March 15, 2007
Steven Pinker on the Decline of Violence
Ethan Zuckerman in World Changing:
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, begins his presentation with an image of corpses on a truck, being taken from Auschwitz concentration camp. The image is one of many characteristic of the 20th century, a century that included brutality under Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and the genocide in Rwanda. The 21st century, which has barely started, already includes the brutality of Darfur and the daily destruction in Iraq.
These sorts of images can lead us to thinking that modernity brings terrible violence. Perhaps native people lived in a state of harmony that we’ve departed from.
This, Pinker tells us, is bullshit. “Our ancestors were far more violent than we are.” We’re probably living in the most peaceful time of our species’s existence, a statement that seems almost obscene in light of Darfur and Iraq.
The decline of violence, he tells us, is a fractal phenomenon - we see it over the centuries, the decades and the years. That said, we see a tipping point in the 16th century - the age of reason - particularly in England and Holland.
Until 10,000 years ago, all humans were hunter gatherers. This is the group that some believe lived in primordial harmony - there’s no evidence of this. Studying current hunter-gatherer tribes, the percent of male adults who die in violence is extraordinary - from 20 to 60% of all males. Even during the violent 20th century, with two world wars, less than 2% of males worldwide died in warfare.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:10 PM | Permalink
Comments
And as Karen Armstrong pointed out in her "Great Transformation" book about the origins of major religions, they were fed, more than less, by a desire to control the violence carried forth into city/state life.
Posted by: beajerry | Mar 16, 2007 4:19:41 AM
What happened to create what we call "The Holocaust" wasn't just violence, though the images of it themselves are violent, certainly. The act of seeing the photographic record of what was done is a violent experience for anyone but a sociopath - but what makes the Holocaust morally anathema isn't just that it was violent.
Automobile accidents are incredibly violent, the damage they do to living human bodies, the way they kill and maim, done by other humans would be considered horrifically savage and brutal acts.
Yet we accept that as the price of "modern" transportation and independence. Automobile accidents are the single greatest cause of death for children in the US.
We aren't worried about violence per se - we're concerned with who's doing it, and who they're doing it to, and why.
Charles Manson became historically infamous for causing the horrific deaths of a relative handful of people at almost the exact moment that Lieutenant Calley's men were killing more, in Viet Nam, with an equally savage and feral amorality.
Pinker's debunking of the absurdly romantic idealistic image of naturally harmonious hunter-gatherers grooving together in an unspoiled world doesn't change the central point of the real question - mostly because the real question isn't even on the table.
The current human landscape may be statistically more peaceful, the percentages may be weighted more toward the peaceful now, but human beings are not identical - nor replaceable - units, and the living hunter-gatherers, the few scattered remnants of them that still exist, without exception are being wiped out, or driven to the margins of a human-dominated world and allowed to die there of attrition and the diseases of poverty.
Driving whole peoples into squalid and terminally foreshortened existence through manipulated real estate laws and corporate opportunism isn't violent, at least not semantically, not legally, not in the equally idealistic world-view of people like Pinker, but in its whole effect, at the end of the day, it is as violent as any active genocide ever was or ever could be.
Posted by: Roy Belmont | Mar 16, 2007 4:24:43 AM
Where's Pinker getting his statistics on hunter-gatherer violence? Does he cite any sources or did he just make this figure up? These figures certainly look suspiciously high. I've never come across figures as high as these in any survey on hunter-gatherer violence.
Posted by: Rick | Mar 16, 2007 9:08:44 AM
One problem I see with the hunter-gatherer violence number is that they would include not only violent acts perpretated on one another, but also assaults by animals and accidents. And living in the wild, those two were probably much more frequent.
Posted by: Marc Andre Belanger | Mar 16, 2007 9:26:33 AM
One should also take into account that violence as meassured by murder is dependent on advances in medicine and health care.
Today if someone gets stabbed he's rushed to the hospital and is more likely to survive. That doesn't mean that the stabbing itself is less violent.
