Posted on 01/26/2012 10:31:23 AM PST by neverdem
Neuroscientist Steven Pinker on the triumph of peace and prosperity over death and destruction
You are less likely to die a violent death today than at any other time in human history. In fact, violence has been declining for centuries. That is the arresting claim made by Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking). The title, taken from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, refers to the way in which the modern world encourages people to suppress their inner demons and let their better angels fly.
Just a couple of centuries ago, violence was pervasive. Slavery was widespread, wife and child beating were acceptable practices, heretics and witches were burned at the stake, pogroms and race riots were common, and warfare was nearly constant. Public hangings, bearbaiting, and even cat burning were popular forms of entertainment. By examining collections of ancient skeletons and scrutinizing contemporary tribal societies, anthropologists have found that people were nine times as likely to die violent deaths in the prehistoric period than in modern times, even allowing for the world wars and genocides of the 20th century. Europe’s murder rate was 30 times higher in the Middle Ages than it is today.
What happened? Human nature did not change, but our institutions did, encouraging people to restrain their natural tendencies toward violence. In more than 800 pages of data and analysis, Pinker identifies a series of institutional changes that have led to decreasing levels of life-threatening violence. The rise of states 5,000 years ago dramatically reduced tribal conflict. In recent centuries, the spread of courtly manners, literacy, commerce, and democracy have reduced violence even more. Polite behavior requires self-restraint, literacy encourages empathy, commerce changes zero-sum encounters into mutually beneficial exchanges, and democracy restrains...
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
I would want to know if Pinker discusses the fact that if you’re a minority living in a Democrat controlled area, risk of violence is very high.
If you are not a human fetus maybe.
Let’s see, how many died in:
WWI
WWII
Korea
Vietnam
Gulf War 1 and 2
All the violence is still there, just more indirect.
Sure, you’re less likely to die. But more likely to be deprived of liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness. A peasant in the Middle Ages enjoyed a far larger share of their fruits of labor than a contemporary Western citizen does.
Pinker: “When you really come down to it, should homosexuality be illegal? You’re going to lose that argument. You can grasp at straws—well, the Bible says so; well our ancestors did it that way—but they aren’t very good arguments.”
Pinker’s intellectual blindness shows itself here, in that (regarding the Bible) he can only establish it’s not a good argument if he first accepts the premise that the Bible is not true.
But if the content of the Bible is factual, then to reach for the Bible in debate is a very good argument.
Does this guy live in a gated community by a pool? Good Lord man go to the ME the Balkans, Chechnya, Malaysia, Indo( anywhere) India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Britianistan/Londonistan, any big city in America, all of Africa, ...crazy NUT!
“And reason, the ability to deploy our cognitive faculties to figure out the best way of living our lives.”
Again—if the God of the Bible is real, then by far the most reasonable choice of “the best way of living our lives” is to follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Pinker’s weakness is he’s not led by reason, but by his heart.
“One of them is self-control: the ability to anticipate the consequences of your behavior and to inhibit it as a result. That is, someone insults you, you count to 10 and you walk away instead of knifing them. Empathy: the ability to feel others’ pain, so that you no longer have fun when you watch someone disemboweled, but you’re actually sickened by the thought of it. Morality: admittedly, that’s a very multiple-personality angel, because a lot of morality actually leads to violence rather than preventing it.”
These are already covered by the teachings of Christian doctrine (refraining from sin, loving your neighbor as yourself, and doing what’s right).
Dr. Pinker, please be more original—or at least more thorough—in formulating your analyses.
This has several of the warning signs of an effort to sell books to gullible liberals who want to feel good about themselves. I can’t imagine that a serious statistician would say that the thousands of “data sets” that would have to be involved to support such a claim are all reliable. In fact, I suspect that most of the “data” is conjecture about years in which no one kept statistics because no one even knew what they were.
Apart from that, Pinker, naif that he is, doesn’t seem to realize that police departments, for political reasons, are lying about crime levels, especially violent crime. If he just read the papers he would see the occasional story on this.
Statistically, he’s right.
Personally, I attribute it to longer life expectancies and better medical care. People don’t start violence, not because they’re less violent, but because they have more to lose.
In the bad ol’ days, your rep was worth more than your life - or the other guy’s life and you were willing to risk death to protect it. Of course, your life expectancy wasn’t all that high, and you could die any time from an infection from a splinter or a bad tooth.
Nowadays, you live to 72+ in good health, and you are less subject to the whims of ill health. So instead of risking an uncertain 10-20 years when you choose violence, when you get violent these days, you’re risking a darn near certain 40-50 years!
GGG ping.
I’m now reading “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities” by Matthew White. Very interesting. Thumbnail sketches of the terrible things that people have done to other people down though the ages.
Number 1 atrocity (in terms of lives lost): World War II.
Number 2: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Hordes. Something like 40 million people killed to expand the Mongol Empire. The Mongols were unbelievably vicious and cruel. Many other historical peoples were also.
I believe that individual man on man violence is less now than it was centuries ago. We have however acquired the technology to kill people in mass without actually facing them with a weapon in hand.
In general, as I’ve posted above, Pinker is predictably short-sighted.
Regarding the trend rates of violence—he fails to discuss what is happening on a recent time scale, and in particular locations.
I am also guessing that person on person violence would decrease because governments frown on it and put folks in jail, unless, of course, they are a protected class.
And, there may have been a subgroup of individuals that were involved in the brunt of the violence. Those folks would be in jail and more restricted in their choices for killing others in current times.
That said, I believe there is a spike in violence currently - at least it seems so - in the youngest generation and often against strangers. And I think it wouldn’t take much for chaos and violence to reign if the economy implodes, government notwithstanding.
What about all the murders takes place in abortuaries? About 1.5 million a year?
Oh those don’t count? I guess you can just declare everything legal and then we’d all have a 0% crime rate too.
What data sets are even available for Muslim countries? This guy is blowing smoke.
Just curious — where did Idi Amin or the Rwanda genocide place in Matthew White’s book?
Actually, I agree with Pinker. I can see it here in Bush Alaska, where I’m living with folks whose great-grandparents had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There is a gleeful appreciation of gossip, casual violence, revenge, and disregard for what we’d all the rule of law. Not that my neighbors are bad people; on the contrary, they’re great to hang with. But they also don’t see things through the idea of rule of law. The first allegience is the family and the tribe, and there is a honor code that demands retribution for slights and insults. The elders tell me endless stories about abuse and violence, and even today, there’s an acceptance of things like wife beating, sexual abuse, and child neglect that is astonishing when compared to the similar small town where I grew up in Connecticut.
All this tend to run against modern Alaskan jurisprudence, which accounts for some of the current tensions in many villages. Over the long run, I’d say Pinker is right. Our disgust of legal abortion is part of it, too. IMHO
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