Are we less violent now?

[sandwiches]

www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/15/steven-pinker-better-angels-violence-interview?newsfeed=true

Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace

Steven Pinker claims in his new book that far from being the bloodiest era in human history, ours is a time when violence has been in steep decline. Here, he explains how mankind turned its back on brutality

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (Allen Lane) is Pinker's latest and most ambitious book. The title is taken from a phrase of Abraham Lincoln's. In it, Pinker challenges one of our deepest but unexamined assumptions – that current and recent times have been the most violent in human history. As evidence we cite contemporary homicide rates, the Holocaust, the death toll of two world wars and the genocide adventures orchestrated by Stalin, Mao Zedong and other tyrants. But Pinker argues that this view is radically mistaken. Violence within and between societies – both murder and warfare – has declined from prehistory to today. We are, he maintains, much less likely to die at someone else's hands than ever before. And even the horrific carnage of the last century, when seen in the long view of history, is part of this trend.

As with all his previous books, The Better Angels has been taken seriously by heavyweight reviewers and, broadly speaking, came through with lots of plaudits.....In his New York Times review, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer described it as "a supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline."
The major voice dissenting from this chorus of praise belonged to political philosopher John Gray, who was unimpressed by Pinker's claim that the Enlightenment was a key factor in civilising humanity. Writing in Prospect magazine, Gray attacks what he sees as Pinker's identification of "the Enlightenment" with a carefully chosen but not necessarily representative group of thinkers.

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/
Delusions of peace

John Gray
21st September 2011 — Issue 187
Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence. They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.

[noons]

As someone with a background in international relations, I don't think we can say we're "less violent," at least in the foreign policy area. Also, another thing Pinker might have going for him is population growth. People say that the 20th century had more death than any other, true, but because of the population explosion of the previous century, there were a lot more people to kill!

However, during the last 50 years, there hasn't been a major war between superpowers largely because everyone knows that the consequences of such a war would be too catastrophic. Mutually assured destruction does have its uses. And in the last 20 years, there being a single superpower has deterred major interstate wars. But since the end of the cold war, the number of civil wars and cross-border conflicts and violent ethnic conflicts has skyrocketed.

[sandwiches]

Yes apparently Pinker (according to Singer) attributes lack of nuclear war to this:

www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2

That morality can be grounded in some commitment to treating others as we would like them to treat us is an ancient idea, expressed in the golden rule and in similar thoughts in the moral traditions of many other civilizations, but Pinker is surely right to say that the escalator of reason leads us to it. It is this kind of moral thinking, Pinker points out, that helps us escape traps like the Cuban missile crisis, which, if the fate of the world had been in the hands of leaders under the sway of a different kind of morality — one dominated by ideas of honor and the importance of not backing down — might have been the end of the human story. Fortunately Kennedy and Khrushchev understood the trap they were in and did what was necessary to avoid disaster.

Though can't help wondering how that reasoning would apply to some who have or will obtain such weapons. How far up the "escalator of reason" is President Ahmadinejad? And how far would we be up it in the face of some disaster?

[humphreyclarke]

Ah - I was reading this the other day and I was going to post a review at some stage. He argues at one point that if you look at wars like WWI and WWII in terms of the proportion of the worlds population that were killed instead of going by a crude bodycount then you would see that other centuries were more violent. Unfortunately the figures he uses to show this are extremely dodgy and poorly sourced. For example he reckons that the An Lushan Revolt wiped out 36,000,000 people at a 20th century population equivalent of 429,000,000 people. This figure comes from comparing an earlier census with one conducted after the revolt - however from the books I have looked at by sinologists the lower figure can be mainly attributed to the fact that the Tang dynasty's bureaucracy was in turmoil and lost it's ability to monitor and tax the peasants. Pinker simply accepts the figure - which if it were correct would mean 2 thirds of the population of China were wiped out. The reality is with a lot of the figures - e.g 40,000,000 deaths for the Mongol conquests - we have no idea what the real totals were. However Pinker is very good on trashing the noble savage myth - seems to rely a lot on Lawrence H. Keeley here - and a lot of what he says on crime rates from Medieval times to the modern age is interesting. Overall there is a lot in the new book I don't agree with but I found it very enjoyable.

