Violent Encounter
I just finished Steven Pinker's lengthy and erudite The Better Angels Of Our Nature. It's about why we're much less violent than we used to be.
First, of course, he has to convince readers of the counterintuitive fact that we're a lot less violent than we once were--a tricky task considering the two world wars in the 20th century, not to mention massive purges and forced starvations. His response: 1) most of that was a statistical anomaly in the first half of the century, and 2) when you look at the overall scheme of things and adjust for population, these were hardly the worst atrocities in human history.
Pinker has done a lot of research, and his conclusions will probably please neither conservatives or liberals. For instance, while he doesn't think we should toss aside everything, he thinks a lot of beliefs from the past--even the fairly recent past--have been or should be superseded. But he certainly doesn't have any patience for a concept like the noble savage (just remove cops from the streets for a few days to find out how noble we can be) and believes all the attacks on Western culture in the 60s went too far and led to a temporary but significant rise in crime.
A lot of the best stuff in the book is a long look at the past--how it's a different country. People simply had different assumptions about how life should be lived. And not just in pre-history, or ancient Rome. Just a hundred years ago, war had a good name--it enlivened society, allowed for glory and offered something greater than the cheap, stagnant, materialistic society we'd have otherwise. Just fifty years ago, it was still considered pretty normal for men to solve their problems with their fists--not something the law should be concerned with. This attitude is far from gone, but the less "honor-based" a society is, the more we understand that punching someone, as much fun as it may look like in the movies, is not a proper response to mere provocations.
Pinker believes the trend will continue, but he understands there's no guarantees. I'd like to think he's right. The question becomes is there anything we can do to encourage the trend, or will history move the way it does regardless?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:06 AM
10 Comments:
I find David Bentley Hart's refutation of Pinker's thesis totally persuasive.
It's short enough that the whole thing is worth reading, especially for his demolition of Pinker's stereotypical and false view of the Middle Ages.
Regaring Pinker's conclusion, here are a couple of Hart's points:
A remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens.
In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion.
I also find Pinker's analysis of violent justice to be wrong. Yes, from time to time criminals were tortured throughout history, but the vast majority of executions in every human society was something very quick -- e.g., a hanging -- of a criminal who had committed murder or robbery. Today in America, we don't hang robbers. Instead, we put them in an institution where hardened criminals fight, extort, abuse, and rape each other on a regular basis. Forget the question of which system is better, or more moral, or more effective, and ask yourself only: which system is less violent? Pinker asserts it's our system. But I disagree. The violence of our current penal system is kept out of view.
In fact, it's almost like modern slaughterhouses. A few centuries ago, most Westerners saw food animals killed regularly. Today almost none of us do. But that doesn't mean that we are eating less meat than our ancestors did.
Oops, the correct link is this.
I don't think Hart lays a glove on Pinker, since most of his "refutation" is not fact-based, but an ideological complaint.
When Hart does get down to numbers, he plays more with statistics than Pinker does. What point is the Inuit example? The fact is for thousands of years, there were millions of millions of people living in small bands, and they were constant prey to marauders, and regularly had wars as well. Your life was much more likely to end young, and violently, than today, or a century ago, or five hundred years ago. We're not talking about fistfights, we're talking about regular, predictable, bloody violence that was repeated over and over, a million times.
Also, in the past, to pick but one example, torture was perfectly acceptable to wide portions of society. No, acceptable is wrong--strongly supported is more correct. True, most people weren't tortured, only millions and millions, with everyone's knowledge, as a part of life. Today, even in the most brutal societies, the number is incomparably lower (and just about non-existent in the West).
It's odd you'd quote the single sentence which I thought was the most illogical in the entire essay:
"In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion."
He's lying right in front of our faces. So in the old days, you had a million people in your country and 200,000 got wiped out in wars on a regular basis. Today, (when wars are less frequent), you've got fifty million people in your country and in a horrible war you lose 500,000. Yep, war deaths went up, but if you don't want to die in a war, you tell me which society is safer? (And we're not even talking about how glorious and noble war was seen until recently, and how much more brutal everyday life was--nor are we talking about genocide of losers, or how women and children became slaves if they were allowed to live.)
