Violence down, claims Pinker the thinker

So, assume every African-American prisoner in the US is shot dead as soon as they’re convicted, and add that to the US murder rate. What does that do to the trend?

After The Blank Slate, I’m not going to read Pinker either.

But I am prepared to defend a moderately Whiggish view of history, at least as it describes the course of my lifetime. When I was young WWII was still fresh in people’s memory, and a WWIII that would wipe out the entire planet seemed more likely than not. The threat of nuclear annihilation has gradually faded (though the likelihood of some kind of nuclear disaster is still present), but the peace between great powers that it enforced has not. On almost any measure, and despite the efforts of successive US Presidents, the last 20 years have been among the most peaceful in the history of the world, continuing a gradual decline since 1945. I don’t agree that this is confined to Western Europe – the change has been equally marked in South America for example where (AFAIK) there has been no international war since 1945, and a big decline in coups, insurgencies and so on over recent decades.

To give this a Whiggish turn, I think that there has developed over the 20th century, for the first time of which I’m aware, a large global Peace party, not just opposed to particular wars, but opposed to the idea of war, and in particular the idea that nations can benefit themselves by going to war. Of course that’s due in substantial measure to the disasters caused by the War party in the first half of the century, but the lessons seem to have taken hold in most of the developed world and even (though not among the elite) in the US.

Must… not… feed… troll.

Isn’t the most delicious part of a Heather Mac Donald apology always her patient, sweet-but-stern exposition of the ways in which, e.g., the War on Drugs has redounded (as was its beneficent design) to the benefit of black Americans and, what’s more, those “activists” and “leaders” who claim to know better than she does what’s best for the downtrodden are in fact poisoning and parasitizing their own people? There’s something erotic about the way she condescends to put that big-college intellect of hers at the service of her inferiors that makes me shiver and pant. Or maybe it’s Strocchi’s invocations of “high heels” and “tottering”. I sure am glad the ladies can pursue Mr Big without the interference of Mr Big Black, whose pleasure at meeting them can apparently be expected as a matter of course to overflow into enthusiastic rape (and whom, besides, one uneasily suspects might be Mr Bigger).

“Much of it is inter-racial gang violence, frequently as a response to the fear of homosexual rape.”

Citation needed, or are we still comfortable “just knowing” this?

It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Pinker seems to be approaching his material in a fundamentally ahistorical and unsystematic way, defining things as violence to suit his purposes, glossing over stuff that’s inconvenient, and ignoring such issues as, say, improvements in medicine or the dodginess of ancient and medieval historians when it comes to numbers. I’d like to see more of the book than is revealed in pieces like the one linked to, but I get the impression that they’re fairly representative. I had a go at an earlier article connected with the book a few weeks back, but I have a depressing feeling that this might end up influencing people.

I’m not saying I’m glad Pinker’s wrong. I wish he weren’t. But he is.

Alas, what if we include “violence against non-human lifeforms” in the bill?

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/steven-pinker-hobbes-pangloss/

On almost any measure, and despite the efforts of successive US Presidents, the last 20 years have been among the most peaceful in the history of the world, continuing a gradual decline since 1945.

The Second Congo War has resulted in several million deaths and the bloodshed continues to this day. I am always amazed at how it seems to be totally forgotten, especially since we are all connected to it by way of natural resource extraction.

Also Franco-Prussian War + Paris commune, Italian independence and unification, wars of Russian expansion, civil wars in Spain, and Irish risings (Irish famine should also be counted IMO). Not to mention the fact that the European powers were engaged in colonial wars more or less continuously. Overall, I think clearly more violent than the past 20 years. The peace of 1945-89 was admittedly artificial in some ways, but conversely, the peace in most of Europe since then is more surprising, given the amount of political upheaval, the disappearance of numerous nation-states and the emergence of others, and so on.

Still, it’s true that C19 (that is 1815-1914) was a relatively peaceful period and that the beginnings of the peace party, though still as a small minority, can be seen for example with John Bright.

Just finished reading the book and IMO, not worth reading. The data has enough holes in it but the sections outlining the rationale are almost unreadable. There’s just an air of complete contempt towards all alternative explanations that permeates the entire book. Almost all his arguments touch upon well-trodden and intensely debated territory but you wouldn’t know from reading the book.

On the data, the comparison of 5-year events with centuries-long “events” is just silly. The improvements in medicine are another one – the lethality of assault has dropped dramatically in recent times http://people.umass.edu/zguo/iraqi%20war%20/murder%20and%20medicine.pdf . Despite this, homicide in England for example has gone up since the 50s http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf .

For a similarly Hobbesian view, I’d much rather read Azar Gat’s ‘War in Human Civilization’.

I’m not a big fan of Pinker’s other popular writing, because I think ev-psych is mostly junk science, but this book had a really interesting-sounding premise and sounded more about data and less about theory, so I picked it up. I haven’t had time to get very far in it, though.

Now I’ve read this post/thread and I’m kind of confused. Is this something we don’t like because we don’t like Pinker and because he says some dumb things in interviews, and because he gets dumb views attributed to him in (vitriolic, possibly uncharitable) reviews? Or is there something clearly wrong about his thesis that we can know without having read the book? The “mass incarceration” thing is embarrassing but it struck me as the only serious charge leveled by the Gray review, which was otherwise composed of sneering and accusing Pinker of contradiction because he believes both in Darwinism and moral progress, which are indeed incompatible if you have as simplistic a conception of them as John Gray apparently does.

When I heard about this book, I thought, “hey, it looks like Pinker has moved away from recounting poorly tested hypotheses from a poorly defined ‘paradigm’ that can basically predict anything, and has moved toward writing about actual things that happened. Maybe he’ll use that charming writing style for good this time.” I’m still hoping that’s what has happened. Broad sneers at Pinker as a public figure, or attempts to find contradictions between this book and his earlier ones, does nothing to diminish my hope that the better angels of Pinker’s nature are starting to take over.

Not an attempt to troll, just a sincere (if perhaps oblivious) statement from a frequent CT reader and infrequent commenter.

If we note that most crime is black on black (I hate the sexualized terminology, but there we go) then it seems that blacks benefit the most from any increase in policing and arrests of blacks, because the deterrent effect on crime caused by longer and harsher sentences would help the victims of crime.

Of course the real horrors aren’t associated with bodycounts. That the civilization of Goethe and Schiller would become engaged in the bloodiest racial war and inquisition in history is a fact worth thinking about, in a way that Catholic’s Spain earlier attempt at genocide isn’t. (To those who don’t know about this: google the Duke of Alba) This alone should give us pause for any story of social progress: millions of Jews, gays, and Communists lie dead in a Polish forest not because of some backward ideology making a triumphant return, but an ideology that conceived of itself as modern in the extreme. An d this ideology emerged from a country known for its tolerance.

Why is Jack Strocchi banned?

Regarding the black-on-black crime issue, there is evidence that imprisoning so many black men leads to an fatherless environment that helps contribute to raising future criminals. So even absent the case for direct helpful intervention in those communities, it is not clear that incarceration is helpful at reducing violence. And we’re not even talking yet about the hideous impact of the criminalization of drug use.

On another point, I want to echo Soru’s sentiments (I find this an unusual position). Pinker may be an ass-hat and this book may be no more use than a paper weight, but… do you seriously expect me to just take it as given that our society has gotten more violent? I am not a historian and I am even less familiar with the world outside of western europe (and the places that it has been heavily involved in from time to time), but it seems exceedingly likely to me that things have gotten less violent over time. There was a story circulating the blogosphere a few weeks/months ago about the drop in murders over a few centuries time line. And while there is some error in those estimates and other problems, the overall trend looks pretty incontrovertible to me. Even if we factor in the enhanced ability of states (particularly the US) to wage war, I’m not sure the human cost is that high relatively. If you applied a lancet like excess mortality rate estimate to your average 15th century conflict (with displaced people’s and dispoiled croplands and far fewer social resources to deal with such problems) I can’t imagine you’d get a pretty picture.

To me, at least, this thesis looks pretty likely, though still unproven. I’m not going to change my mind because Pinker wrote a book that happened to argue for it.

If we note that most crime is black on black (I hate the sexualized terminology, but there we go) then it seems that blacks benefit the most from any increase in policing and arrests of blacks,

This may be the most grotesquely stupid thing that Watson Ladd has yet said on CT. And that’s a high bar.

I wonder how much of this decrease in violence in Western countries is attributable to the advent of on-line, mass slaughter computer games. Has there ever been a better chance to sublimate (sexual) violence?
Instead of building cathedrals, we give kids the chance to virtually perforate assorted brown people and save Western civilization. Then they watch porn.
The most talented get to control drone aircraft from bunkers in Nevada. Draw your own conclusions.

tomslee #30:

I dunno, I found myself pretty much agreeing with the paragraph you quoted. It does seem true to me that more awareness of statistics and cognitive biases would be a good thing in many parts of academia. I’m thinking for instance of Philip Tetlock’s demonstration that political experts (including academics) do worse at predicting political events than simple statistical models, and that those experts continue to trust their own predictions despite their objectively poor track record (possibly because of confirmation bias or something similar).

I guess one could get annoyed with Pinker for criticizing a system that has benefited him, but I don’t see why the opposite would be preferable. Given that Pinker is an academic bigwig who gets a lot of publicity, I’d rather have him make criticisms of academia that I agree with than have him not make those criticisms.

38.2: I am apparently not needed.

Why exactly can our newly-evolved cosmopolitan pacifism not mothball at least one carrier group?

We are docile domesticated subjects of some kind of Empire, not freely co-operative and peaceable equals. Pinker is celebrating a Triumph, is admiring the studs on our dog collars.

Or dismantle the surveillance systems?

History ends with a whimper, from the few of us aware enough to still give a damn, not a bang.

The rest of you:

Smile at the camera

Can’t resist one more comment on black incarceration. Anybody have any idea here what black incarceration is about? It’s about drugs. White folks use and deal drugs and don’t get caught: black men get caught two or three times and bye bye for life. Sure there is more violence in poor neighborhoods than in rich ones, although perhaps not more crime (see Occupy Wall Street). The gap between need and have is greater, although perhaps the gap between want and have is smaller. It’s being poor, not being black: a buddy of mine moved here to Boston recently and was stunned to get mugged by poor white kids!

Given that Pinker is an academic bigwig who gets a lot of publicity, I’d rather have him make criticisms of academia that I agree with than have him not make those criticisms.

I think this is why Chris mentioned the 1,300-year Middle East slave trade in his original post. Pinker’s focus on supposedly innumerate humanities/social science professors is a straw man argument, because it’s irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I’m all for more widespread mathematical literacy and understanding of cognitive biases, but I’ve seen Pinker do this before:

1. Divide the population into two groups (hard-headed realists versus innumerate idealists)
2. Propose a rather mundane thesis that your readers already believe (civilization has made a lot of progress over the past 10,000 years, or people are not completely blank slates)
3. Pretend as if all objections to your thesis arise from the fact that innumerate idealists can’t deal with reality
4. Sell lots of books

Unfortunately stats on crime relating to poverty are not easily available, unless there is a source I am not aware of. The FBI crime reporting covers race, not SES. I think poverty and density are the two factors leading to crime.

Chris, I’m happy to see you support concealed carry as a means to distribute the means of violence equally.

Henri, I think the fact India exports grain is worth celebrating.

SB, I’m not going to deny that the people who work in the humanities are very talented at what they do, or that it is valuable. I certainly couldn’t remember 100 books well enough to be tested on them at once, which is one of the requirements of anthro doctoral candidates here. What I am going to challenge is the monopoly that the humanities have on how we think about the social world.

1. Divide the population into two groups (hard-headed realists versus innumerate idealists)
2. Propose a rather mundane thesis that your readers already believe (civilization has made a lot of progress over the past 10,000 years, or people are not completely blank slates)
3. Pretend as if all objections to your thesis arise from the fact that innumerate idealists can’t deal with reality
4. Sell lots of books

Ah, you said it much better than I did. And speaking just for myself, it’s particularly infuriating to have people dismiss your own reasoned, researched, an rational criticisms to what they say on the grounds that by the very fact of raising any objections at all you’re “going against what the best science says”.

Is there any evidence that Pinker is actually any good as a scientist? The psychologists I know are pretty sniffy about him, which might just be academic jealousy, but certainly his pop science books suggest that he’s not got a great grasp on experimental technique, statistic analysis or clear logical thinking.

“What I am going to challenge is the monopoly that the humanities have on how we think about the social world.”

But for the most part, apart from the “humanitarians” among us, we don’t think about the social world. We think about the economic world, where privilege and poverty are simultaneously the “real-valued” functions of wealth, or the lack of it, and human rights or civil rights or the Bill of Rights are the imaginary ideals of antiquated secular humanists.

JJ, good point. But the claim of the Deceleration of Independence is that such rights are “self-evident”, so that one doesn’t have to study their origin to defend them. Of course we live in a world in which there is such a thing as right and wrong, and being wrong kills without mercy. How many lives did Sabin save, and how many do all the humanitarians in the world save? Powerful is he who knows the causes of things.

Of course we live in a world in which there is such a thing as right and wrong, and being wrong kills without mercy.

Because most problems in the world really are that black and white. Some people are wrong, and some are wrong – it is that simple, science proves it. Seriously people, get with the program and follow Watson in the technocracy of the last century.