Oct 19, 2011 14:44:48 GMT sandwiches said:

That morality can be grounded in some commitment to treating others as we would like them to treat us is an ancient idea, expressed in the golden rule and in similar thoughts in the moral traditions of many other civilizations, but Pinker is surely right to say that the escalator of reason leads us to it. It is this kind of moral thinking, Pinker points out, that helps us escape traps like the Cuban missile crisis, which, if the fate of the world had been in the hands of leaders under the sway of a different kind of morality — one dominated by ideas of honor and the importance of not backing down — might have been the end of the human story. Fortunately Kennedy and Khrushchev understood the trap they were in and did what was necessary to avoid disaster.

This is one of the main areas I disagreed with him. He spent about a paragraph at one stage arguing that 1945 onwards was 'not a nuclear peace' which I think is complete rubbish. One can see this by imagining the events of the Cold War taking place with only conventional weapons involved on both sides. Its hard to see how a third major conflict wouldn't have erupted.

[sandwiches]

Yes, Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times 16th October was a bit sniffy about all the stats in his review:

...“The figures for the An Lushan rebellion are widely disputed, since Chinese census-taking pretty much collapsed at the time anyway. And is this numerical measurement of atrocity valid? Most of the Chinese deaths were caused “collaterally” by famine and disease. How does this compare to the attempted extermination, with all the ingenuity of modern science and Zyklon B, of an entire race?
Pinker is better on hunter-gatherers…. In hunter-gatherer societies, deaths from warfare average around 15% of the total, whereas for the world between 1900 and 1950 with all its colossal violence it was around 3%....The archaeological evidence is relentless in showing that large numbers of males, and often whole families, died violently in pre-historic, ancient and medieval times…

….he does depend a lot on statistics, and these can always be manipulated. There are plenty of figures here for England and America, for instance, but far fewer for Congo or Afghanistan (They’re simly not available, I know, but even so). “Framing” is another notorious statistician’s device., meaning you choose to draw your starting lines. If you show homicide rates for England over the past 800 years, sure, they’ve gone comfortably down. But if you show them for the past 80 (which he doesn’t), they’ve gone up. How does this fit in with his theory that we are all now nicer, more rational people than our forefathers?

And can we judge human cruelty by statistics an percentages anyway? The Holocaust cannot be captured or quantified by citing a figure such as “6m”. The horror lies partly in the thought of one of the world,s most civilised and educated countries …deliberately embracing barbarism; its soldiers and policemen, doctors and civil servants joining together to exterminate men, women and children in gas chambers. A “statistical” measurement of such behaviour feels not just irrelevant but even a little repulsive….

We have not innately improved but our society – western liberal society – is a very good machine for producing broadly decent behaviour…


I note atheist reviewers see more ready to accept a rather smug view of our supposed progress e.g. Michael Shermer:

www.skepticblog.org/2011/09/27/review-of-better-angels-of-our-nature/

Again—and it must be repeated in every discussion of this controversial topic—the decline of violence is tracked in a systematic sloping downward curve with occasional bumps along the way. Think of a saw blade tilted down at an angle. Individual teeth point upward, but the overall slope of the blade is downward. Or think global warming. Yes, some years are cooler—and climate deniers are only to happy to point them out—but the overall trend is that of a warming earth. The analogy applies to violence of all kind. Compared to 500 or 1000 years ago, today a greater percentage of people in more places more of the time are safer, healthier, wealthier, and freer.

[sandwiches]

And another thing:


www.slate.com/articles/Arts/books/2011/10/steven_pinker_s_the_better_angels_of_our_nature_why_should_you_b.html


Will War Ever End?
Steven Pinker’s new book reveals an ever more peaceable species: humankind.
By John Horgan

I have one major disagreement with Pinker. True to his tragic view of human nature, he subscribes to what I call the deep-roots theory of war, which holds that lethal group aggression, and not just violence per se, is an evolutionary adaptation reaching back millions of years. As evidence, he notes that chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, have been observed engaging in deadly group raids. So have tribal societies such as the Yanomamo, whose behavior supposedly resembles that of our pre-state ancestors. Archaeological relics—skeletons with hack marks and spear heads embedded in them, rock drawings depicting battles and walls and other fortifications—also reveal that pre-state societies engaged in group violence.