Posted by: Paradigm | Mar 16, 2007 10:40:03 AM
Where are these numbers coming from?!!!They seem completely and totally at odds with the general concensus in archeology and anthropology, which holds that warfare is generally rare among Hunter-gatherer societies as their territory is so vast and number are so small, that defensive warfare for a territory is usually a complete aboration or at least very, very rare. And while some violent homocide does occur within groups, it is generally one or two per century. Certainly nothing at the level, to warrant a considerable level of 20 to 60 percent death rate. Now even given that my number maybe on the low side, Pinker's numbers are spectacular (certainly to anyone familar with the research on this) and the fact that they are unquestioningly accepted reveals more about the general ignorance of the populace and their implicit assumptions, then hunter-gatherer ethnography.
Quite simply I would like to know where Pinker got his numbers as I suspect he either pulled them out of his ass or relied upon or misreaded very questionable studies.
Posted by: Rick | Mar 16, 2007 4:23:23 PM
Thanks for the great news! If we can just stop the cartoon network terrorism in the Boston area then Pinker will definitely be right!
Posted by: Scooby-Doo | Mar 16, 2007 6:06:09 PM
Look, I don't think it is too much to ask for an academic to reveal his sources. Supposedly Steve Pinker reads this site to the detriment of his other commitments. Therefore I do not think it too much to ask him reveal his sources. Moreover, I must confess I am sick and tired of individuals simply asserting the supposed violence of hunter-gatherers and citing a number or percent age, thereby assuaging the rest of us of the "objective truth" of our assumptions. Hey, show me the study!!!!
Posted by: rick | Mar 16, 2007 9:03:13 PM
This is an account by Ethan Zuckerman of a presentation that Steven Pinker gave, not a scientific paper with footnotes. If you bother to actually look at Pinker's book The Blank Slate, he cites study after study to back up what he is saying about violence in hunter-gatherer societies. (For example, look on p. 56. I am not about to waste my own time providing citations for people too lazy to look them up themselves, if they are so interested.)
And with the brilliant scholarly anaysis presented in these comments of, for example, the "complete aboration" of territorial warfare among hunter-gatherer societies, and profound and respectful assertions such as "I suspect he either pulled them out of his ass or relied upon or misreaded [sic] very questionable studies," I am shocked that Pinker doesn't drop whatever he is doing to spend his time re-giving citations he has already given in his book, at every blog where he might be criticized.
Try reading his book before losing your cool, or at least cite your own studies to counter what he is saying.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Mar 16, 2007 10:26:02 PM
"Driving whole peoples into squalid and terminally foreshortened existence through manipulated real estate laws and corporate opportunism isn't violent, at least not semantically, not legally, not in the equally idealistic world-view of people like Pinker, but in its whole effect, at the end of the day, it is as violent as any active genocide ever was or ever could be."
I am not exactly sure to what "manipulated real estate laws" are though I accept that corporations do illegal, even bad things.
But to equate "at the end of the day" the possibility of dying in a poorly-designed car from General Motors with being a victim of the Kmer Rouge because one is a teacher is absurd.
They are hardly equivalent and to make them so debases the discussion because it ignores is the all-important matter of "intention." People live and die by their intention. The intentions of GM and the Kmer Rouge were different. So to make a death caused by one with the other equal evils doesn't hold up .
Look at it this way: I'd rather drive a Corvair in California in 1964 than teach in Cambodia in 1968.
Posted by: David Sucher | Mar 17, 2007 10:58:15 AM
David Sucher-
Aside from the fact that the central point I was trying to make was that "intention" is pretty much the determinant, as opposed to the more readily admitted "violence, that violence is not the issue at all really, but rather intention and cultural context - as I say, aside from that you sure nailed it right up.
We abhor the Khmer Rouge, and tolerate the automobile, and poor design and morality has much less to do with it than does the arrogance of semi-conscious sedentary bodies hurtling at 90 mph up and down rivers of poison gas, and control of who's doing the executions.
Go stand by the nearest interstate for a solid half hour, as close to the traffic as you dare, you'll get it. Then read up on the Clear Lake Massacre, in California, pre-Corvair.
Posted by: roy belmont | Mar 17, 2007 4:00:07 PM
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