“…and being wrong kills without mercy. ”

Presumably, you’re implying that being right kills with mercy, although I’m not sure whether you’re referring to the moral rather than the political right.

@JJ: No, I’m saying that if you are wrong about the natural world, you will discover pretty quickly and harshly. Think a bridge will stand up to your weight and you are wrong? You are dead. Think screening for prostate cancer is a good idea? You are going to be very likely to undergo unnecessary surgeries for a cancer that probably wouldn’t have killed you. Think vaccines kill children more then they help? Have fun in that iron lung. The world is not a nice place, and most places are quite a bit less nice.

Derailed. Bravo, Watson. Star of the show.

An alternative explanation of the data on wars in the last two centuries is that wars have become less frequent but more destructive. Pinker touches upon this phenomenon drawing upon the work of Lewis Richardson who first pointed it out, but he doesn’t draw out its full implications.

Our current period may be the equivalent of a Minsky-ian ‘Great Moderation’-like stable period. Similar arguments can also be made about ‘broken windows’ style policing which Pinker endorses i.e. we have increased stability but also increased fragility.

I largely agree w/ J. Quiggin @6 et seq.

More specifically:
Pinker is (or purports to be) writing about ‘violence’ in general. If however one narrows the focus to armed conflict of various sorts, then there is no question at all that the data show an unmistakable downward trend since c. 1990. The complete absence of traditional interstate war is significant and so, though less striking, is the declining severity and prevalence of civil wars; in terms of war, what we are left with now is a relatively small number of civil wars and armed secessionist mvts, plus e.g. Afghanistan (and Pakistan border regions), which one could argue about how to label. The fact that the US and some of its NATO and other allies have been involved in war(s) since 9/11 has meant understandably that many people have not noticed that, on a global basis, war has been on the decline.

(J.S. Goldstein’s just-published Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (Dutton) is a book I plan to review on my blog at some point – I’m on a break from blogging at the moment – with appropriate caveats to acknowledge that I’m acquainted with the author.)

Watson, I’m a little slow today, so are you actually arguing that if we don’t listen to the insights of Pinker, nature is going to kill us?

Just to repeat the blindingly obvious: people who are experts at statistics are also often wrong. They’re just much better at convincing themselves and others that they are not.

christian h:
people who are experts at statistics are also often wrong

A lot of people are often wrong, but, all else equal, I’d rather listen to someone who is conversant w statistics but also knows about other things and can see that numbers are one piece of evidence, not the be-all and end-all.

All you’ve done is assert that the humanities don’t monopolize our way of thinking about the world, but you’ve offered no counterexamples. If they don’t it should be easy to see how we think about the world scientifically in public.

SoV sez science fail. If you actually knew anything about SOP for scientific methodology you’d know that you actually have to do some work and show some evidence for your rather emphatic claim that ‘humanities have a monopoly on how we think about the social world’. The skeptics? Not so much. Note that you can’t fall back on the hoary old chestnut that they’re just as guilty of failing to support the counterclaim that humanities don’t have a monopoly on how we think about the social world. No. They’re just being skeptical. What they’re saying, in the parlance of the financial world is “show me the money”. You can’t read a quote like this as anything else:

Anyone else notice a monopoly?

[silence ….]

No, I thought not.

So yes, understandably we get peeved when someone goes on about how shameful it is and how damaging it is to social policy that other people just don’t understand science like they do . . . and while doing so, talking and arguing in ways that rather decisively indicate they really haven’t any idea how science works.

From what I’ve read here, a fundamental problem with Pinker’s project is one of definition: what is violence?

It’s nice that we can rely on the organizing and humanizing power of the state to avoid another Cultural Revolution.

From what I’ve read here, a fundamental problem with Pinker’s project is one of definition: what is violence? Without a clearer notion of “violence” to work with, his project doesn’t necessarily fall apart entirely and may still offer some valuable insights or questions to pursue (I’m just trying to be fair here), but it certainly can’t live up to the grandiose claims he himself seems to make for it.

What’s violence? That’s easy. That’s something rich folk don’t use as very much these days as a tool for conflict resolution . And when they do – say imprisoning poor blacks for drug offenses – they’re actually incarcerating people for their own good, so you can’t really count that as violence. Sorta like how our opponents in various resource conflicts engage in terrorism but when our own guys do it they’re Freedom Fighters.

Although actually, if you use the ‘violence is a tool for resolving conflicts’ paradigm, I think a good case could be made that violence has declined only insofar as better methods have been developed to extract concessions from an adversary. When the Terminator finally comes back from the future to rid the machines of meddlesome humanity the first item on his agenda will be to get a job on Wall Street as an investment counselor ;-)

Well yes, Gray is a troll . . . .

Is he? I don’t know much about the man, but he seems pretty decent in this review.

(I meant to include in there that I agree with the rest of your post too, SoV, I’m just branching off from it in a slightly different direction.)

I would think, given a statistic which encompasses 1300 years, that we will have to look at the subject of violence since 1945 in another 1255 years in order to tell if violence has gone down.
However, the interest this book has may be in the reversing of a conservative meme. Fukuyama, in the Great Disruption, argued that Western society has gotten noticeably more violent in the post war era – a feat he accomplished by simply overlooking WWII. You know how it is when you are a great thinker – historical events have to be really large to bite you on the nose. At the time he wrote this, the rightwing meme was all about how liberalism, unions, black people and maybe feminism had caused the non-violent bourgeois societies of old to decline into rape, murder, and selling crack near the White House. Hmm, I’ve noticed for a while that the right is dissatisfied with this idea, although every once in a while a rightwinger likes to haul out the factoid that it was less dangerous in Baghdad in 2004 than in downtown Philly.

Pinker, however, is not that kind of rightwinger. I’d group him with the Slate contrarians – open to, say, the idea that blacks are inferior to whites (only because we must be open to all potential facts!), as Saletan infamously was, open to the idea that Bush is secretly a liberal (the Kaus idea), and certainly open to the idea that now is the least violent time in history – which is a point I am sure I have read some columnist on Slate make.

@LFC etc., fragmentary argument on state terror:

1) Balance of state power vs individual power is partly a function of technology. Of long time periods, technology will be the major factor altering this balance.

2) Because of it’s ever increasing complexity, technology strongly favours factions that can operate overtly: in this case, the state.

3) Sometimes considered a modern phenomenon, guerilla warfare is as old as humanity; Sun Tzu, Fabius, Robin Hood etc. etc. In spite of perceptions, pre-modern history is full of near-endless guerilla wars.

4) By contrast, West Bank barrier (w South Armagh as mini-prototype), Afghanistan etc. illustrate modern state can counter guerilla enemy ad-infinitum without either unbearable losses or resort to unlimited atrocities. These phenomena are novel in human history.

Using this simple framework to evaluate state terror in history leads to conclusions:

a) Historical oppression mostly noble oppression/enslavement – i.e. involving power distributed among large numbers of individuals; no less unpleasant at the receiving end, but generally carried out in pursuit of rational objectives.

b) Historical rulers could ally with nobles vs peasants or peasants v nobles (occasionally true in most European monarchies except for HRE and Poland where noble victory was absolute) but either way power of state only facilitates centralised rule after renaissance.

c) Historical rulers could impose extremes of tyranny only by engaging in a form of civil war, i.e. by pandering to some faction in an existing struggle, even if distribution such that no lines of territorial countrol often masked nature of conflicts.

d) State terror in its modern form, i.e. where the central state may need no domestic allies, only really possible with modern state; e.g. Stalin’s terror which mostly bypassed ‘peasants’ and heavily targetted nomenklatura (‘nobles’ – perceived disloyal elements, but of his own power base!) is a manifestation of a phenomenon not possible in the pre-modern era. Typewriter proves amongst most cruel and deadly weapons in history. Potential for subjugation of individual to state power has since accelerated.

Comments: Recent history has not witnessed ever-increasing state terror, but extrapolating based on a few decades is risky. Obviously many factors other than those cited at play (*) but fact remains that computer databases, biometrics, automated surveillance etc. create potential for much more absolute forms of oppression than pre-modern social conditions permitted.

Ancient terror was moreover always broad-based and generally in pursuit of either rational economic or ethnic/religious group objectives. Potential for extremes of terror, in particular arbitrary terror such as the holocaust, has actually increased.

(* But please spare me twitter. Camera phones maybe, though central control of dissemination networks is much greater and simpler than possible with historically comparable media)

Sadly, only about 30% of the people in the world understand even basic statistics. The other 80% just don’t have a clue.

LFC @71:
But twenty years (1990 onwards) is a pretty short span of time to establish a trend on noisy data (war casualties tend to cluster). The climatologists are continunlly having to keep reminding that a decade is to short a time to establish a (climate) trend.

As far as the ease of killing, brought about by technology. I’m far from convinced. I’ve seen studies, of expenditures of money per enemy killed for various wars, and the trend is dramatically upwards. We also (in the more advanced parts of the world), have dramatically better battlefield (and later) medicine. So lots of wounds that would have had high fatality rates fifty or a hundred years ago have very low casualty rates today. So much so, that comparing say US fatalities in say Iraq and Afghanistan against past wars creates a very deceptive impression about the human cost of modern wars on the warfighters. Since so many injuries that would have been fatal in the past rarely kill todays soldiers, but often leave them with lifelong disabilities instead. To invent an extreme example, in the stone age, I might only have a sharpened stick with which to kill my tribal warfare rival. But there is a significant chance that a minor scratch inflcted upon him by my primative stich will get infected and kill him. My investment in the effort would have been minimal.

In terms of the longer sweep of history. We live in what I think of as a short anomolous era. If the normal state of human society without constraint is exponential growth of population, then for most of history, we’ve had a sort of Malthusian like incentive to kill off our co-competitors (other humans mainly). Interesingtly starting from roughly the time Malthus wrote his thesis, we’ve enjoyed a period where technological advances have largely overcome those resource constraints. A lot of indications are that this brief vacation from Malthusian resource constraints is going to be over. How we react to the increasing zero-sum nature of economic (and ecological) competition remains to be seen. But an increase in violence seems entirely plausible.

LFC (77.): A lot of people are often wrong, but, all else equal, I’d rather listen to someone who is conversant w statistics but also knows about other things and can see that numbers are one piece of evidence, not the be-all and end-all.

Well yes, I don’t disagree with that at all. Being a mathematician myself I’m just very wary of the way statistics have been used in the public discourse of social sciences often not as a tool but as a way to present claims that are fundamentally political in nature as incontrovertible fact. (Disclaimer: this is not a dig at social sciences as such, nor at the many social scientists who use survey and statistical methods in the full awareness of their limitations. It’s a dig at the method Pinker uses here: present some numbers – any numbers – then declare the debate over.)

@85 That’s precisely why he is particularly effective troll. For example, look at these two sentences from the review:

The astonishing numbers of black young men in jail in the US is due to the disproportionate impact on black people of the “decivilising process,” notably the high rate of black children born out of wedlock and what Pinker sees as the resulting potential for violence in families (black or white) that lack the civilising influence of women.

and

The possibility that mass incarceration of young males may be in some way linked with family breakdown is not considered.

Obviously, on a factual level, those two things directly contradict each other. No-one with any level of commitment to factual accuracy, or the vaguest interest in the meaning of what they were saying, would so blatantly contradict themselves in such a short space of words.

But that doesn’t matter to Gray. He just sees in one paragraph a chance to imply Pinker is racist, and in the next the chance to call him an idiot. Both of those match the goal of his review: raising his profile. So both claims are made.

Asking which he believes to be true is a simple category error.

Pinker and Gray can be neatly regarded as equal and opposite. One makes factual statements attached to a symbolic or cultural resonance the facts don’t support. The other makes symbolic or cultural gestures without any regard for underlying facts.

For starters, I find it completely shocking that Mr. Bertram would devote a blog post to slagging a serious academic like Pinker without even having bothered to read the book–and proudly admitting that fact!

As a general matter, I get the sense that many people posting on this board have arrived at their opinions based on the fact that they dislike the very notion of a ‘human nature’, or find the idea that the current incarnation of Western society/civilization/culture is somehow an ‘improvement’ over the past to be highly distasteful. Fifty years of anti-colonialism and anti-Eurocentrism have taught many in the humanities and social sciences to be viscerally (which is not to say obstinately) skeptical of the notion that some cultures can be better than others. I detect a whiff of this in Mr. Bertram (and a strong stench of it in Gray). Needless to say, the truth of a proposition bears no relationship to the discomfort it may cause you.

I also get the sense that many people have profoundly misunderstood the argument Pinker (and other proponents of EP, like Dunbar and Tooby and Cosmides) is making with respect to ‘human nature’. I think such people should read more carefully. It is not, as one person suggested, a contradiction to suggest that there is simultaneously a) a fixed, pan-species human nature, in the form of evolved psychological mechanisms (eg the ‘language instinct’) and b) a means of improving human behaviour through better moral ideas and political/legal institutions. Pinker’s argument that human thought is structured via pre-existing modules does not preclude the possibility that cognitive innovations, like new moral rules, or new ways of conceiving of the moral community, can alter the way those modules operate in practice. Evolution gave us the hardware, and culture gives us the software.

