April 06, 2007
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
From Edge:
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:55 AM | Permalink
Comments
This is the second time 3QD has featured this link. What is the odd affinity you guys have to Pinker and his brand of pop-socio biology?
Posted by: Jonathan | Apr 6, 2007 11:43:23 AM
Strong support of this thesis is to be found at http://www.humansecuritycentre.org/.
The Human Security Report posted there elaborates on the following:
"Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways. Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply. International wars, now only a small minority of all conflicts, have been in steady decline for a much longer period, as have military coups and the average number of people killed per conflict per year."
Posted by: Edwin Gardner | Apr 7, 2007 4:16:57 PM
What is the odd affinity you guys have to Pinker and his brand of pop-socio biology?
I suppose the phrase "his brand of pop-socio biology" is supposed to be derogatory, but it is utterly vacuous. Do you have an actual, you know, argument to offer against what Pinker is saying?
Posted by: Jason | Apr 7, 2007 6:40:39 PM
Perhaps Pinker's argument is more fleshed out in his upcoming book, but as presented here it is just skin and bones.
For example, "progress" is defined in an extremely one-dimensional sense. Anyone who's read Brave New World (Cliffs Notes included) can tell you that absence of strife in itself is not necessarily a desirable condition.
To support his creaky thesis, Pinker commits an act of extreme analytic sloppiness (if not outright manipulation) by choosing a low moment in human history (when cats were tortured as entertainment) compares it to our present day ethics, charts these two moments on a graph, and leaves it to the reader to presume that this implies a historical throughline; a constant trend from our dark, barbaric origins to our present enlightened state. This is a teleological mythology that finds no support in fact. There is no such trendline.
The Ev-Psych crowd have positioned themselves as defenders of Hobbesian realism against sappy Rousseauian idealism, but we don't have to join Rousseau in romanticizing human societies of time past to point out that Hobbes's realism got one important thing very wrong: homo sapiens have never existed in an atomistic state, faced with the choice to either make deals or go it alone. Sociability preceded the development of primates into humanoids by millions of years. There has never been human "anarchy" in the sense Pinker means it, except in the transitional gaps between organizational models.
Our civilization is a package deal. Along with increased wealth, health, and lifespan has come extreme social alienation, environmental devastation, and a slow surrender of communal franchise to corporate capitalism. We can imagine alternate civilizations--perhaps
civilizations to come--that would be less troubled by these concerns, but it would be facile to think we can just strain out all the unwanted side effects and keep the good stuff.
Just as hysterical-rationalists like Dawkins see every critique of Darwinian theory as necessarily religious, the sociobiologists see every critique of modernity as necessarily Romantic. This isn't science; it's reactionary orthodoxy.
Posted by: Deets | Apr 8, 2007 1:04:06 PM
Like Deets, I see less here than what Pinker seems to think he's offering.
One of the big knee-jerk criticisms of "Romantic" yearning is it's nostalgic, and nostalgic as well for an idealized version of the past, the past as it never really was. Maybe, though I'm inclined to think it's more like the desire to not be in a bad spot, known by those who are.
You can say the terminal patient is nostalgic for his better days, because he is, but it won't really mean much. Wanting to be healthy when you're not will ipso facto lead toward yesterday, at least as a template for tomorrow.
Possibly an area Pinker covers, though I doubt it, is the complete absence of violent non-human predators in our daily lives. Even yearly lives. Our whole lives. No bears, no wolves, no giant angry herbivores. No night-stalking jungle cats. The rare fatal shark attack is written up across the world as thrilling news. Compare and contrast with the million or so lives taken by automobiles every year.
Most of us now spend our whole lives without ever confronting a violent non-human predator, because collectively we have exterminated most of them, through all kinds of tricky ways and means. And held their broken remnants in cages, for the sport and comfort of our children and ourselves.
Possibly this accounts for some of the subsidence in violent tendencies in modern humans. Certainly it must figure highly in the social devaluation of violent skill sets, especially in the formerly near-sacrificial male of the species.
Men were once the default negotiator with lots of scary creatures, and honored for their courage, and violence, in that regard.
Not so, now. Now they're revered for their abilities to make money and maintain economic equilibrium, and any violence they commit is inevitably verbal, psychological, using the tools and weaponry of status, or stylized and ritualistic, i.e. sport.
So you'd expect, and I think find, that less capable males in the former circumstance, the weaker, wimpier, less brave, less fearsome, would be doing much better now, and be generally quite happy about that. Lo and behold.
Posted by: roy belmont | Apr 9, 2007 1:56:29 AM
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