Critics have raised many objections to the deep-roots theory. Chimp raids are rare, and may be a response to recent human encroachment. Some modern tribal people, such as the Semai of Malaysia and the !Kung of Africa, are quite peaceful. As for the archaeological evidence of warfare, it extends back only about 12,000 years, and excavations have revealed that some pre-state societies thrived for centuries or longer without leaving significant signs of violence.



You don’t have to be prone to dangerously utopian views to be persuaded, as I am, by a different theory of war’s origins, first advanced by Margaret Mead in 1940 and favored by anthropologists such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Douglas Fry, and Brian Ferguson. War, Mead proposed, is not a biological adaptation but a cultural "invention"—like music, art, cooking, and religion—that emerged relatively recently in human prehistory. War is an especially infectious meme, because if one society starts attacking its neighbors, their only options are to surrender, flee, or fight. Societies in a warlike region have a strong incentive to boost their fighting capability, by inventing new tactics and weapons, and to carry out pre-emptive strikes against neighbors. In this way, the whole world rapidly became militarized, armed and dangerous. For millennia, we have been struggling to overcome this cultural contagion, and we're still struggling, in spite of our recent gains. Just in the last decade, the United States, arguably the most advanced civilization in history, has invaded two countries, and it now routinely assassinates without trial many suspected enemies around the world.

[fortigurn]

There's no doubt Pinker plays with the statistics. I do agree with Pinker in general terms, and of course over a very long period of time the general trend has been a reduction in violence in a wide variety of forms. But Pinker is trying to use this to support the argument 'Life is always getting better, don't listen to the naysayers, anyone who thinks it's more violent today than yesteryear simply isn't aware of the facts'. He's trying to make it sound as if there's no rational reason to think that the present is more violent than the past, but clearly for millions of people it is more violent.

The massive rural-urban migration over the last 100 years in all first world countries has resulted in millions of people moving from small rural communities with very little violence, to dense inner urban communities where the level of violence is among the highest in the world. It's no good telling people that their ideas that the world is a less violent place than before, because in their actual world it is considerably more violent. I don't think Pinker has addressed this at all.

The eyre court in 13th century London was seeing about six homicide cases a year (15 per 100,000), and the courts in Washington DC see how many? Well it was a rate of 45 per 100,000 in 2002. Let's look at some other big scores for 2002:

Homicides per 100,000

(1) Washington, DC 45.8
(2) Detroit 42.0
(3) Baltimore 38.3
(4) Memphis 24.7
(5) Chicago 22.2
(6) Philadelphia 19.0
(7) Columbus 18.1
(8) Milwaukee 18.0
(9) Los Angeles 17.5
(10) Dallas 15.8

I think there's something Pinker isn't telling us. He's telling us that if you average out the statistics you can make people feel that our entire society is far more safe than any of the societies in previous generations, and that homicide statistics everywhere in society have descended in a uniform manner. In reality, some capital cities today experience three times more homicides per 100,000 than capital cities in the Middle Ages.

In fact in 2002 the US had nine capital cities with a homicide rate higher than that of 13th century London. So what happened to our glorious ascent to civilization and the uniform decline of homicides? Why are they still higher in these cities than London in the Middle Ages some 700 years ago?

The answer is that the data isn't as simple as Pinker's statement would suggest. It's clear that some people living in some parts of the world have every justification for their perception that violence is on the increase. Manuel Eisner was the one who arrived at the figure of 15 homicides per 100,000 on the basis of data such as the eyre courts, and he explains why the figure is reliable. He is actually the criminologist of whom Pinker makes especial note in his articles, but Pinker doesn't explain Eisner's methodology, or even some of his more important conclusions.

The way Pinker reels off statistics (and I'm talking about in his publication), makes me think that he is fudging the facts. He says things like this:

* 'According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade'

* 'After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end'

* 'Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent'

A number of these are statistically meaningless for his argument, since they simply refer to the end of various wars. This is selective quoting at its best. Nor does Pinker typically mention in his articles various counter trends, as Eisner does ('The well-documented increase in criminal violence between the 1950s and the early 1990s', though Pinker does mention that one briefly in a video).