I myself haven’t yet read Pinker’s latest, but I will say this: the much-derided table posted by the Guardian strikes me as nothing more than a pedagogical device, i.e. a means of getting the lay reader to place historical events in proper perspective. What really matters are the long-term statistical trends Pinker relies on. Carping about whether the Mideast Slave Trade is really ‘comparable’ to WWII is completely missing the point.

skeptical of the notion that some cultures can be better than others

What’s the meaning of ‘better’ when it’s applied to cultures? Who’s to judge, some supernatural omni-cultural being?

All that needs to be said about Pinker.

He objects to using education “to instill desirable attitudes toward the environment, gender, sexuality, and ethnic diversity”; but he insists that “the obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education.” He thinks that we should be teaching economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics, even if we have to stop teaching literature and the classics. It’s O.K. to rewire people’s “natural” sense of a just price or the movement of a subatomic particle, in other words, but it’s a waste of time to tinker with their untutored notions of gender difference.

You can choose any metric you like

Suppose I choose the incarceration rate. Now what?

Of course violence is down in a long term perspective. No question. That goes between countries, but even more so within countries.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/long-term-trend-in-homicide-rates.html

I don’t know what Bertram’s or Gray’s problem is. They seem to want Pinker to be wrong, not only in his explanation for the trend but also in describing the trend.

I agree with J. Q. that the transition between the Europe of 1914-1945 to that of 1945-present is truly remarkable — though I don’t expect that Pinker writes much about social democracy or the construction of post-war pan-European institutions.

Chris –

Even assuming that the entirety of the decline in violent death were attributable to the fact that incarceration has replaced execution or banishment, do you not think that this is an improvement both in morality and in outcomes? Your earlier comments make it seem like you don’t.

Chris, could you do us the favor of disemvoweling and name-redacting this troll masquerading as Erik Labelle-Eastaugh (who is in fact a real person, a professor at Oxford)? Whoever’s stolen his name for the purposes of posting here is committing what amounts to defacement. At the very least, I guess someone should write Dr. Labelle-Eastaugh to let him know there’s a troll posting comments under his name, and give him the opportunity to address the matter. A one-comment drive-by could just be shrugged off, but this person has now posted four comments under the name, and it hardly seems fair to let some pseudonymous troll (most likely a disgruntled student of his) sockpuppet-drag Labelle-Eastaugh’s name through the mud.

John et al: I just don’t get your argument about the decrease in violence in the past 20 years – within that time-frame occured:

– Second Congo War
– Second Sudanese Civil War
– Rwanda Genocide
– The Wars in the Former Yugoslavia
– War in Afghanistan
– War in Iraq

…

His claim (I gather) is that the world is growing less ‘violent’ as certain beliefs and institutions spread. By ‘less violent’, I take it he means that an individual’s risk of violent death at the hands of another person is decreasing in a way that is somehow proportional to the spread of this complex of beliefes and institutions. …. This is an empirical question.

Yeah, right, empirical. Talk about being cryptic. What are these “certain beliefs and institutions”? Buddhism? Three strikes and you’re out? Anti-imperialism? The project for the New American Century? Spell it out.

My original point was that some people are so deeply committed (intellectually or emotionally) to the idea that Western civilization is/was a brutal oppressor and warmonger that they are incapable of taking Pinker’s argument at face value, on the facts.

Why, maybe it’s the idea that Western civilization is/was a brutal oppressor and warmonger is that magical belief that’s responsible for less violence. Or maybe it’s just that Pinker’s argument is bullshit.

@117

Those did occur yes, however that sort of thing has been going on since before the dawn of history there has been a fairly consistent trend for there to be less of it and even those wars that have occurred have been tending to be less bloody than before. The previous twenty years had included the Cambodia genocide, the Ethiopian civil war the Pakistan civil war, the Sudan civil war &c . The point is that the proportion of violent deaths seems to be falling fairly consistently. Some older evidence includes the very large proportion of ancient burials that show signs of violent death and non-fatal serious violence compared to more recent times. The number of murder cases in western Europe shows a huge decline since the middle ages, murder being a crime where the court records give a pretty good record of the number of murders committed.

Popeye @105-

Very nice quote but the link to the source is defective. Which is too bad, because it looks worth reading.

Sort of going back to Salient @ 70 (if I understand it correctly):

A lot of people seem to be objecting Pinker’s thesis on the grounds that violence has not decreased, historically speaking; and a lot of people (who don’t necessarily agree with Pinker’s claims in general) seem to be arguing that, nevertheless violence has too decreased (since 19945, or 1991, etc.).

But isn’t the real problem with Pinker’s thesis that either of these kinds of comparative judgments is fairly meaningless, because there’s no clear metric for quantifying violence (esp. when the implicit or explicit point is to establish some thesis of human progress or regress, or even some plus ca change type thesis).

@js #125

“no clear metric for quantifying violence”? How about # of people intentionally killed by other people/100,000 people?

Why are you retreating to some sort of know-nothing position?

“no clear metric for quantifying violence”? How about # of people intentionally killed by other people/100,000 people?

Doesn’t work. A society in which rape/mutilation/imprisonment of females is ubiquitous, but murder is unheard-of, would score as perfect under that metric–would you feel comfortable asserting that such a society is violence-free?

Wait, don’t respond, I already know the answer is “no, of course not!” I don’t mind giving you the chance to revise the metric. But now you have to consider, is 1 rape = 1 murder, or what’s the scale of equivalence? 1.5 to 1? Etc. And then of course you have to take all other forms of violence into account, etc, etc.

The “can I devise an objective metric for violence” game is easy to play, but the “can I devise an objective metric for violence that my opponent can’t convince me is lip-bitingly gut-clenchingly wrong in one paragraph” game is mutually assured deconstruction– The only winning move is not to play.

It’s not a even question of whether the past-to-present comparison is true or false (we can invent metrics, subject to the problems I just noted, to make the case either way). It’s mostly a question of whether the comparison is meaningful. (You can substitute ‘useful’ at the end of that sentence, if you like.) What value do we derive from the comparative statement, reasonably presupposing that nobody here is trying to act as apologists for present-day atrocities?

Let’s say you convince me, and I completely believe, that someone really really could construct a Ptolemy-in-the-age-of-Kepler epicycles theory of violence that covers enough special cases that we run out of imagination coming up with possible special cases. Perhaps we find what appears to be heavenly evidence that 1.14 rapes = 1 murder in cold blood = 2.26 accidental murders in the course of assault = 1.09 genital mutilations, and we can quantify every last thing satisfactorily. Other than now being able to play Atrocity Trivial Pursuit and rank the Top 100 Well-Documented Atrocities by badness (perhaps in a Time retrospective article with the computations mostly suppressed), where on Earth does this get us?

We might find there’s no reason to be morally complacent (but there never is). We might find there’s every reason to be optimistic (but there always is). We might find there’s good reason to be proud (there always is). We might find there’s good reason to not be proud (there always is). So even if we suppose it’s possible to come up with a metric that approximates the impossible, satisfactorily aggregating violence well enough to make broad-strokes comparisons, what are we supposed to use it for?

To me, saying that 1215 unjust imprisonments ~ 500 murders feels like I’m being a jerk to 1215 people. Now, ok, there exist situations in which being a jerk to a lot of people (or hypothetical people) is entirely called for. Is making this kind of comparison one of those?

As far as I can tell, the majority of the case against Pinker’s thesis in this post (and much of the subsequent discussion) pretty ad hominem.
If you don’t want to pay attention to his arguments, that’s really up too you, no one is going to make, but I don’t understand why you’d write a post saying “Pinker puts forward X thesis… I haven’t really read the argument, but it’s wrong because he sucks.”

Sorry if someone has posted something similar, but haven’t had a chance to read all te comments. Here is anthropologist Greg Laden on what he als thinks Pinker’s book contains (he discusses the hunter-gatherer aspect):

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/09/pinkers_new_book_has_a_fundame.php

Also, I offered a (in hindsight, poorly worded) comment there, where I mention this document:

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf

You should see there that crime increased dramatically over the 20th century in Britain. It’s fallen a little bit since the mid-90s, but still way up compared to before WWI. Crime is a big problem in Britain – sometimes the tabloids are right.

Watson:

Chris, we live in a world driven by forces most of us, least of all the interpreters of it, do not understand. The hysteria over GMOs, the complaints over breast cancer screening not working, the demand for continued support for treatments that kill people on the basis that some are helped (but we don’t know which ones ahead of time), are all results of a news media beset by ignorance, and a commentariat as ignorant of the second law of thermodynamics as the Romans. Being wrong costs lives, and people are generally wrong about the way things work.

This may be true, but the problem is that just because the likes of Steven Pinker rail against society’s scientific illiteracy, doesn’t mean that such people themselves are free of such baggage. Observe UK politician Michael Gove declare he’s going to make sure kids learn about “Newton’s laws of thermodynamics” in their science lessons:

http://politicalscrapbook.net/2011/06/michael-gove-physics/

So even if we suppose it’s possible to come up with a metric that approximates the impossible, satisfactorily aggregating violence well enough to make broad-strokes comparisons, what are we supposed to use it for?

To identify what traits of groups are correlated with violence. Because if we know that then we are one step closer to knowing how to reduce the amount of violence in the world (or is that not right?)

The fact that any simple metric for “violence” will have flaws, and “gotcha” cases where it fails ridiculously, doesn’t seem to me to be a unique feature of “violence” as a concept. Most of the concepts that matter to us are pretty fuzzy and complicated, and if we always bound ourselves by standards this strict, academics would never be able to make claims about anything, ever (except math, and some of physical science). The point is not to create an operational definition that has no flaws (which is impossible) but to create one whose flaws do not damage the particular argument you’re interested in making. (And besides, there’s some worth even to “first tries” with significant, relevant flaws; people can always come along and refine your ideas.)

You would be hard-pressed to find an example of a society with lots of murder but not much assault

Ok, but I’d have an easy time finding a society in which there’s lots of assault but not much murder; I’d have an easy time finding a society in which there’s little murder but quite a lot of imprisonment.

the answer would be to use a number of definitions of violence, rather than just one

Epicycles, exactly.

my frustration with the position that it’s somehow impossible to quantify violence is that, no, we should be able to convince a visiting Martian, through the use of statistics, that in fact Hong Kong is less violent than New York, which in turn is less violent than Sao Paulo, without requiring the Martian to visit said cities

If we’re to take ‘violent’ as somewhat synonymous with ‘likely to kill or harm you’ that doesn’t really follow. And you could also convince a visiting Martian that Hong Kong is less loving than New York, which in turn is less loving than Sao Paulo. There’s probably a sense in which that’s true.

If you claim not to agree with that ranking, you seem like a know-nothing, if you do agree, how do you know?

There are a lot of nonsense statements that I claim to agree with when pressed for an answer, not because my answer is meaningful but because I dislike fistfights. “I support the troops” comes to mind; if you disagree that we should support our troops, you seem like a moral monster, if you agree, then [fill in whatever you like].

If someone from Hong Kong asks me which is more violent, I’ll say uh probably NYC; if someone from NYC asks me which is more violent, I’ll say uh probably Hong Kong; if someone from neither place asks me, my brain will instantly start churning, not with computation of which place I’d feel safer in, but with calculation of which choice is less likely to cause conversational strife.

And ok, sure, “New York, NY is more violent than Waco, TX or Birmingham, AL” seems self-evidently true, on the {I would feel safer wandering through the fantasy-simplified version of that city that I currently have in my head, having actually visited neither place} metric. And that metric is probably what would matter if I was choosing a place to move, so ok, there are cases where the “where would I feel safest” metric obtains. I would feel weird drawing broader conclusions about the populations in either city from that (am I supposed to conclude that Waco and Birmingham are ‘better’ than NYC, in any meaningful sense?)

“the answer would be to use a number of definitions of violence, rather than just one”

Epicycles, exactly.

I don’t see how measuring degrees of violence is any less legitimate an enterprise than other attempts to measure human well-being, such as the various human development indices. Sure, none of them is objectively the best one, they have different strengths and weaknesses, but they do tend to be correlated.

The only big problem I can see is comparing more- to less-lethal violence, and accounting for the changing lethality of violence. But if more-lethal violence declines or increases, and other types of violence don’t change much in the same period, it’s not really problematic to say things got less violent.

Salient said:
If we’re to take ‘violent’ as somewhat synonymous with ‘likely to kill or harm you’ that doesn’t really follow

I honestly am lost here, Salient. That’s exactly what it means. The locals are *in fact* much less “likely to kill or harm you” in Hong Kong than in New York, and in New York than in Sao Paulo. If you disagree with that, you are removing yourself from important human knowledge. If you are going to go wander down a random street in Sao Paulo because it was safe to do so in Hong Kong you are acting quite stupidly. It is this kind of refusal to acknowledge basic facts because at times inconvenient that sabotages so much of the left in terms of practical, winnable politics.

Jawbone @ 133:

Exactly what would you trying to be trying to convince the Martian of? Is he/she/it a potential investor? A potential home buyer? A possible resident of the city? Given any one of these, or some other, context, we could surely come up with a perfectly useful (and indeed right) answer to the question of whether NYC or Hong Kong is more violent.

Part of the point of the OP (entirely right in my opinion) was that there are various forms of state-perpetrated (and perhaps culturally sanctioned) violence that we’re going to miss if we look at, say, violent crime statistics.

