Are we less violent now?

[fortigurn]

Very interesting.

[parapicchus]

I had a friend who believed that in the year 2k violence was no more an option and that people have matured a standard and an attitude of non-violence. He ended up in a mass grave somewhere near Prijedor in northern Bosnia.
Reality sucks

P.S. I know that a case is not a statistic, just wanted to make the point that wishfull thinking get you writing ridiculous books if you are an american psychologist but get you killed if you live in less amiable parts of the world

[himself]

The thing is, one of the professional papers that Pinker references while affirming a general decline in murders from the middle ages to 1950, points out that after 1950, interpersonal violence has been increasing. So we may assume that from the Middle Ages onward, the West was being progressively more influenced by some sort of philosophy that advocated, I don't know, love of neighbor, perhaps, or love of enemies. But that since 1950, some contrary philosophy has been gaining ground. Maybe someone could research this.

[unkleE]

Jan 10, 2012 1:36:03 GMT himself said:

The thing is, one of the professional papers that Pinker references while affirming a general decline in murders from the middle ages to 1950, points out that after 1950, interpersonal violence has been increasing. So we may assume that from the Middle Ages onward, the West was being progressively more influenced by some sort of philosophy that advocated, I don't know, love of neighbor, perhaps, or love of enemies. But that since 1950, some contrary philosophy has been gaining ground. Maybe someone could research this.

Sometimes you're a classic, himself, and this is one of them. * Scratches head. *

[fortigurn]

Jan 10, 2012 1:36:03 GMT himself said:

The thing is, one of the professional papers that Pinker references while affirming a general decline in murders from the middle ages to 1950, points out that after 1950, interpersonal violence has been increasing.

Which paper is that? I find it incredible that Pinker restricted himself specifically to homicide, excluding all forms of interpersonal violence (domestic abuse, physical and sexual abuse, assault, etc), as well as institutional violence such as war.

[ignorantianescia]

This one:

videojuegosycultura.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/long-term-historical-trends-of-violent-crime.pdf

Himself mentioned it in the blog post at Jesus Creed that Nate linked to here.

[fortigurn]

Excellent, thank you.

[sandwiches]

Another rather withering dissection:

www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136957/timothy-snyder/war-no-more?page=show

By Timothy Snyder
There is also a more fundamental way in which the book is unscientific. Pinker presents the entirety of human history in the form of a natural experiment. But he contaminates the experiment by arranging the evidence to fit his personal view about the proper destiny of the invdividual: first, to be tamed by the state, then, to civilize himself in opposition to the state. The state appears in Pinker's history only when it confines itself to the limited role that he believes is proper, and enlightenment figures as the rebellion of intelligent individuals against the state's attempt to exceed its assigned role...

A principle of the scientific method is to arrange experiments so that one's own prior beliefs can be challenged. Pinker's natural experiment with history generates instead a selective rereading, in which his own commitments become the guiding moral light for past and future......

Pinker goes so far as to suggest that libertarianism is equivalent to intelligence, since holding libertarian views correlates with high IQ scores. Since he believes that the need to regularly adjust IQ tests to preserve an average score of 100 means that we are growing more intelligent generation by generation, he deduces that we are becoming more libertarian. Pinker also conflates libertarian ideology with ethics, allowing him to conclude that we are therefore becoming increasingly moral. Each step in this argument is shaky, to say the least. As Pinker might have learned from Kant or Hume or any of the other Enlightenment figures he mentions, one cannot jump from reason to morals in this way....

What he provides is less an answer to his question than a mode of reasoning that has little to do with the scientific study of the past and much to do with a worldview that happens to be his own

[heath69]

Popmatters recently posted an amusing takedown of Pinker's book - as far as I can tell, its the most critical out there. And it cites Quodlibeta too (via a discussion of the An Shan Rebellion)

www.popmatters.com/pm/column/156671-where-angels-fear-to-tread/


Some choice quotes

"The question, however, is whether the book should be viewed as a jewel in reason’s crown or as amongst its costume jewelery"

"The Better Angels of Our Nature , then, keeps falling victim to the halo effect, or a cognitive bias that tends to overvalue certain facts while undervaluing others. It’s important to see the effect this has on his reasoning: it creates an aura around reason itself. There’s no denying that Pinker’s approach can be illuminating. Nonetheless, Pinker’s lopsided view of reason highlights the limits of rationality, or the way it attempts to mark the boundary of (and adapt to) its own environment. Instead of highlighting the phenomenon of natural selection, Pinker constantly draws attention to the problem of selective reasoning."

[ulyssesrex]

My thanks go to everyone on this thread who posted a review link! I was initially very impressed by Pinker's book (perhaps mainly because he was engaging in History at all rather than using those persistent hunter gatherer fables so commonly used in evo psych to explain humanity to itself) but the reviews- particularly Snyder's (his Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin is one of the best works of modern history I've ever read btw) raise grave doubts about the theory, the methodology and even the must vaunted statistics. My Marxist friends who dismissed it as 'Whiggery' actually had a point!