Are these really the best metrics for violence? Why use only homicide statistics? That's only a single metric of violence in society. Where are the statistics on physical and sexual assaults, domestic violence and child abuse? Why doesn't he mention these? Why include social contract killings such as state based conflicts, when they are anomalous in the data, since they don't reflect trends of violence in society, but trends of states using military force?

As I said, I agree with the overall statistical decline in violence, but that doesn't alter the other points I've made. Interestingly, I found that Eisner made a number of the same points I have, and Pinker didn't mention them at all. Eisner for example points out that despite the overall statistical decline a number of startling outliers remain which resist the trend, violent crime in the US being one of them.

I also find it interesting that Pinker didn't mention the rise of the serial killer. Psychologically identifiable serial killers seem to emerge in the 19th century (there's debate over various mass murderers in earlier history, since their psychological profiles are unavailable, they don't seem meet the typical serial killer profile, and some of the details are dubious and historically unverifiable), and they have only increased in number over the last 100 years. One theory is that the serial killer is a product of the high density urban environment, which is characterized by isolation, alienation, reduced empathy, and various forms of stress which constitute 'triggers' for certain psychoses.

But on the other hand, people today maintain exactly the same desire for violent spectacle as they did in the past. You're not allowed to do it for real now, but the public demands graphic depictions of violence in almost every conceivable form. So it's not that people are more repulsed by the violence, they still find it as attractive as ever. It's just that certain expressions of violence have become less popular, and others have become demonized. You're not allowed to commit certain actual acts of violence, but there's nothing to stop you depicting them graphically, which is as we both know hugely appealing in today's society.

Given that the brain interprets fictional violence in exactly the same manner as it interprets actual violence, it's clear that we're still feeding our desire for violence, we've just arranged it so that we're salving a peculiar part of our conscience. It's considered horrifying to perform these acts, but it's considered healthy to be entertained by them. So from that point of view I see we're far less different to the spectators of the Circus Maximus and the stocks than we like to think.

One theory Eisener describes for the reason why violence has declined is that the increased power of the state and the greater increase in detection and prosecution of homicide have become a better deterrent than they were in the past. It's not that people are less violent, but that they have fewer opportunities and are more scared of being caught; behaviour in the modern state is ironically regulated by the constant threat of state sponsored violence, a threat which is far more effective now than it was previously.

This is related to another interesting issue, which is that statistically the percentage of familial homicides has increased dramatically since the Middle Ages. Less than 10% of homicides in the Middle Ages were familial, whereas in the US between 1976 and 2005 it was around 18%. This is another reason why people may receive the impression that violence is on the increase.

[sandwiches]

That was very interesting. Can't help being suspicious that he gives a rather partial view. Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian is running some kind of series on the book:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/01/steven-pinker-violence-in-decline
Do you agree with Steven Pinker – is violence in decline?
Join me as I read Pinker's new book on the history of violence, and examine some of the claims of this "astonishing" book
There is no doubt that Pinker is on a sort of crusade here and he makes clear his target: "a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity and western society." His response is this massive tome, a counterblast against the pessimism of our age, which is so full of gloom at the possibility of climate wars, global warming and nuclear proliferation.

If you want a very skeptical take, John Gray in Prospect makes some characteristically elegant points. Also worth a quick look are the reviews in the Sunday Times and in the Financial Times. And for a very thoughtful discussion of some of the wider implications of this book, look at New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He raises the question that the decline of violence perhaps more properly should be called the "nationalisation of violence" and that it is linked to the rise of the modern state since the 16th century. He also makes a very good point that Europe's unparalleled peace over the last half century may be the outcome of centuries of civil war, and ethnic and religious conflict; peace has come at a very high price indeed. He came back to the issue in a blogpost and there are some good comments on the thread. He poses the question that several centuries of violence may be required to produce the kind of post-war peace Europe has experienced – and that might be a trajectory for parts of the world where there is currently a lot of conflict, such as parts of Africa. A rather gloomy thesis.