Also, what Salient said.

@js #144

The point is, Hong Kong is less violent than New York across the full range of relevant comparisons, from murder to rape to assault to imprisonment. Feeling unable (or, “weird”) to answer the question as to which is more violent is just badly retrogressive in terms of basic human knowledge about the world. It is to be an idiot for weird ideological reasons.

How can Pinker have attempted accurate statements about violence in the West without ever once mentioning European imperialism? Is the operative idea that violence caused, encouraged, or abetted by Europeans doesn’t count against them when it happens to populations outside of Europe?

Because he, like Diamond, mostly supports European imperialism.

@149 I don’t think that was really in doubt, the question is whether there’s been a decrease in casualties of armed conflict within the 66 year period since then.

Sorry for the repeated posts, but reading over this again …why does every discussion of violence end up with a good chunk of the (white) readership getting practically sexually excited as they rave about black men committing crimes and getting locked up.

It’s embarrassing. Please keep your fantasies to yourself.

One reason that Pinker’s thesis is flawed is that his statistics would count deaths during the so-called “Arab Spring” as violent, but wouldn’t count the very existence of the dictatorships under assault as violent (i.e. it’s hardly a moral improvement if a State rules through fear alone, not needing to resort to violence to get its way). Violence is subjective, as others have said. Some might say that Pinker is missing the violence inherent in the system.

@153 No, but on the other hand you have the extermination of half the population of the Congo by the Congo Free State under King Leopold of Belgium, a death toll of perhaps 10 million.

@151 What’s much harder to debunk is his basic thesis that the circle of those we consider part of our group has progressively expanded over the past several thousand years to include people who are not closely related to us, some of the more familiar domesticated animals (dogs, cats, horses) and even people who are not members of our particular nation-state.

I don’t think this kind of universalism is as new as you think it is. I’m even doubtful that more people are firmly convinced of it now, compared to 2000 years ago. Nation states are a very new thing, and who even has good evidence for how much people accepted the basic human worth of the rest of humanity before modern times? On the other hand, Buddhism at least has AFAIK pretty strong views on gratuitous cruelty to animals, and I know of at least literary and anecdotal evidence that it has generally been frowned upon in the Muslim world.

One thing you could look at is acceptance of infanticide, which has changed a great deal within recorded history. Islam and Christianity both strictly forbade it, and (at this point I’m just going off of Wikipedia, because I need to go grade papers) Buddhists in China didn’t forbid it–in fact, used reincarnation as a rationalization for it–male (but not female, or at least not as much) infanticide declined during the Ming period.

As a white person should I be concerned about the unjustifiable, disparate rate of black incarceration or should I keep that to myself lest it be thought a prurient fixation on my part?

After all, most ordinary men in ancient and medieval times carried weapons if away from home

Note that even if true, this would be illegal in modern times in most Western countries (except the US, where gun ownership and corresponding violence is high).

Just think of how dumb it would be for one to claim (re)distribution was impossible because who can tell who is “poor” or “rich.”

Inequality though, is itself a subjective quantity:

https://crookedtimber.org/2010/10/01/fun-with-gini-coefficients/#comment-334080

And the reason we haven’t had a World War since 1945 is because of Nuclear Weapons. This should be obvious to anyone with a brain.

I guess someone should tell historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa he has no brain then:

Yet Bernstein, Hasegawa, and many historians agree on one startling point. The public view that the atomic bomb was the decisive event that ended World War II is not supported by the facts.

If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons? We know they are dangerous. If they turn out not to be strategically effective, then nuclear weapons are not trump cards, but time bombs beneath our feet.

http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-07/bostonglobe/29861790_1_hiroshima-tsuyoshi-hasegawa-japan-surrender

Chris, I don’t see any alternative to scaling by population size. Suppose you had 50 million people who all lived in villages of population 50, where in each village 7 people died in the local orgy of violence. This seems to me exactly as violent as your Society A, and thus Society B is less violent.

‘The whole thread is rather impressive, given the number of people who offer substantive criticisms of Pinker’s book, and indeed aspersions on his character, while happily admitting they haven’t read it.’

Well there’s a large element of truth in that, but of course, if The Blank Slate hadn’t been so awful (indeed, this was a key point of the main post) then more people wouldn’t be inclined to write off Pinker’s new one.

But you must remember that the OP began with a link to a Guardian interview with Pinker in which he made some staggeringly bizarre points. His key argument would seem to be that the idea of ‘declinism’ is associated with the political left.

But giving this theory one second of thought (that is, one second more than Pinker gave it) would show that this is a highly problematic idea. Indeed, thinking for one second about why those on the left describe themselves as being progressives might give a serious thinker pause before proclaiming this concept to the rooftops.

It is certainly true that many on the left are opposed, generally, to the Whig View of History (for very good reasons). And also it is true that, as the true horrors of colonialism has made many on the left look again at pre-colonial civilisations: specifically as to whether they were quite as awful as the colonists made them out to be. And (again this is only common sense) the left is highly aware of the many forms of violence and ‘violence’ (e.g. poverty, environmental destruction) associated with capitalism.

But that’s very different from arguing, as Pinker seems to be arguing, that ‘liberals’ want us all to return to some prehistoric Arcadia. Nor is it the case the ‘environmentalists’ want that. Indeed, if Pinker wasn’t so intent on making right wing political arguments dressed up as science, he might have noticed that it is the environmentalists that champion the new sciences of climate change modelling, and the political right which oppose them etc. (and of course, this is even more apparent when it comes to ‘intelligent design’).

Equally, it is the political right who have gone out of their way to ignore the drop in violent crime that has occurred since 1995 and to continue to insist that we live in a uniquely violent age (and it’s no great mystery why they do that).

Right wing hysteria over the recent riots in the UK is highly instructive here, as is this article.

Note that even if true, this would be illegal in modern times in most Western countries

Isn’t the fact that there is a meaningful concept called ‘illegal’, backed up by more or less effective institutions, clearly going to be at the core of the relevant trends?

‘Secondly, the long decline in crime doesn’t postdate tabloid fearmongering but actually coincides with it. The tabloids’ great achievement has been to convince people that crime is going up even when it’s going down.’

Exactly. And if one wanted to know why that was, and cui bono, one could do a lot worse than study the works of a real psychologist (i.e. not Pinker).

‘”Mean World Syndrome” is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is.… Gerbner, a pioneer researcher on the effects of television on society, argued that people who watched a large amount of television tended to think of the world as an intimidating and unforgiving place. The number of opinions, images, and attitudes that viewers tend to make when watching television will have a direct influence on what the viewer perceives the real world as. They will reflect and refer to the most common images or recurrent messages thought to impact on their own real life. Gerbner once said “You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour,” he said. ‘It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.“‘

And cui bono?

‘Gerbner testified before a Congressional subcommittee on communications in 1981. He said that “fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postuires….They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities.”‘

If Pinker wasn’t so concerned with making cheap political points and attacking ‘liberals’ he might ask some hard questions about why Americans nowadays are so terrified of the (negligible) threat of ‘terrorism’, who is stoking these fears and why.

But I suspect that’s not a question that would interest him.

‘Consider, for example the documented fact that public cat-burning qualified as a form of light entertainment during the middle ages.’

Y’see this is typical of Pinker’s MO. First, a quick look at the relevant wikipedia page shows that this was a form of activitiy associated with the Renaissance (not the middle ages) and that it was mainly practiced in France. Secondly it wasn’t a form of ‘light entertainment’ but a ritualistic attempt to ‘cleanse’ the community of sin: with cats being associated with the devil.

Secondly, as you say, there is the issue of slaughterhouses.

And finally there is the issue of the internet. I’m sad to say, but many people still are amused and entertained by cat burning, public executions etc. albeit via electronic means, not ‘live’.

Only if we’re defining away some violence by declaring the law f the land to be inherently non-violent.

Colour me sceptical that you could change the trend by counting things plausibly violent-but-legal, as opposed to picking some other more or less arbitrary bad thing and choosing to apply the label ‘violent’.

It’s not like there wasn’t a lot of violent-but-legal things back in the day, say: (wiki)

In late December, shortly after Christmas, the combatants met in the grounds of an abbey in the Northern Paris suburbs. After lengthy ceremony battle was joined and after a furious and bloody encounter, Carrouges stabbed his opponent through the throat with his dagger and claimed victory, being rewarded with substantial financial gifts and a position in the Royal household. The duel was watched by the Royal court, several royal dukes and thousands of ordinary Parisians and was recorded in several notable chronicles including Froissart’s Chronicles and Grandes Chroniques de France.

Or lynching, conscript wars, slavery, …

If anyone wants to say they would prefer to live in a country where the rich fought duels, and sometimes wars, for power, go ahead. Could just be direct preference, or you could have some argument it would tend to lead to better outcomes. No need to redefine common words, make radical claims about the impossibility of knowing anything, or any other universal solvent of an argument.

There does seem to be something genuine going on here, connected to what Hidari said about ‘progressives’ @170. It’s not just the usual revolutionaries against progressives; there seems to be a real group of people who have a visceral,. pre-rational dislike for the concept of political improvement. I doubt they are actual feudal nostalgists.

I blame confusion sown by the US corporate media, the annexation of the term by one faction of the Democrat party, and the limitations of the US academic-led neoliberal+cultural left. I suppose there may be a religious element too.

1. Why assume that acclimatisation to institutional cruelty, social violence, war casualties (,…) are to be treated as a single category? To make one representative point: as any propagandist knows, the whole thing about warfare – these days at least – is that it tends to be treated as though morally exceptional. Since it is often done at considerably more than arm’s length even by those on the frontline (see robots, killer, flying: several thousands killed in Pakistan, mostly civilians) there’s good reason to expect that the waging of war is largely independent of social levels of violence.

2. Pinker: innumerate comparisons, such as between Afghanistan and Vietnam – can he really mean that arts grads can’t tell which of two numbers is larger?

3. Pinker: a hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common – as is ‘disagreeing with Stephen Pinker’, which might be a better way of describing the phenomenon.

4. Pinker: I try to explain historical changes in violent behaviour by showing how a changing historical environment (anarchy versus government, illiteracy versus literacy, parochial versus cosmopolitan milieus) engages the various parts of human nature in different ways. Sometimes our inner demons are activated, such as with greed, revenge, dominance, puritanism; at other times our better angels, such as self-control, empathy, fairness and reason have the upper hand.

If there is any point to the book it must really lie here. The range of phenomena involved (see 1) and of factors affecting them is pretty staggering. If Pinker examines, say, the (empirical) psychology of war and elucidates the ways in which normal people engage or acquiesce in atrocities, that is certainly of interest. But I suspect that this aspect will be almost Graylingesque in its elevation of mundane platitudes to the status of keen insight. Resort to ev-psych narratives seems likely to be about as useful as approaching the issues through the medium of contemporary dance. But headline claims and grandstanding apart, there could be something useful there.

5. There’s a bit of a problem with timescales here. Comparing the degree to which people are inured to seeing grotesque suffering, say, as between the C20th and the C10th in Europe, seems rather obvious and not necessarily very useful. And it’s not entirely clear that a long-term trend in terms of war casualties can be established (see below for inadequate figures).

I’m sympathetic to the project of pointing out that various plaints about the violence of modern youth etc are largely unfounded and that the 50s or the Victorian era were not notably less violent nor free from moral panic. But that’s very different from divining a general historical trend from a period of 10 or 20 years or whatever it’s supposed to be. It looks as though Pinker is doing a bit of a Fukuyama, extrapolating from the downward slope of the hillock on which he finds himself, to some grand narrative about the wider landscape of history.

There may be a bit of a lull under a kind of pax Americana, but the GWOT seems to have taken forward the Cold War language of spreading democracy (pssst! and capitalism) and combined it with newfound openness about belligerence, torture, lack of UN control etc. Probably 1 million dead in just one war, Iraq, in the 1st decade of the new American century, though a mere 50 thousand or so in Afghanistan and Libya so far. (Meanwhile, maybe another .5m in Darfur and 4m in Congo.)

6. The table supplied with the Graun interview, with a modicum of spreadsheet-based retabulation, provides the following century-by-century breakdown of war deaths from C3-C20 (numbers spanning centuries are divided evenly). I think this is about as useful as that particular set of data can be made for these purposes:

century . deaths(m)
8 . . . . .439
13. . . . .288
17. . . . .201
20. . . . .148
19. . . . .137
15. . . . . 95
16. . . . . 71
14. . . . . 60
18. . . . . 45
3 . . . . . 35
4 . . . . . 35
5 . . . . . 35
7 . . . . . 10
9 . . . . . 10
10. . . . . 10
11. . . . . 10
12. . . . . 10
6 . . . . . . 0

“Yeah, but surely everything that came before Leopold was better in the Congo. “We are less violent than Belgian colonialists” doesn’t sound sxey enough to sell lots of books.”

“Surely” is doing a lot of work here. I’m entirely ignorant of the pre-colonisation history of the Congo (as I imagine are most of us), but I don’t have any reason to believe that it was a peaceful utopia. In particular, there’s no good reason to suppose that people had better or more peaceful lives then than they do now. I agree that it’s hard to imagine that things were worse pre-colonisation than under Leopold, but the current situation of chronic low-level warfare with the resulting famine and so on seems likely to have prevailed for much of the past, as it has elsewhere in the world.