There are certainly many wonderful and noble things about the past, and plenty we can learn from the ancients. But we should also face facts. The trouble is Hart, and indeed many people who write for First Things, don't really have a problem with Pinker. They've got a problem with modernity.
It's not per se invalid to do gross counts. There are circumstances where that is the primary data point. I haven't really thought about whether this is one of them, but certainly it could be, e.g., if it turned out there was some causal relation to those on the losing end of the violence transaction.
Calling this lying is quite a stretch and does not do you credit. Feel free to call it stupid if you like, but to believe percentage is the only number that counts is hardly in the nature of inquiry.
And I doubt that it's odd that you obsess over the sentence Mr. King chose. Rather, it's probably systematic. (I suppose the systemic relationship could be odd, but I don't think that was your point.)
I believe there has also been a drastic decline in the percentage of the population involved in warfare/defense over the centuries. Part of the reason for this is the increasing wealth of our societies, in that military service is not the only option for people without a job. As the average standard of living has risen, the willingness of people to risk their lives (on average) goes down. I suspect this has something to do with declining violent crime rates too.
Sometimes things don't scale, but when you're talking about these sorts of numbers, not taking into account changing populations is intellectually dishonest. When I first read Hart's piece it was at the sentence I discuss where I threw up my hands. It's as if (though I almost shouldn't use an analogy, since his in plain sight deception is pure enough so why mess with it?) he wrote "You say the Republicans lost a crushing election in 1964, but I say Barry Goldwater got 27 million votes--a veritable explosion in popularity after Grant only got 3 million votes a century earlier."
I've read a number of critiques of Pinker, from the right and left, and others were equally pointed, but generally fairer in taking him on. There are all sorts of things that can be questioned about his thesis, numbers and otherwise. I admit I thought they all fell short, but part of that may be that Pinker wrote 700 pages, which makes it difficult to refute in a few paragraphs.
How does Pinker answer the Mad Max question?
In a breakdown of societal institutions, won't we all be forced to become wasteland warriors, haunted by our pasts and doomed by our futures.
How does the behavior on people in lawless situations- e.g. third world war zones, even the aftermath of Katrina - work in Pinker's world? Is it his argument that the existence of institutions that keeps us peaceful and their removal throws us back into the state of nature?
Also- DG's argument needs to address the fact that "total war" is a more modern phenomena- many middle age wars were fought by professional companies who weren't that interested in getting too hurt. Maybe Pinker would argue that regardless of statecraft and war, casual violence was worse?
Pinker isn't talking about a genetic change in humans (though he does discuss that a bit in his book), he's talking about a change in our culture and a change in our personal moralities. As I said, he agrees with much of what Hobbes has to say. He believes that changes in society have led to the decline in violence (though you've sometimes got chicken and egg questions about what led to what), and that a breakdown in these institutions can and has led to more violence. He also discusses what he sees as flaws in various other theories about the decline and how it's often claimed that the gains made could easily be reversed.
As to war, it's changed a lot through the years, like most other institutions. Pinker claims it's both less brutal and less destructive. (So our modern, "clean" way of killing others has not led to more violence or deaths.) It's also true that casual violence was far more common in the past.
Okay, I agree that the sentence in question is problematic.
But I think the first sentence I quoted is still true. A man who nervously robs a bank, hears a car backfiring, and then shoots the bank teller is guilty of murder, and rightly so. A man who stalks a woman over the course of a year, figures out when she will be alone, abducts her, tortures her for several months and finally kills her is also guilty of murder. But if you want to measure "violence", it's absurd to claim they are equally violent.
I don't know how Pinker actually defines "violence", but since his book clearly considers violence a bad thing and a nonviolent society better than a violent one (a view that I agree with), then he shouldn't be simply counting numbers. When two tribes of hunter-gatherers kill each other over who gets to fish from a lake, that simply is not on the same level of evil as the Trail of Tears, or sending a million kids to rush machine guns in the Battle of the Somme, or the Khmer Rouge hacking into pieces every single Cambodian who knew how to read or write.
It's a bit much to ask people to read Pinker's entire book to understand his argument, but if you want to get a feeling for what he's saying, you could check out http://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-about-better-angels-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined where he deals with frequently asked questions.
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