[sandwiches]

Andrew Brown in the Guardian:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/08/steven-pinker-better-angels-of-our-nature

Steven Pinker's book is a comfort blanket for the smug
The factual errors in The Better Angels of Our Nature destroy Pinker's thesis, rendering it no more than a bedtime story

Whether or not you suppose Christian myth to be true, it is simply impossible to consider the development of ethical thought and practice in the west without understanding that almost all of it has been Christian, and that what comes after Christianity is itself incomprehensible without it.

It would not be true to say that religion is never mentioned, but it is in the context of an idiotically whiggish view of history. We learn from his opening piece in this series that "the philosophers of the Enlightenment extolled the way novels engaged a reader's identification with and sympathetic concern for others … The clergy, of course, denounced these novels and placed several on the Index of Forbidden Books" – which accounts very nicely for the atheism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and also explains why Jane Austen was burned at the stake.


I didn't comb through the book to find mistakes. I just opened it at random a few times and looked for references to subjects I know something about. It wasn't hard. His range is wide. But the factual errors, although they destroy his thesis as a serious piece of history, point up its attractive weakness as a comfort blanket for the smug.
In his earlier works, Pinker was a great populariser of the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology; in this, he has moved on from prehistory to give an account of history, which is still stitched together from just-so stories, but this time illustrated with graphs, and lots of numbers. This kind of thing tends to impress arts graduates. But it's still just a bedtime story and the only serious conclusion to draw from Pinker's work is that a culture that regards him as a great intellectual is one already in serious crisis

[humphreyclarke]

Here's a profile from the NYT of the guy Pinker got his 'scientific' body count statistics from:

www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/books/the-great-big-book-of-horrible-things-by-matthew-white.html?pagewanted=1

Quite interesting especially:

Randolph Roth, co-director of the Historical Violence Database at Ohio State University. While he admires Mr. White’s willingness to look at the big picture, he said, “it’s going to be hard for many historians to read this book and look at that death toll for Genghis Khan, that 40 million, and not have a sinking feeling.”

Yes - that anticipates my next blog which will be on whether the Mongols really killed 40 million people. I'm keeping an open mind....

[eckadimmock]

Apparently we're less violent, but no more accurate.

[sankari]

Nov 8, 2011 17:30:51 GMT sandwiches said:

It would not be true to say that religion is never mentioned, but it is in the context of an idiotically whiggish view of history. We learn from his opening piece in this series that "the philosophers of the Enlightenment extolled the way novels engaged a reader's identification with and sympathetic concern for others … The clergy, of course, denounced these novels and placed several on the 'Index of Forbidden Books' which accounts very nicely for the atheism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and also explains why Jane Austen was burned at the stake.

Superb!

Quite refreshing to see a Christian-friendly article in the Grauniad for a change.

[sandwiches]

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/18/steven-pinker-better-angels-final-verdict?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature – the final verdict.
A selection of your views on Steven Pinker's grand idea on violence in society, and a last chance to air your thoughts

Perhaps the Guadian would like a few comments or even an article by a historian on Pinker's use of data? Though I think some of their readers are more interested in the conclusions than whether there is reliable evidence for the same.

[fortigurn]

I haven't seen Pinker mention school shootings either. Does he explain how the rise of school shootings and the fact that children in the US are more likely to be killed or maimed by their peers than in previous years, fits into his belief that humans are becoming less violent?

[sandwiches]

www.firstthings.com/article/2011/12/the-precious-steven-pinker

David Bentley Hart not impressed with Pinker's book:

The Precious Steven Pinker
David Bentley Hart


Whether Pinker himself does the tale justice, however, is debatable. He is definitely not an adept historian; his view of the past—particularly of the Middle Ages, which he tends to treat as a single historical, geographical, and cultural moment—is often not merely crude, but almost cartoonish (of course, he is a professed admirer of Norbert Elias).

Well, each to his or her own tribalism, I suppose. It is pleasant to believe one’s society is more "enlightened" or "rational" than all others, and Pinker has every right to try to prove the point. He would be more convincing, though, if only the central claim of his book were not so entirely dependent upon a statistical fiction.

In the end, what Pinker calls a "decline of violence" in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about "progress" or "Enlightenment"—or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.

Pinker has not (yet) added this review to his webpage of reviews:

stevenpinker.com/content/reviews-better-angels-our-nature