The general point about non-comparability made by quite a few others is applicable here of course.

I’m yet another person who hasn’t read the book but also, I must confess, I’m not a Pinker-hater. I think, for example, that The Stuff of Thought is quite useful, and have used it myself. His analysis of swearing is interesting and his penultimate chapter, on certain kinds of indirect speech (e.g. “Would you like to come up and see my etchings”) is worth serious consideration. Like many of you, I’ve read earlier and considerably shorter versions of Pinker’s current thesis in this or that place and, on the book, I’ve also seen his diavolog with John Horgan.

So, in # 79 Meredith asserts: I think of three things: the Geneva Conventions, the extension of legal rights and protections to a wider and wider range of people in any given jurisdiction, and a growing consensus (with its ups and downs, to be sure) that we must do our best to ensure that virtually all people on earth are decently fed and housed, receive basic medical care, and in general are treated with the respect that they deserve simply by virtue of being human beings.

I don’t know about the first, but I do think Pinker suscribes to and argues for the second and third, though perhaps not in those terms.

# # # # # #

Salient, #87: Same with saying we’re “less violent” than our ancestors of a few hundred years—are we giving ourselves a pat on the back? Well, ok, we don’t need to quantify anything in order to do that.

Are you saying that, since this is self-evidently true, we need not try to make an explicit argument? IS it self-evidently true? Or are you saying that we have no way of knowing whether or not we’re less violent than our ancestors, but we can (and should?) give ourselves a pat on the back anyway? OR, we don’t and cannot and will never ever know and we shouldn’t give ourselves a pat on the back.

Are we reassuring ourselves that there’s reason to be optimistic? Again, well, ok, no need to quantify.

Are you saying that, since this is self-evidently true, we need not try to make an explicit argument? Or is it that optimism comes cheap and so is of no significance?

Are we attempting to suggest we shouldn’t worry so much about modern-day atrocities because they’re dwarfed in scope by previous centuries’ atrocities? That seems self-evidently not ok.

I’m sure Pinker would agree. He doesn’t believe that we’re home free on the peace and ponies-for-all bus.

# # # # # #

McLaren, #153: What’s much harder to debunk is his basic thesis that the circle of those we consider part of our group has progressively expanded over the past several thousand years to include people who are not closely related to us, some of the more familiar domesticated animals (dogs, cats, horses) and even people who are not members of our particular nation-state.

I believe Pinker got that idea from, or at least attributes it to, Singer, no?

@Alex, #173: Pinker argues this as a causal factor in the overall decline in violence.

@Chris Bertram: …I think that it is probably true that the trend in interpersonal violence is probably down. This is an unsurprising fact, self-regardingly presented by Pinker as a bit of daring iconoclasm by him in the face of the humanities-educated liberal elite.

Yes, Pinker is annoying on the humanities elite business. Setting that aside, is this “unsurprising fact” also unimportant? If unimportant, why? If it IS important, then why not give the man some credit for at least attempting an extensive exposition of evidence and attempting, as well, to account for it? He’s not the first one to the idea by any means, but, as far as I know, this is a major attempt to put the argument before a large educated readership.

And fwiw, no, I don’t agree that incarceration is violence in this sense.

A substantial number of people (odd people, admittedly) would argue that it is, and that taxation is also violence in exactly the same sense.

Chris, I don’t see any alternative to scaling by population size.

I laid out a pretty solid alternative upthread…

I honestly am lost here, Salient. That’s exactly what it means.

If my examples of Waco and Birmingham didn’t cause anything to click, I’m not sure what else I can do to help, sorry. [I’ll let your calling me and those who agree with me pig-headed idiots go, as the CT regulars have been asked to keep the temperatures cooler around here, but that doesn’t mean I have to keep engaging.]

“and a proper and dispassionate look at the global picture .”

That would be interesting. Anyone know a professor type with a sabbatical year who could write a book about it?

Which we could then discuss?

stopping them crossing borders which were previously open

I really think that you are off in a blind alley here with the idea that lots and lots of state actions count as “violence” because they are enforced by the credible threat of violence. And the alley is also populated by the sort of person who says that taxation falls very definitely into this category – as does, really, any state action. The issue of making things like border controls (!) commensurate with actual violent acts is one that I doubt you want to really address.

To pick an example: in 1962, the British government changed the law on UK nationality; as a result, 5 million Hong Kong-born Chinese no longer had the automatic right to live in the UK.
In 1982, the British government engaged in the Falklands conflict, which resulted in the death or injury of around 3,000 British and Argentinian servicemen.

Which would you say is the more violent act?

“or perhaps take a look at the razor-wire at Mellila”

Is there something unusual about the way razor wire is used in Mellila? I have a Chubb lock on my front door, is that an act of violence too?

I make no apologies for mistrusting Pinker’s book without reading it. I’ve earned that right by having slogged my way through two large Pinker tomes while trying to set aside the sweeping, almost meaningless characterizations he made about people like me (a cultural historian of the family)–you know, those “cafe inellectuals” who are blockheaded enough to believe cultural and social factors matter when it comes to kinship. Only to read a flippant essay in the New Republic a few years later in which his whole argument turned on the importance of cultural and social factors when in comes to kinship–but this time an argument that let him bravely state the truth that Western people, with their social contracts and weaker kinship ties, are fundamentally different than those beastly Iraqis who all marry their cousins.

Pinker has put himself into the arena as a public intellectual. That means his value rests with whether he fairly and soundly frames scientific questions for readers who by definition with know less than he does about the science. So his track record matters. And that record is poor. He can’t be bothered to actually inform himself about what humanities scholars are actually arguing, but still has no qualms about dismissing their work as liberal nonsense. Meanwhile, he lets his own political investments and animus govern the way he chooses to frame the science, depending on the target of the moment. If so many readers are prepared to express suspicion–or even contempt–for a Pinker book they will never read, I think it says more about Pinker than his (non) readers.

Ajay, what’s so special about taxation and barbwire around warehouses? Any action (or a threat of action) undertaken to enforce property rights is violence. Otherwise, why don’t we invite some homeless people and tell Pinker to share his house with them? That would seem to make sense, wouldn’t it?

And they use barbwire simply because it’s cheaper than hiring people with guns.

SusanC @181:
I seem to recall from a psychology conference somewhere that pre-Vietnam, many soldiers were reluctant to kill in battle, but that, post-Vietnam, training methods used by the US have changed so that [its] soldiers are much more likely to kill.

A study of US combat in WW2 (S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire, 1947) found that most soldiers (I forget the exact percentage) never fired their rifles; perhaps this is what the first part of the above sentence refers to. I have no idea about the second part of the sentence or whether it’s correct. But this debate (or whatever you want to call it) is not about training methods so the point, even if correct, is by itself of doubtful relevance.

If you prefer, you can call it ‘coercion’. But if you actively refuse to comply, the response, of course, is likely to be violent.

Ajay, what’s so special about taxation and barbwire around warehouses? Any action (or a threat of action) undertaken to enforce property rights is violence.

Well, that’s a defensible position, of course. But it’s not the sense in which “violence” is commonly used, and I would venture to suggest that it’s probably not the sense in which Pinker etc are using it when they talk about modern societies being less violent.

You could have a sort of William Blake-ish approach in which the education of children is an act of violence. In that case literally everyone in every Western country is or has been a victim of state-sponsored violence for years at a time. But, again, that’s not the commonly understood meaning of “violence”. You could have a libertarian approach in which taxation is violence, in which case Sweden is a more violent country than Congo because the tax rate is so much higher. But, same objection.

If so many readers are prepared to express suspicion—or even contempt—for a Pinker book they will never read, I think it says more about Pinker than his (non) readers.

We are justified in condemning him out of hand without examining the evidence because lots of other people are doing the same thing. Nice one.

“Imagine a peacable favela, peacable because the drug gang enforces order ….”

It would make sense for the average inhabitant of such a favela to claim that his society had become radically less violent, wouldn’t it? Of course the situation wouldn’t be ideal but it would make sense to describe it as less violent

@212 It would make sense for the average inhabitant of such a favela to claim that his society had become radically less violent, wouldn’t it?

In that case, your best bet to diminish violence is more violence. Something like Singapore.

This reminds of this ‘memorable quote’ from the movie called Red Heat:

Art Ridzik: Yeah? Well, tell me something, Captain. If you’ve got such a fucking paradise over there, how come you’re up the same creek as we are with heroin and cocaine?
Ivan Danko: Chinese find way. Right after revolution, they round up all drug dealers, all drug addicts, take them to public square, and shoot them in back of head.
Art Ridzik: Ah, it’d never work here. Fucking politicians wouldn’t go for it.
Ivan Danko: Shoot them first.

@214, 215 In other words, introducing effective law enforcement is not the same as “they made a desert and called it ‘peace'”.

Kaveh – yes, I wasn’t supposing that the data was actually useful, just pointing out that even taken at face value, it doesn’t disclose a trend of decreasing ‘violence’ over time. And indirectly, I suppose, to highlight just how amazingly uninformative (anecdotal, innumerate, arts-graduate-ish) the data is in the form supplied.

@CB, ajay et al. re: threatened violence of border guards v threat of imprisonment for failing to disclose taxable income, refusing to instruct bank to pay IRS etc.

Libertarian squealing about generic ‘force’ is ridiculous partly because a respectable middle class type who evades tax is not going to get killed or injured (unless he/she really tries, e.g. by violently resisting arrest, saying something about a cop’s mother, etc). Someone attempting to cross a border, acting suspiciously while black, etc., may very well get shot or have the crap beaten out of them.

Just to harp on the statistics-hypocrisy angle, the “Worst Atrocities” chart is embarrassing for its historical gaps and its inconsistency for classifying violent “events”–first mentioned with regard to the Middle Eastern slave trade in the OP.

First, the claim that the deaths are the “median/mode of figures cited in encyclopaedias” is an outright lie. The An Lushan revolt (as noted above) figure is the largest argued (and a preposterous number besides). The “Middle East slave trade” is also the largest estimation (and quite contentious). Curiously, the Atlantic trade is nowhere near the high end of the estimates.

Second, how exactly are the two included slave trades enumerated? It looks as though he’s using numbers calculated from total people exported plus those killed in extraction of the slaves. Sure, huge portions of slaves in Atlantic tropical plantations died within 5 years, but some died more “natural” deaths. And the 20 million Amerindian deaths (very low estimate) certainly weren’t all at the end of arquebus, sword, and rifle.

Third, if “Middle East slave trade” is a unit of analysis or “Napoleonic wars,” why isn’t “British Empire” (or Spanish, or Ming, whatever) a unit worthy of inclusion in the chart? (And why are 20th-century British India famines not aggregated with the 19th-c?)

Fourth, where are the Crusades (3 million? deaths unless you add in the Cathars, Jews, and Baltics, which might add a million more)? Using his multiplication formula, this “event” roughly contemporaneous to the Mongol conquest should squeeze the crusades into #14 on the all time adjusted-for-human-inflation atrocity list! The fall of the Roman Empire is here, but what of building the empire (and its centuries-long slave trade)?! Certainly some few millions perished making Pax Romana, which–adjusted–should land them ahead of that piker Leopold!

A noted scientist writing a popularization that, in the opinion of other scientists, oversimplifies or leaves things out (IMHO How the Mind Works) is one thing. A scientist whose specialty is having an opinion on one of the most contested questions in his field (the question whether it’s actually his field’s question or another field’s also being a highly contested question) writing a book that presents his personal, professional take as truth, as with The Language Instinct, is another thing. A scientist publishing his own actually rather elegantly expressed thoughts about literature, as in the last chapter of The Blank Slate, is perfectly fine. You can see how a few people might be (justifiably) irritated, but that’s okay.

But these last two books, especially, have been science popularizations of a particular kind, almost falling into the category of science journalism, for a very broad audience, and as such there are certain expectations. Facts (even generalizations) that supposedly aren’t expected to be read as factual, but as “teaching tools,” seem beyond the pale to me. And I doubt that’s the case.

Though I did like how John Gray may or may not have asserted the non-existence of the Enlightenment altogether.

This discussion has really gone off the rails. The problem here is that there are three crappy ways of telling history:

1. The world is getting better and better
2. The world is going to hell in a handbasket
3. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

These I learned at my mother’s knee before I went to graduate school and learned fancy names like Whig history, declension narrative and equilibrium theory.

Good history engages the insight: “you don’t get something for nothing.” Who is getting what? What is lost? What is gained? Since Pinker apparently doesn’t engage these questions, I won’t bother reading him regardless of whether I think a) people should take more statistics (and by that I mean any – and they should) b) Humanists don’t know their way around statistics (contrary to popular belief, many of them do). c) this whole thing ignores a more interesting question about how does violence change over time? (And I’m surprised the whole medical technology piece drops out so quickly in discussion of homicide rates. Is there a comparison of homicide vs. attempted homicide charges out there that might lead one to conclude that the violence rate is constant but that the death rate has gone down?).

what is the more peaceful period you had in mind? (…) bad as things are, they are not as bad as at any previous point

I have listed two conflicts resulting in millions of deaths including the bloodiest conflict since WW2, as well as the bloodiest conflict in Europe since WW2, a full blown genocide and two neocolonialist wars of aggression led by the US that resulted in undeniably high rates of violence over long periods of time, if not extremely high casualty numbers. Now we can play games with numbers all day – and casualties are just the tip of the iceberg of violence – but I see the past twenty years as part of a continuum of violence rather than a turn for the better.

