites.
We’ve since quelled random violence to some degree, primarily by throwing a vast number of men in jail. The actual outcome of the Rights Revolutions appears to be more freedom for the upper reaches of society and more prison for the bottom. In 1960, only 1 percent of black male high-school dropouts were incarcerated, compared to 25 percent in 2000.