Bill Benzon: The ones I mentioned. I had forgotten the other one.

Re. the “peaceable favela”: Peace imposed by a gang is not so great. Actually, I doubt it would be so peaceful in most cases. How many gangs manage without an outlet for their enforcers among the ordinary folk? But even so, would peace imposed by outsiders be better? Especially if they were going around imposing peace on other places mostly to have an outlet for their own enforcers (or worse).

There’s a difference between a practice where violence is incidental (your football example) and one where it is an constitutive part of the practice.

Violent attacks on prisoners by other prisoners, or indeed by guards, are not a constitutive part of incarceration. They may be _common_ (in the US) but then so is violence in football.

Violent attacks on prisoners by other prisoners, or indeed by guards, are not a constitutive part of incarceration

Actually, I think the endemic violence in prisons is regarded as an integral part of the punishment by those parts of officialdom that actually consider the matter at all. Routine references to rape made by cops and prosecutors in US films are not invented, and evryone involved is aware that a significant part of the deterrent, especially where short sentences are concerned, is constituted by the fear of violence (which ironically means the most vicious thugs are less deterred than others).

In the end this comes under definitions of various kinds of violence, and why we care about it – are we concerned only for the victim, or do we require intentional violence on someone’s part, etc. Pinker’s approach so far as one can tell without wading through the 800 pages is to focus on deliberate direct attacks, sadism, glorification of cruelty, etc.

This is of course just the way a ‘free market’ advocate likes it – ‘unintended’ consequences due to callousness or – in practice – self-deception get a free pass. (Note Pinker counts avoidable famine as violence when it takes place in a military context, but apparently not otherwise).

There’s a weath of interrelated distinctions to be made which talk of generic ‘force’ ‘coercion’ or ‘violence’ obscures.

threat v warning (e.g. of own loss of temper)
imminent v remote
feared v dispassionately assessed (cf Nozick on residual fear of compensated attack)
rational v reflex reaction (e.g. goading)
harmful v harmless bodily contact
striking v restricting (I’d say manacling not essentially violent, just restricts liberty)
painful v painless

also
justified v unjustified
excusable v inexcusable
sadistic v callous v regretful
proportionate v disproportionate
easily avoidable v not

Going off on a bit of a tangent, but just to note that

Libertarian squealing about generic ‘force’ is ridiculous partly because a respectable middle class type who evades tax is not going to get killed or injured

and

endemic violence in prisons is regarded as an integral part of the punishment

are compatible at least so far as the UK is concerned, because we have special white collar ‘open’ prisons for people who are sufficiently refained that it wouldn’t be appropriate to subject them to all the additional (cruel but usual) aspects of punishment over and above restriction of liberty.

@bianca steele: FWIW, the reason I asked is because Stuff doesn’t really fit your characterization: “…science popularizations of a particular kind, almost falling into the category of science journalism.” It’s full of detail on semantics, detail that’s interesting if semantics interests you, otherwise, eww, all that boring detail–which was a common refrain in reviews.

On The Language Instinct, if someone says to me, “I don’t know anything about linguistics, what’s the one book I should read if I read only one”, well, at the moment The Language Instinct is what I’ll recommend. I’ll likely also tell them that I find the notion of a language instinct somewhere between unhelpful and flat-out-wrong, and that I don’t agree with the Chomskyian approach to grammar, which is what he offers in the book (though, FWIW, that’s not what he uses himself). But I simply don’t know of any other popular book that gives such a good overall feel for what contemporary linguistic thinking is about. I wish there WERE another, one that’s more skewed toward my own intellectual tastes. But, as far as I know, there isn’t.

Even for a post which started off “I can’t be bothered to actually read this book, but I’m going to slag it off anyway”, 236, with its combination of strawmannery and implied racism, is pretty low.

However, here goes: “Perhaps you believe that the guards all say “please step inside your cell, sir, otherwise I’ll be obliged to use force” and the convicts all reply “certainly, sir” and comply, and no actual shoving, manacling or beating happens or that it is incredibly rare?”

The latter, in fact. ie that the use of physical force by guards against prison inmates is extremely rare.
Why, how often do you think that a typical prisoner in a UK prison is the subject of a physical attack from a prison warder? Most of the time – and this may be a complete surprise to you – they don’t actually need to be beaten senseless and hurled into their cells every night, only to be beaten senseless and dragged out again for breakfast twelve hours later. They’re human beings, not caged animals. Given the choice between “walk into your cell” and “get into a fight, get bruised, and get shoved into your cell and denied privileges” they generally take the sensible option. Try talking to some ex-prisoners.

@Bill Benzon: I’m not sure what you’re getting at with your description of The Stuff of Thought as “not science.” It’s presented as psychology, Pinker’s field, a science (there are people who think of psychology as not science, but not many in US universities, and not AFAICS Pinker), and linguistics, also Pinker’s field, similarly (in all those respects) a science. It’s absolutely presented as a scientist presenting the discoveries of science for laypeople.

Yes, I think a jay is right on this one, violence is not a constitutive part of incarceration. And I would say that the KKK burning a cross osn the lawn of a householder is a threat of violence, not an act of violence. That does not mean it is not serious, or terrifying, or a crime, but it is not in the same category as actually assaulting that householder. Violence must mean something more precise than just crimes that we think are especially repugnant or it becomes more or less an empty category.

Omega 96: “If the normal state of human society without constraint is exponential growth of population, then for most of history, we’ve had a sort of Malthusian like incentive to kill off our co-competitors (other humans mainly).”

That statement is quite weird but also in a sense representative for what is wrong IMHO with this whole debate. Because, of course, exponential population growth is nowhere close to “the normal state of human society” (I’m disregarding the “without constraint” here because I am not aware of any society ever having existed “without constraint”). On the contrary, the high population growth rates of the past 200 years (exceeding 2% in the middle of the 20th century) are a historical anomaly. Population growth rates were almost negligible, 0.1% or less, for most of human history.

This whole debate suffers from an absurd over-interpretation of recent short term trends. Has warfare been slightly lower in the past 20 years compared to the preceding 20 years? If it were, would it really matter? Do we have reason to believe in any kind of sustained long term trend towards less violence? Such would seem to be extremely hard to argue since it would have to dismiss at least WWII as a mere outlier. But as someone pointed out above, the violence of WWII and the Shoah was unmistakeably modern. Any argument therefore that tries to link modernity with peacefulness has a hard time coming to terms with the modernity aspect of modern violence.

This whole debate suffers from an absurd over-interpretation of recent short term trends.

No, that’s not the debate, it’s a sideshow. All this is merely a launchpad for some equivalent of “Countries with McDonald’s Never Fight Each Other”.

https://twitter.com/#!/crookedfootball/status/125999249589665792 ::

>@crookedfootball Chris Bertram

>@dsquareddigest I’ve been hoping for a DeLong intervention [in this thread], so I can joke that, before, the internet, I’d have punched his lights out.

I think that pretty much says all that needs to be said. Satisfied?

@259 piglet – well said.

JQ 184:

“I’m entirely ignorant of the pre-colonisation history of the Congo (as I imagine are most of us), but I don’t have any reason to believe that it was a peaceful utopia. In particular, there’s no good reason to suppose that people had better or more peaceful lives then than they do now. I agree that it’s hard to imagine that things were worse pre-colonisation than under Leopold, but the current situation of chronic low-level warfare with the resulting famine and so on seems likely to have prevailed for much of the past, as it has elsewhere in the world.”

There goes the Whiggish history. JQ doesn’t know anything about precolonial Congo but surely there is no “reason to believe that it was a peaceful utopia”, from which logically follows that people in that part of the world would be starving and killing each other even if colonialism had never happened. Because, it is simply hard to imagine otherwise when you are partial to the Whiggish view of history.

Now that was convincing.

Henri V.:
No, that’s not the debate, it’s a sideshow. All this is merely a launchpad for some equivalent of “Countries with McDonald’s Never Fight Each Other”.

This is ludicrous. It is Henri V.’s apparent mode of proceeding: Tar the people with whom you’re arguing w/ the brush of Thomas Friedman, originator (afaik) and proponent of the silly ‘McDonald’s theory’.
This has nothing to do with McDonald’s. It has nothing to do with denying the “modern” aspect of mass bureaucratized violence. It has nothing to do with “absurdly over-interpreting short-term trends.” These are all straw men thrown up by commenters who are determined to avoid certain facts — which I’m not going to repeat since I’ve already mentioned them probably more than once.

To be clear: Some good-faith disagreement on these matters is to be expected and I think I sort of see where e.g. Timberman is coming from, even though I don’t agree with him. But the Henri V. comment about the ‘McDonald’s theory’ is pure trolling. It’s a silly attempt, as I said, to tar your opponents w the Friedman brush and think you’ve won the argument. Really really low.
Parts of this discussion, featuring some commenters authoritatively pronouncing on subjects (e.g. the incidence of war) on which they might charitably be described as uninformed, have been much less than edifying.

OK, bianca, I think I got you. No, Pinker is certainly not some kind of seer who’s magically right about Something Deep even if he’s got the ‘facts’ wrong. But he’s not the blind ideologue that some in this conversation seem to think he is, nor is he even a conceptual dullard with a gift for catchy prose. He’s a smart man with something to say and, by ordinary standards in these matters, his technical program (which, as far as I know, he’s never abandoned) justifies a Harvard professorship.

I do, however, think there’s something more than popularization going on here and there in at least some of his books. He’s trying to think on a scale that’s all but forbidden to any academic except perhaps for certain kinds of philosophers and literary critics. There’s some of that going on in The Stuff of Language and I think that’s all to the good. And I’d wager there is some of that in the current book as well. Anyone who attempts such work is almost certain to fail in small and not-so-small ways. But don’t we need someone to take a serious try?

Peter 265: “A population growth rate of 0.1% is exponential.”

Well yes I am aware of that. However, I don’t think we really have that precise figures of past population counts to pinpoint when and where exponential growth really occurred. More to the point, I was responding to a post (96) that clearly assumed high growth rates. A constant very low population growth rate (e. g. about one per year in a tribal group of 1000 people) would hardly suffice as an “incentive to kill off our co-competitors”.

This is pretty weird; it looks as if some people are putting the cart before the horse and it’s not even a horse; it’s an ostrich that people are calling a horse in the hopes that this will somehow make their arguments not only valid, but relevant.

Let me ruthlessly rip off a story from Jack Vance and posit a future society that’s managed to reduce what we would all agree was violence to zero. How do they do this? Simple: at birth, every citizen is fitted with a indestructible tamper-proof collar containing an explosive charge which is impossible to remove. Citizens whose transgressions are deemed a sufficient threat the social order can be dealt with simply by punching in a certain code at any convenient terminal anywhere in the world.

It’s a pretty peaceable place, actually. There are no assaults and no robberies, no public drunkeness, no public enemies. People respect each others personal boundaries and have a natural inclination to volunteerism. Should they be called on by their government to make personal sacrifices on behalf of all citizens everywhere, they seldom display any hesitance to cooperate.

Now Pinker might give this society high marks for having abolished violence, but somehow I get the impression that most people wouldn’t really want to live there . . . I just can’t quite put my finger on it somehow.

An act of violence has been perpetrated on a victim if and only if the victim, if given the chance to do so safely as an alternative to the act, would have preferred to sprint at top speed away from the source of the threat until falling over from exhaustion.

SoV, that’s the question of justice. It seems that what’s behind much of the debate is the question of legitimation. We understand there are some acts (rape, robbery, arson, murder) which justify violence administered by someone in response. But that then raises the question of whether to count this as as bad as actual violence or not. The democratic state imposes violence that is in some ways essential to society: without it there is so much more, as everyone other then Henri (and probably a few others) seem to think. State violence can exist: anyone denying it wasn’t awake during the WWII period. But ordinary administration of criminal law, while it involves acts that for any private individual would be violence, seems to live in a different moral category. Yet at the same time this administration can also be morally corrupt. (See 1984)

Harold, there is world of difference between exporting the murder of European Jews and Russian PoWs to Poland and engaging in a distant war against a totalitarian enemy.

I’m suprised no one has mentioned this yet:

http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict/Battle-Deaths/

Salient @272 An act of violence has been perpetrated on a victim if and only if the victim, if given the chance to do so safely as an alternative to the act, would have preferred to sprint at top speed away from the source of the threat until falling over from exhaustion.

I guess you’re proposing this as a proxy, not actually an all-inclusive definition of violence, but I still think I can break your definition. What about situations where people choose not to run from violence? For example, what about martyrs? Not just martyrs who give up their lives, but martyrs who expose themselves to serious pain in order to advance a cause by exposing the brutality of their enemy–something that is probably true of a large number of people who publicly demonstrate against the government, anywhere? Some of the people who suffered pepper spray or blows from police clubs would not have run away from those injurious situations even if they could have (around the start of February, I heard from a friend of people protesting in Egypt that a friend of mine, and their friends, were “ready to die”). They put themselves in harm’s way and did not sprint away from the attackers until exhaustion. Does that mean they weren’t exposed to violence?

You might object that under normal circumstances, they would have sprinted away from the attacker to the point of exhaustion, but how uncommon are abnormal circumstances, really? Being in Egypt, which has relatively little violent crime, and on top of that a good number of the protesters were well-to-do and lived in safe neighborhoods, it’s probably the case that most of these people faced far more violence-in-abnormal-circumstances than violence-in-normal-circumstances. I’m sure that some of the men, at least, and as adults, never faced a situation which they sprinted away from and would have continued sprinting from to the point of exhaustion.

If the condition is then that you could find situations, absent the moral/political cause, where somebody would have sprinted away as an alternative to the act, that might restore the possibility of political violence, but then how do you determine the role of emotion in the decision to run or not run? And what about other situations where people choose not to run from violence?

What about situations involving, for example, domestic abuse, where an individual chooses not to run from violence because of their personal ties to the violent one? What about machismo and bravado, wanting to prove oneself powerful, physically or otherwise (say, through one’s ability to love)? What about irrational fears? I don’t think it’s as straightforward as you’re suggesting to classify acts into ones a person would run from given the chance, and ones one wouldn’t.

@nostalgebraist, #277: And you survived, critical faculties in good order, ready to think another day. Hallelujah!

I agree with ajay here that the Americans in the audience have a tendency to fetishize prison violence and rape and/or to assume it’s normal. Well-functioning prisons in civilized democracies don’t have to involve much violence at all, and even the act of getting people to those prisons (from arrest to incarceration) can be done through fairly low-violence means.

It’s a bit depressing that so much of the internet-based discussion of crime and punishment, and the related issue of the “war on drugs” is tainted by the US’s weird and racist criminal justice history, and its lurid mass media depictions of same. It would be best if when discussing prisons we distinguished between (moderately) well-functioning systems (such as in Canada, the UK, and Australia) and poorly-functioning systems. Or between systems that genuinely aim to respect at least some of the humanity of their inmates, and systems that don’t.

I know how some smart-arse is going to find a news report about something horrendous that happened in a British or Aussie prison, but … whatever. meh.

sg @ 282

I don’t disagree with your characterization of U.S. prisons and criminal justice system at all, but I do wonder if the history of places like Long Kesh doesn’t leave some room for doubt about the humanity of British prison administration. Perhaps some of the Irish main page contributors would like to weigh in on the subject. As an American, I have only fleeting impressions of something that from this distance seemed awfully nasty in both theory and practice.

I know how some smart-arse is going to find a news report about something horrendous that happened in a British or Aussie prison, but … whatever. meh.

LMGTFY: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=violence+in+UK+prison

@282 The issue isn’t so much that prisons can be violent as that being in prison isn’t the same thing as being subject to violence. The two might always be positively correlated, but to very different degrees in different prison systems. And this is an issue even if you hold that imprisonment itself constitutes violence.

Salient @283, I agree it would be silly to say that violence simply can’t be defined, and I’m intrigued by your attempt to define it. I’m not sure about it having binary nature. Part of me likes the idea of a victim-sensitive definition of violence, but I still think it is better to avoid defining violence in a primarily subjective way.

I don’t see how you can assign a sufficiently stable value/set of values to {the experience of complete bodily physical exhaustion}. Maybe it’s because my prior experience with these kinds of questions is with the intro micro-economics version of “utility”. But, for one thing, that’s not even always necessarily a bad experience, some people actually try to achieve it through exercise or other physical regimens (fasting, &c.). For another, the thing that would make it bad in an obviously violent context is the emotions that go along with it, i.e. you are running from something that you imagine to be horrible, imagining what is about to happen to you, you’re not just running and getting tired. Or maybe this is a failure of my own imagination, because I don’t really appreciate the experience of total physical exhaustion. I’ve been in severe pain before due to an illness, and incapacitated and exhausted, and there are still things I’d prefer that experience over… maybe that’s not the same as what you mean by total physical exhaustion? But then I’m not sure what would qualify as total physical exhaustion, if you are specifying an emotional state too.

[A fundamental rule ~ If a person sincerely feels that they’re the victim of violence, then they’re the victim of violence. That’s not a necessary condition, but it’s sufficient.]

I think even this seemingly iron-clad rule will trip up on the frequency with which people both 1) invite and 2) imagine violence being perpetrated on them. For example I think we’d all be comfortable with saying forcing someone to engage in sexual acts (even if it doesn’t involve physical injury) could be called violent. But what about forcing people to violate other taboos? Being tricked into eating human flesh is a no-brainer at least WRT most people, but what about being tricked into violating taboos based on, say, strongly-held religious beliefs (I mean, ones that would result in a *sincere* feeling of being subject to violence, not Wattson’s silly, oh-so-unsurprising-ripped-from-the-headlines example), or beliefs in one’s racial superiority to other people?

But then (and IMO less problematic), what if two participants in a boxing match give different answers as to whether they were subjected to violence, because one of them thinks of boxing as an art form and sees physical injury in boxing as no different from falling off your bike, and the other one truly loves being violent (and is willing to suffer violence from others for the opportunity to dish it out)?

What about various macho types who really get a thrill out of violence? I think this includes a lot of people, actually. The feelings people have towards violence they mutually participate in can be complicated. I think this is where the binary-nature-of-violence assumption could encounters really serious problems.

I think it actually might have been hard for many Medieval Persian-speakers to even answer the question, for linguistic reasons–I think, though I’m not sure, that خشونت, the word we use today for “violence” (for example, to translate the English word, “violence”) wasn’t commonly used for this purpose until recently. In the one very old example of the meaning corresponding to “violence” in the Dehkhoda dictionary, it is used to describe somebody’s words. I would need more data than I was able to find in a few minutes of research, but I think this is the case.

I think the best approach is not to try and come up with a rigorous definition of violence, and then see where in history we can find it. Rather, work in the more top-down manner of writing a historical narrative: look for trends in certain types of violence within given times and places, accept that our definitions are somewhat arbitrary, and that there is a kind of uncertainty principle at work (the longer the time period and the more diverse populations you include, the less rigorous the definitions can be), and see what kinds of violence we can meaningfully track, or even ones for which data *could* exist (even though it might be mostly lost)–thinking of more domestic forms of violence here. For this reason, I think the “wage slavery is violence” end of the inclusiveness spectrum is better avoided.

Having been accused of Know-Nothingism, pigheadedness, and what-not, let me try this once more:

If one assumes some specific purpose or context (e.g. which policies—presumably of a recognizably modern state—would reduce violent crime; which would be a better place to live or visit, etc.), then of course we can make perfectly good comparative judgments about more or less violent places or times (assuming that the times at issue are more or less comparable).

But of course this isn’t Pinker’s point, is it? His thesis about declining violence is supposed to establish that the current state of affairs in the Free World (or whatever’s it’s now called) is the best actual, and perhaps possible, state in human history (more or less). And the kind of comparative judgments mentioned above won’t get you this. They won’t get you anywhere near close. And again, there’s simply no reasonable metric for measuring violence that’ll get you Pinker’s conclusion, or anything like it.

On a related note, suppose ajay and others are right that incarceration/credible threats of violence, etc. are not in fact acts of violence. What exactly does this get you? Suppose a society where everyone (and why not?) is incarcerated, but there are no murders. Assuming ajay’s point, this society would be less violent than a previous one that it replaced, say, where almost no one was incarcerated but a few number of people died violent deaths. So is the society where everyone is incarcerated better than the one it replaced? The question answers itself. (This of course merely recaps ScentofViolets @270.)

js @290 As for imprisonment as violence, the problem is that violence is not the only bad thing in the world, so if the world is less violent, that probably, but not necessarily, means it is better in general.

Watson, you’re absolutely right, it’s a legitimate question. I think we’re pretty much on the same page as far as saying that particular violations of taboos in certain modern contexts, at least, simply shouldn’t be regarded as violence.

And getting back to the main point, I am, however, sure that we could come up with other contexts in which “merely” violating “merely” religious taboos really is violent. For example, stealing somebody’s hat (even if they really, really like the hat) isn’t violent, but deftly swiping a woman’s hair covering that she is wearing (for reasons of piety/modesty) probably would (sometimes) count according to Salient’s definition of whether somebody sincerely feels they were subject to violence. But this act could be violating in a particular sense only because of the taboo. Religious beliefs/rules affect how we define our personal space, but once that personal space is defined, to violate it is, well, violent. But then, you have to give a similar consideration to taboos (regarding personal space, hygiene, &c.) based on notions of class, race, or caste, and somehow that feels icky…

The question of whether the world is more “violent”, defined in particular ways, is interesting and worthwhile (and this puts me a couple more levels into the abyss, but I’m not even reading reviews of Pinker’s book, because in spite of what I think was an implicit invitation to do so in the OP, nobody’s really offered any good reason why I should pick up this particular work by Pinker, so there!) even if it simply can’t support the point Pinker supposedly wants it to support.

In utter and complete sympathy with Kaveh and dr ngo: why are we focusing on violence at all, when we could be talking about justice? That seems to me the more important, the more valuable (carefully chosen word) question.

@294 It’s funny, I actually thought asking about violence was a more interesting (and maybe more manageable) question than asking if the world has become more just–that seems like it’s been done to death. Asking about justice is a more inherently, basically valuable question, maybe, but much less interesting because “justice” is so close to the words we already use to describe social orders, whereas “violence” is somewhat more oblique to them, and constitutes a particular and (for some definitions) easy-to-isolate part, and furthermore, the older forms of it are partly but not entirely intuitable to us now.

@295 but I doubt the average male of many past times and places thought of themselves as a victim when they were injured or killed, or even would have preferred to avoid death or injury if it meant loss of honour, status, possessions…

Hmmmm… I’m not sure if I’m ready to accept that they wouldn’t see themselves as a victim, but maybe if I read more of the right texts/ethnography I’d become convinced of this. I would think that at least in the Ancient and Medieval urban settings, even if people were more ready to rise to defend their honor with a sword than they are now, I’m not so sure that they necessarily relished doing it, or that this was generally the case in urban settings (I don’t remember ever reading about duels as an aspect of Middle Eastern social history in any period, but maybe I just missed out on it).

My point was more that people still operate this way to some extent, even for totally frivolous or at least not extremely grave reasons. So treating violence strictly as something people try desperately to avoid might blind us to some of the psychological factors involved in trends of increasing or decreasing criminal violence in countries not at war.

CB and Torquil Macniel @ 250-253 (and other related posts).

Whether a cross burning on the front lawn is an act of violence or not is a matter of the context. Burning a cross itself is an act of vandalism. It becomes a threat of violence in a context where actual violence has occured in relation to the symbol.
So the question of whether that act is violent or not exists in relation to the level of actual violence that is occuring in the society – a social context in which cross-burning was a credible threat of violence would already have a higher level of actual physical violence, which could be measured independantly (if it could be measured).

The flaw in that argument, of course, is that a symbolic act may signal a significant threat of violence due to historical levels of violence associated with the act, even if the level of contemporary physical violence is much lower.

Likewise, I would argue that the level of physical violence present with incarceration is what should be measured, not incarceration itself. A prison system in which actual physical violence rarely occurs is less violent than one in which physical acts of violence are routine.

John

298: “Assault (or common assault) is committed if one intentionally or recklessly causes another person to apprehend immediate and unlawful personal violence.”
So you don’t actually have to make contact, but you do have to do something like raise a fist or say “I am going to break your arm” or something.

Cross-burnings come under “threat of harm” or “intimidation” or similar, and under hate speech laws if such applied.

I notice that Yglesias has just posted on the same book, by the way:

“I think I’m sufficiently interested in the subject of Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that I should actually read it instead of simply reading the coverage.”

Ooh, snap, as they say.

269: You do realise that there’s nothing actually wrong with optimism in itself? Can I wake up and feel cheerful without being accused of being Thomas Friedman?

Not sure if someone posted this already (if that’s the case sorry), but as a substitute to the book, Pinker deploys the arguments here:
http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

Read this a while ago, and have been sitting on the sidelines here trying to grasp what’s going on. Can’t say I have arrived at it yet…

I haven’t read the book and don’t plan to, however, after reading the summary above, I tend to have the same feelings as actio @#15. Argument looks convincing, however data flaky (loved the spanking poll for relevance…). And reduced “violence” (introduce appropriate qualified term if you prefer) does not mean awful realities exist and the game should be picked up to eliminate those that we can.

Is there a catchy Latin name for pre-emptively caricaturing your opponent’s position before someone has had a chance to advance it. If not, clearly there should be.

If one assumes some specific purpose or context (e.g. which policies—-presumably of a recognizably modern state—-would reduce violent crime; which would be a better place to live or visit, etc.), then of course we can make perfectly good comparative judgments about more or less violent places or times (assuming that the times at issue are more or less comparable).

I think this is kind of backwards. Something can be generally true without being politically useful in a particular context. You can only explain the problem with the general truth in terms of that specific context.

Certainly, the human world is a complicated enough place that any general statement, no matter how true, will have particular contexts, relevant to political struggle or choice, where emphasising that truth would be unhelpful or misleading.

For example, take the data on the violent mortality rates in tribal societies (popularised but not originated by Pinker), bring that up in the context of the recent treatment of such people by the Australian state, and you are likely to end up finding yourself on the unwise side of that argument.

Maybe that kind of thing, in some people’s experience, happens often enough that they are starting to develop a general aversion to true statements? So they counter with not a different proposed truth or theory, but a set of universal rhetorical strategies ( nobody knows nothing) that would apply equally to any and all such claims?

That certainly would explain how this thread is approaching the point where it’s a meaningful fraction of the length of book, without anyone so far owning up to having done more than skimmed it in a book store.

Ashwin @24 says they read it, soru

Walt@306: Is there a catchy Latin name for pre-emptively caricaturing your opponent’s position before someone has had a chance to advance it.

I think occupatio comes close, although some seem to define it more as just a form of paralipsis.

Mordaunt @307:
Pinker doesn’t include the Congolese Civil War which, with a death toll of 5.4m over a decade or so seems to indicate that our species’ capacity for carnage has not significantly abated.
The Congo death toll figure of 5.4 million is WRONG. (How many times do I have to say this?)
From Winning the War on War (pp.253ff):

…the claim that 5.4 million people died as a result of the war in Congo since 1998 is way too high. One or two million would be much closer to the truth…. [p.261-62:] The IRC [International Rescue Committee] researchers arbitrarily used the average mortality rate for all of sub-Saharan Africa — 18 per thousand annually — as representing Congo’s rate before the war. But this is a very bad choice, because clearly Congo’s mortality rate was already much worse than the African average before the wars ever broke out in 1996. This is because Congo is much poorer than the average African country….In the World Bank’s recent listing of GDP per person in 210 countries, Congo ranked…last, with $280 per person per year…. The…GDP number for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole was $1,950… these income differences created high mortality in the Congo compared with sub-Saharan Africa as a whole….The researchers also extend the war deaths estimate forward year by year as the war itself recedes…. Their idea is that the war shocked the mortality rate up from the African average [which it was a mistake to use to begin with] to a high level, which has remained elevated ever since…. But this is not the case–Congo’s mortality rate was rising before the wars began in 1996 and falling after the war ended in 2003. The…indirect deaths that derive from the war would be those during the temporary additional rise in mortality during the war years themselves…. [L]ooking at the available…estimates, the total war deaths is clearly much more like 1-2 million than the claimed 5.4 million….

In short, the 5.4 million figure depends on: (1) underestimating the mortality rate in Congo before the war, and (2) overestimating the mortality rate during and after the war.

The Congo death toll figure of 5.4 million is WRONG.

… is wrong

There is a debate about methodology and numbers between the IRC/Burnet Institute (authors of the study) and the HSRP (Human Security Report Project) – see e.g. here.

The fact that Goldstein chooses to side with the HSRP is hardly decisive and not surprising since the thesis of his book is that conflict casualties have gone down dramatically over the past decades, so of course a high death toll in Congo would be very inconvenient to him.

novakant 316: more to the point, if scholars’ estimates of the death toll of a recent conflict differ by a factor of five, how well constrained does anybody think are estimates from centuries ago? As a methodological suggestion, maybe somebody can run a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations using the whole spectrum of estimates and then tabulate how often a statistically significant trend emerges.

Not that I really think this is worthwhile doing. I think the general flaw in the Pinkerian project, as I pointed out at 254, is that any attempt to link modernity with peacefulness has a hard time coming to terms with the modernity of modern violence. The Pinkerian (or Friedmanian or whatever) project is simply to deny the Dialectic of Enlightenment. And that is wrong and intellectually dangerous.

“Let us assume that the level of personal violence is down and that this is compensated for by more state violence, is that a bad evolution to have?”

As Henri says, depends on who you ask. But first we’d have to agree what should count as state violence and apparently we can’t. I maintain that incarceration is clearly violence (even absent beatings). Incarceration is physical, it restrains bodily movement. It historically has replaced other violent forms of punishment like flogging (or gladiator games, as somebody mentioned). I see that one could make the argument that this represents a move from more to less violence. And one could make the opposite argument, or one could maintain that the wrong question is being asked. What is not intellectually honest, in my view, is to say: “I shall judge modernity by comparing modern violence with premodern violence but I’ll make sure to use a definition of violence that ignores the structural violence embedded in modern state power.”

The Pinkerian (or Whiggish) argument I am most suspicious of is the one that celebrates our purported intolerance of certain forms of cruelty (the burning cat example). As pointed out, the conquistadors and other colonialists used similar arguments to maintain their moral superiority over non-European cultures, painting them as cruel and backward while themselves inflicting far worse atrocities on the natives in the name of civilization. Any debate about modernity and violence that ignores this history is a grotesque failure.

311: even for that guy the difference is that he may argue his specific case and we may argue such cases in general with a hope of changing the rules e.g. via elections that are open to people outside the elite. If it would be a matter of tit for tat to be applied in the street, that guy could have been lynched. I assume we do not prefer lynching.

I frankly don’t understand what elites have to do with this however lousy they may be in many other matters. If anything the elites would be softer on crime afaics. It’s the popular vote in urban areas that has driven towards a tougher approach on crime. At least that is how it was in my city.

@322,

Rules do change; via elections – it seems unlikely to me (because of certain institutions and beliefs), but somehow they do change. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Lately it hasn’t been going well: some bad new wars, some bad new law.

I agree that most of the population in urban areas probably is in favor of a tougher approach on crime. But so what; that’s not here nor there. The issue is the existence of these areas, the conditions in these areas. Unless, of course, you believe that criminality there is not a product of the environment but a result of mentally defective individuals somehow gravitating to these areas.

Yes, lately it hasn’t been going well and that for sure increased crime. But a general cause is not sufficient to explain an individual crime. If it were so that woumd be very unjust to the great many people suffering from the same general cause and not committing any individual crime. That said, it is sufficient to change the rules so as to avoid criminalizing people for petty crimes committed out of need, this is in my city also the change that is being made.

And no it is not tit for that, it is worse which is exactly why people favour taking violence from citizens and entrust it to the law. There is no violence more violent than constant threat of random application of violence, with no recourse but reciprocating with more violence.

js. @ 290:

… suppose ajay and others are right that incarceration/credible threats of violence, etc. are not in fact acts of violence.

Leaving aside the question of incarceration, it’s more than a little odd to claim that the threat of violence is the same thing as violence, when it rather obviously isn’t. The whole point of a threat of violence is the prospect, but not the actual existence, of violence. If the violence happens, there is no longer any threat.

Of course, it would be idiotic to then conclude that threats are irrelevant, or meaningless, or inconsequential. Saying that the only thing which matters in human history is violence is a (straw-man) position as silly as arguing that only the prevalence of disease matters. (A society without disease but with lots of [well-defined] violence is better or worse than a disease-ridden society with less violence: discuss.)

Most legal systems recognize a distinction between threats of violence and actual violence: threatening to burn down a store (or to kill someone) may well be a criminal act, but it is not exactly treated the same as actually burning down a store (or killing someone). Armed robbery is worse than simple theft because of the element of threat; but any actual violence that takes place during an armed robbery is a separate, additional crime.

From the good old Wikipedia:

The monopoly on violence (German: Gewaltmonopol des Staates) is the conception of the state expounded by Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation. According to Weber, the state is that entity which claims a monopoly on violence, which it may therefore elect to delegate as it sees fit. Weber’s conception of the state as holding a monopoly on violence has figured prominently in philosophy of law and political philosophy in the twentieth century.

It’s not even clear that pre-industrial war was less deadly than modern industrial war – although the latter is certainly faster. French deaths in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars are of the same order of magnitude as those in World War I, and it’s not hard to find plausible estimates of population losses due to war that rival or even exceed Soviet losses in World War II (over ten per cent of population). Some I have come across include the Elizabethan and Cromwellian campaigns in Ireland, Thirty Years War in Germany/Bohemia and the Mongol conquests of Iran and Georgia. We cannot, of course, get precise estimates, but the surviving evidence offers an order of magnitude.

Further to Meredith, a try at estimating trends in some more obvious forms of violence over time is not an exercise in moral philosophy, if only because the morality of violence has altered. A capacity for inflicting or enduring violence was often admired in past times.

The discussion of incarceration versus violence, and evaluation thereof, does seem pretty counter-factual. Claiming a trade-off exists may make for a more interesting moral discussion, with better opportunities for striking postures, but it has little else to recommend it. It’s all a bit trolleybus.

In the real world, when you compare the USA to peer states, it has both more violence and more incarceration. And in theory, other things being equal, greater violence will almost certainly cause greater incarceration, and very likely vice versa. And there are plenty of available polices that, given sufficient funding and moderate competence in execution, could be expected to reduce both.

They don’t get put into place, largely because the profit extractable from the difference in desirability of a minimum wage job and jail is greater than that between the same job and welfare.

@334.

Sure, I guess I agree with pretty much everything here. My last post was responding to specific a thesis (Pinker’s thesis, which this thread was nominally supposed to be about, I thought), and various posts that seemed to providing partial defenses of this thesis.

If you leave all this out, it will no doubt seem trolley case-ish.

But Novakant, what is the point of quibbling about the numbers for the Congo, when (@228) you’re just going to ignore the numbers in the end anyway? Why not stick to the claim that as long as some people are dying, violence can’t be declining?

But JQ 338, if you admit having no knowledge of and no evidence about violence in pre-colonial Congo (see 184), why make claims? Si tacuisses.

Alex 339, the claim about prehistoric hunter-gather societies is highly contentious at best. Again see http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/09/pinkers_new_book_has_a_fundame.php.

“Several conflicts of the distant past took a proportionately greater toll on the global population than the world wars” – even if true, that is not sufficient to establish a long term trend.

Peter 332: this and other posts raise the question what the frame of reference is. C20 compared to C17? C16-20 compared to C11-15? The last 50 years compared to the preceding 11,000 years? Some of the examples you give – Cromwellian campaigns in Ireland, Thirty Years War – are preindustrial but not premodern. That is relevant. If the thesis is one of a long term trend toward less violence due to civilizational progress, it should give us at least a little bit of pause to observe that our current level of civilization was heralded by some of the most savage butcheries in history. And the observation that *not all* savage butcheries are modern (look, the 8th century An Lushan revolt was unimaginably terrible if we can trust 8th century census figures) is hardly a convincing argument in favor of Pinker.

If the thesis is one of a long term trend toward less violence due to civilizational progress, it should give us at least a little bit of pause to observe that our current level of civilization was heralded by some of the most savage butcheries in history.

Or not. To take an analogy, you’d expect to see a lot of progress in firefighting in the immediate aftermath of the Great Fire of London. If there’s ever a bird flu pandemic, I reckon there will be a lot of improvements in flu vaccines and treatments in the years immediately after it. Why shouldn’t civilisational progress towards nonviolence be strongest immediately after a terrible outbreak of violence? The UN was devised during the bloodiest war in history.

“By the early 1990s Americans had gotten sick of the muggers, vandals and drive-by shootings.”

If you read this section of his book he goes on to say that the US imprisons “far too many people” with a disproportionate impact on African-Americans:

http://tinyurl.com/3fmha48

Pinker has a whig view of history but it isn’t one that puts Texas on the top:

http://edge.org/conversation.php?cid=mc2011-history-violence-pinker

LEDA COSMIDES: Right, I think that’s the claim. But the real question I
had was about the cosmopolitanism, because I’m puzzled by that in a
certain sense. It almost sounds, like “come be an undergraduate and
everything is going to be okay.” I’m wondering if that is a real factor
that’s contributing to this. It must be driven a lot by popular culture
because you don’t have massive numbers of people reading Proust and etc.

STEVEN PINKER: It’s a rising tide that lifts all the boats. It sounds
elitist to say this, but attitudes toward women, homosexuals, and racial
minorities, and the tolerant attitudes that we celebrate of not beating
up your kids, tend to start among the most educated strata, and you
can see the rest of the country being dragged behind. With a lot of
these statistics, the red states today have attitudes that the blue
states had 30 years ago—toward women, towards spanking, towards
homosexuals, towards animal rights, and so on.

What starts out at the universities and the pundits can trickle down
and become conventional wisdom. That probably happens worldwide as well.
This is another thing I’ll probably get flak for saying, but very
roughly you can see a continuum in the world in a lot of variables
related to the decline of violence: Western Europe, then the American
blue states, then the American red states, then Latin America and Asian
democracies, and the Islamic world and Africa pulling up the rear. We
can look, say, at the criminalization of homosexuality in Africa, or
human trafficking, and say the world is in a terrible state, which of
course it is. But the historical trend is that the other parts of the
world eventually catch up. Slavery is a concrete example: just fifty
years ago, slavery was still legal in Saudi Arabia.

I like how 5 billion out of the world’s 6 billion people are “bringing up the rear”.

347
Hidari 10.20.11 at 7:51 pm
‘It’s a nice, soothing, heartwarming vision. Maybe this time it’s not completely wrong.’

Yeah but it probably is. Let’s face it (and I hope I’m wrong about this) at the time of writing, it seems that no one has any intention of doing anything, whatsoever, about AGW. Or the other horrendous environmental catastrophes that face us in about 20/30 years time. Or about the spiralling gap between rich and poor which cannot help but lead to violence

See 273 above

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/steven-pinkers-history-of-violence/

Yes,it’s a set-up. The bus will swing by your place tomorrow at 6AM to transport you to the Kamp Krusty Kollege of Higher Hermeneutics and Deep Insight for a 10-day refresher course in Fundamental Truth. You should bring your own toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo.