The Violent Death Rate Has Been Declining for Centuries
including the Last Thirty Years
DIALOGUE WITH BILL HODGSON
January 2, 2016
I have stated that meaningful dialogues are
just not happening on Facebook. The
American public is sharply divided and the radical right, The Tea Party, has a
policy of never give in and never compromise.
There is a bigger issue: The super rich sociopaths that control all
the major media paint a picture of the world that focuses on every manner of
misery man can do to other men and the threat of Global Warming and climate
change. By posting every incident of cop brutality, muggings, and all manner of
unpleasant events, the alternative media are playing right into the hands of
the major media. The picture of a
dangerous and hostile world causes people to be frozen with fear and unable to
do anything positive. Just what the
sociopaths want.
Here is the shocker, so contrary to the
"dangerous world" portrait, that most people will have trouble
believing it: we live here in 2016 is a vastly safer world that our species has
ever experienced. Research by many top
scientists and writers have proven this. For example, Steve Pinker, the author
of a dozen cutting edge books. Google:
"the history of death by warfare on a percentage basis" and you will
be amazed at the number of hits you get.
The quality of the information and the evidence many writers present is
massive and well documented as well as potent ideas about how achievements of
modern man have lead to a vastly safer world.
We must stop thinking and writing about every unpleasant event. What he
is doing just helps the Major Media paint this picture of a dangerous world,
and it JUST ISN'T TRUE.
Morris Creedon-McVean,DO
A gentleman and a scholar
Please excuse the typos and poor
writing, I have been up most of the night with back pain.
Here is a comprehensive text
explaining his research, theories, and the supporting data.
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Frequently Asked Questions about The Better Angels of Our
Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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Questions about Definitions
How do you define “violence”?
I don’t. I use the term in its
standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The
American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in
which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”)
In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault,
rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or
institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide,
corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.
What about metaphorical violence,
like verbal aggression?
No, physical violence is a big
enough topic for one book (as the length of Better Angels makes clear). Just
as a book on cancer needn’t have a chapter on metaphorical cancer, a coherent
book on violence can’t lump together genocide with catty remarks as if they
were a single phenomenon.
Isn’t economic inequality a form of
violence?
No; the fact that Bill Gates has a
bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and
genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying
workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other
practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the
term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you
can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”
Questions about the Origins of the
Book
What led you to write a book on
violence?
As I explain in the Preface, it was
an interest in human nature and its moral and political implications, carried
over from my earlier books. In How the Mind Works (518–519) and The
Blank Slate (166–169, 320, 330–336), I presented several kinds of evidence
that violence had declined over time. Then in 2007, through a quirky chain of
events, I was contacted by scholars in a number of fields who informed me there
was far more evidence for a decline in violence than I had realized. Their data
convinced me that the decline of violence deserved a book of its own.
You’re a linguist. What made you
think you could write a work of history?
Actually, I’m an experimental
psychologist. Better Angels concentrates on quantitative history:
studies based on datasets that allow one to plot a graph over time. This
involves the everyday statistical and methodological tools of social science,
which I’ve used since I was an undergraduate—concepts such as sampling,
distributions, time series, multiple regression, and distinguishing correlation
from causation.
Does this book represent a change
in your politics? After all, a commitment to human nature has traditionally
been associated with a conservative fatalism about violence and skepticism
about progressive change. But Better Angels says
many nice things about progressive movements such as nonviolence, feminism, and
gay rights.
No, the whole point of The Blank
Slate was that the equation between a belief in human nature and fatalism
about the human condition was spurious. Human nature is a complex system with
many components. It comprises mental faculties that lead us to violence,
but it also faculties that pull us away from violence, such as empathy,
self-control, and a sense of fairness. It also comes equipped with open-ended
combinatorial faculties for language and reasoning, which allow us to reflect
on our condition and figure out better ways to live our lives. This vision of
psychology, together with a commitment to secular humanism, has been a constant
in my books, though it has become clearer to me in recent years.
How and why has it become clearer?
Though I have always had a vague
sense that a scientific understanding of human nature was compatible with a
robust secular morality, it was only through the intellectual influence of my
wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I
understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be
grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the
world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in
particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the
decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I
call Enlightenment humanism (pp. 180–183), which has driven it, and it offers
the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence (pp.
694–696).
Questions about Data and
Methodology
Where did you get your data?
It depends. For the contrast
between nonstate and state societies, I used data from forensic archeology and
from quantitative ethnography. For the history of homicide in Europe, data from
coroners and town records go back centuries. Western governments today keep
good data on homicides (the violent crime of choice, because a dead body is
hard to explain away), and several of them conduct crime victimization surveys
for other crimes (which avoid the distortion of how willing victims are to
report crimes to the police). For wars large and small, and other kinds of
armed conflict since 1946, we have the Uppsala Conflict Data Project/Human
Security Report Project and the Peace Research Institute of Oslo. For larger
wars since 1816, I used datasets from the Correlates of War Project. Some
historians and political scientists (such as Pitirim Sorokin, Quincy Wright,
Peter Brecke, and Jack Levy) have tried to quantify war deaths in earlier
periods, and “atrocitologists” such as Matthew White and Rudolph Rummel have done
so for genocides, deliberate famines, and other kinds of mass violence. And of
course in recent decades almost no aspect of life has gone unquantified by
pollsters, government bureaucrats, and social scientists.
How did you decide which data to
plot?
I had two guidelines. The first was
to use data only from sources that had a commitment to objectivity, with no
ideological axe to grind, avoiding the junk statistics commonly slung around by
advocacy groups and moral entrepreneurs. The second was to plot the datasets in
their entirety: no finagling the start and stop dates, or second-guessing the
inclusion criteria, or slicing and dicing subsets, or cherry-picking the best
examples. The few exceptions involve well-motivated historical intervals (for
example, the period since World War II) and one case in which the authors
themselves had played fast and loose with their criteria (data on terrorist
deaths from the Bush administration); these are discussed explicitly.
For comparisons of a single place
at different times, or comparisons of different places at a single time, I
generally present deaths as a proportion of the population of that place at the
time (most often countries, but sometimes states, cities, tribes, or samples).
For comparisons across vast ranges of times and places (such as comparison of
the atrocities of the 20th century
with those of earlier centuries), I generally use the population of the entire
world at the time. Population estimates of smaller jurisdictions in the distant
past are iffier, and there is too much latitude to push the numbers around by
choosing different denominators (the city? the country? the continent?).
Your claim that violence has
declined depends on comparing rates of violence relative to population size.
But is that really a fair measure? Doesn’t a victim of violence suffer just as
much regardless of what happens to other people of the time? Was the value of a
life less in the 13th century than in the 21st just because there are more people around today? Should we give
ourselves credit for being less violent just because there has been population
growth?
You can think about it in a number
of ways, but they all lead to the conclusion that it is the proportion, rather
than the absolute number, of deaths that is relevant. First, if the population
grows, so does the potential number of murderers and despots and rapists and
sadists. So if the absolute number of victims of violence stays the same or
even increases, while the proportion decreases, something important must have
changed to allow all those extra people to grow up free of violence.
Second, if one focuses on absolute
numbers, one ends up with moral absurdities such as these: (a) it's better to
reduce the size of a population by half and keep the rates of rape and murder
the same than to reduce the rates of rape and murder by a third; (b) even if a
society’s practices were static, so that its rates of war and violence don’t
change, its people would be worse and worse off as the population grows,
because a greater absolute number of them would suffer; (c) every child brought
into the world is a moral evil, because there is a nonzero probability that he
or she will be a victim of violence.
As I note on p. 47: “Part of the
bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or
painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of
people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a
moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are
victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask,
`If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be
the chances that I would be a victim of violence?’ [Either way, we are led to]
the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies,
we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.”
Skeptical Questions about Whether
Violence Has Really Declined
Wasn’t the 20th century the most violent in
history?
Probably not; see chapter 5,
especially pp. 189–200. Historical data from past centuries are far less
complete, but the existing estimates of death tolls, when calculated as a
proportion of the world’s population at the time, show at least nine atrocities
before the 20th century
(that we know of) which may have been worse than World War II. They arose from
collapsing empires, horse tribe invasions, the slave trade, and the
annihilation of native peoples, with wars of religion close behind. World War I
doesn’t even make the top ten.
Also, a century comprises a hundred
years, not just fifty, and the second half of the 20th century was host to a Long Peace
(chapter 5) and a New Peace (chapter 6) with unusually low rates of death in
warfare.
Atheist regimes in the 20th century killed tens of millions of
people. Doesn’t this show that we were better off in the past, when our
political and moral systems were guided by a belief in God?
This is a popular argument among
theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is
historically inaccurate.
First, the premise that Nazism and
Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric
worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on
Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements
were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were
defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any
of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and
Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are
no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or
alchemy or Scientology.
Second, Nazism and Fascism were not
atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine
plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no
opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism
in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia. See p. 677 for discussion and references.
Third, according to the most recent
compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White's Great Big Book of
Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of
the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths.
Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If
defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million
murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an
impressive argument.
Fourth, many religious massacres
took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller.
Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a
genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the
Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range
of World War II in Europe (p. 142).
When it comes to the history of
violence, the significant distinction is not one between thesistic and
atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing,
utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and
secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights. On pp.
337–338 I present data from Rummel showing that democracies are vastly less
murderous than alternatives forms of government.
Wasn’t the spread of Christianity
the main historical force that drove down violence? Jesus preached love, peace,
and forgiveness. The Spanish missionaries eliminated human sacrifice in Latin
America. Abolitionism in the 19th century, and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th, were inspired by the morality of
Christianity and led by Christian ministers. The two world wars show what
happens when people depart from the teachings of Christianity.
Jesus deserves credit for
stigmatizing revenge, one of the main motives for violence over the course of
human history. But things started going downhill in 312 when Christianity
became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the historical facts are
not consistent with the claim that Christianity since then has been a force for
nonviolence:
•
The Crusaders perpetrated a century of genocides that murdered a
million people, equivalent as a proportion of the world’s population at the
time to the Nazi holocaust.
•
Shortly afterwards, the Cathars of southern France were
exterminated in another Crusader genocide because they had embraced the
Albigensian heresy.
•
The Inquisition, according to Rummel, killed 350,000 people.
•
Martin Luther’s rant against the Jews is barely distinguishable
from the writings of Hitler.
•
The three founders of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, and Henry
VIII, had thousands of heretics burned at the stake, as they and their
followers took Jesus literally when he said, “If a man abide not in me, he is
cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them
into the fire, and they are burned.”
•
Following the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live,” Christians killed 60,000-100,000 accused witches in the
European witchhunts.
•
The European Wars of Religion had death rates that were double
that of World War I and that were in the range of World War II in Europe.
•
Christian conquistadors massacred and enslaved native Americans
in vast numbers, and perhaps twenty million were killed in all (not counting
unintentional epidemics) by the European settlement of the Americas.
•
World War I, as I recall, was a war fought mostly by Christians
against Christians. As for World War II and its associated horrors, see my
answer to the previous question.
Certain Christian denominations, such as the Quakers, did indeed
mobilize the abolitionist movement, but they came late to the party.
Christianity had no problem with slavery for more than 1500 years, and agitation
against the institution only took off with the writings of John Locke and other
philosophers of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, who found plenty of good
secular reasons why slavery was abominable. The American abolitionists fought
against a slaveholding South that was, of course, thoroughly Christian,
including many ministers who defended slavery because it was approved in the
Bible.
As for Martin Luther King, in his
essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” he discusses his inspirations: ancient Greek
and Enlightenment philosophers, renegade humanistic theologians who rejected
orthodox Christian doctrine, and most of all, Gandhi. And of course the
segregationists he opposed were all Christians, and several of the civil rights
activists they murdered were Jewish.
This is not to single out
Christians or Christianity as a source of violence; many of the contemporary
alternatives were just as bad. And there have been times in recent history when
Christian ideas and movements have been pacifying forces, particularly when
they have been influenced the humanitarian currents I discuss in the book. But
to say that Christianity has, overall, been a force for peace in history is
factually inaccurate.
I’ve read that at the beginning of
the 20th century, ninety percent of deaths in warfare were suffered by
soldiers, but at the end, ninety percent were suffered by civilians.
This is a bogus statistic; see pp.
317–320.
You say that cruel punishments and
slavery have been abolished. But torture was practiced by the United States
during the Bush administration, and human trafficking still takes place in many
countries.
There is an enormous difference
between a clandestine, illegal, and universally decried practice in a few parts
of the world and an open, institutionalized, and universally approved practice
everywhere in the world. Human trafficking, as terrible as it is, cannot be
compared to the African slave trade (see pp. 157–188), nor can the recent harsh
interrogation of terrorist suspects to extract information, as indefensible as
it was, be compared to millennia of sadistic torture all over the world for
punishment and entertainment (see pp. 130-132 and 144–149). In understanding
the history of violence, one has to make distinctions among levels of horror.
Haven’t we just been lucky? If
Churchill hadn’t stood up to Hitler, if Stalin hadn’t been willing to sacrifice
tens of millions of Russians, if German scientists had succeeded in their
nuclear program, then most of the world would be living under the horrors of
the Third Reich.
True, but these counterfactuals go
both ways. As John Mueller has put it, “had Adolf Hitler gone into art rather
than politics, had he been gassed a bit more thoroughly by the British in the
trenches in 1918, had he, rather than the man marching next to him, been gunned
down in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, had he failed to survive the automobile
crash he experienced in 1930, had he been denied the leadership position in
Germany, or had he been removed from office at almost any time before September
1939 (and possibly even before May 1940), Europe’s
greatest war would most probably
never have taken place.”
One could argue that in fact the
world has just emerged from a run of stupendous bad luck, one in which
three extraordinarily bloodthirsty men—Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—managed to take
over powerful states, and were responsible for a majority of the deaths from
war and genocide in the 20th century. Many historians have argued as follows: No Hitler, no
Holocaust; no Stalin, no Purge; no Mao, no Great Leap Forward and Cultural
Revolution. See the section “The Trajectory of Genocide,” particularly pp.
331–336–338, 343.
I repeat: Haven’t we just been
lucky? On a number of occasions, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world
came just this close to nuclear annihilation.
According to the most recent
analyses of documents from the Cuban Missile Crisis (see, e.g., Max Frankel’s High
Noon in the Cold War), both the US and USSR desperately tried to get out of
the crisis, avoiding unnecessary provocations and offering greater concessions
than they had to. Other allegedly just-this-close brushes with Armageddon, such
as the Vietnam and Yom Kippur wars, were even less perilous. As Mueller puts
it, the metaphor of an escalator, in which one misstep could have carried
leaders up and away to all-out nuclear war, is misleading. A better metaphor is
a ladder: each rung made leaders increasingly acrophobic, and in every case
they nervously sought a way to step back down.
As long as nuclear weapons exist,
one cannot say that we are living in less-violent times, especially since it is
inevitable that they will be used at some time in the future.
There is no answer to the question of how to compare the decline
in actual deaths from dozens of high-probability categories (homicide, war,
domestic abuse, and so on) with the increase in hypothetical deaths from one
low-probability category – it is, as they say, a philosophical question. But
it’s far from certain that nuclear weapons will ever be used again. The 67-year
history of nonuse suggests that, contrary to predictions that blundering
politicians and trigger-happy generals have always been on the verge of unleashing
nuclear weapons, the likelihood of their being used is probably very small. Of
course, even an event with an extremely low odds, when the probability is
exponentiated over enough years, becomes extremely probable, but that curve has
to be set off against the one representing the probability that the Global Zero
project will succeed and that nuclear weapons will go the way of chemical
weapons, human sacrifice, and slave auctions – also a low-probability event,
but one which has a nonzero chance of happening in this century.
How can you say that violence has
declined when we continue to murder millions of unborn babies?
As I discuss on pp. 426–428, the
rate of abortion worldwide has been in decline. I also discuss the question
whether people perceive abortion as a form of violence, given the
evolving understanding of the locus of moral value over the centuries.
What about all the chickens in
factory farms?
I discuss the chickens in a section
on Animal Rights in chapter 7, pp. 469–473.
What about the American
imprisonment craze?
As unjust as many current American
imprisonment practices are, they cannot be compared to the lethal sadism of
criminal punishment in earlier centuries (pp. 144-146). For a discussion of the
causes and effects of today’s imprisonment binge, see pp. 121–123.
If you measure violence in terms of
homicides or war deaths, couldn’t the decline of violence just be a by-product
of advances in lifesaving medical care?
Unlikely, for a number of reasons.
First, before the late 19th and
early 20th century, most medicine was
quackery, and doctors killed as many patients as they saved, yet many of
the declines I document occurred before that time. Second, many forms of
violent crime move up and down in tandem—for example, rapes and robberies went
up in the 1960s and down in the 1990s, just like homicides—so it’s unlikely
that any of these trends simply consist in a constant amount of violence which
has been reallocated from deaths to injuries thanks to quick-acting EMTs.
Third, while medical technologies have improved, so have weapon technologies.
Fourth, advances in medicine can only move the numbers around for the
statistical sliver consisting of the victims of violence who are injured so
severely that they would have died with even with the primitive medical care in
the past, but not so severely that would have died even with the advanced
medical care of the present. Yet many of the declines are from scorched-earth
campaigns of violence in which no amount of medical care could have reduced the
death tolls to current levels—Mongol invasions, deliberate sieges of cities (in
which doctors, even if they were around, would not have been allowed in),
over-the-top frontal assaults into machine-gun fire, Dresden, Hiroshima,
carpet-bombings, the deliberate killing or starvation of prisoners of war.
But most important, the development
and deployment of medical care to save the lives of soldiers is itself a part
of the very phenomenon I'm exploring—that war leaders and battlefield
commanders today treat the lives of their soldiers as far more precious than in
the days when they were used as fodder. Not only have armed forces invested in
lifesaving technologies at tremendous cost, but battlefield commanders have
avoided the temptation to compensate for the advanced lifesaving care by
putting more soldiers in riskier situations, keeping casualty rates constant.
With lifesaving technologies, as
with lifetaking technologies (that is, weaponry), far more of the variance in
deaths over time depends on how the technologies are applied—whether people
want other people dead or alive—than on what they technologies can do. (See
“Weaponry and disarmament" pp. 673–674.)
You can’t really be arguing that
violence has declined. That would mean that you believe in progress—that Mahler
was an advance over Beethoven, who was an advance over Bach, and old-fashioned
notions like that.
Huh?
Questions about the Future
Have you heard the one about the
turkey who, on the eve of Thanksgiving, remarked on the extraordinary 364-day
era of peace between farmers and turkeys he is lucky enough to be
living in? Or the man who fell off
the roof of an office building and shouted to the workers
on each floor, “So far so good!”
Maybe violence is cyclical, and the whole system is going to blow at any
moment.
There is a big random component to
the timing of wars, but there is no deterministic momentum, nor hydraulic
cycles of buildup and release; see pp. 190–193 and 200210. A lengthy war-free
period does not imply that war is becoming increasingly likely.
Aren’t you in danger of becoming a
laughingstock like the journalist Norman Angell, who predicted that war was
obsolete just five year before the outbreak of World War I?
Actually, Angell wrote only that
war was economically counterproductive, not that it was obsolete—he worried,
correctly, that leaders might blunder into war in their drive for national
glory and other non-economic motives (see pp. 244–249). As for myself, I’m not
predicting that large wars will never happen in the future, only that they
haven’t taken place in the recent past—a phenomenon which needs to be explained
(see pp. 251-255, 361–362, 377).
Have there been times in history
when violence has increased? If so, couldn’t it
happen again?
Of course. Examples of increases of
violence I discuss include a rise in the concentration of destructiveness of
European wars up until World War II, the heyday of genocidal dictators in the
middle decades of the 20th century, the rise of crime in the 1960s, and the
bulge of civil wars in the developing world following decolonization. Yet every
one of these developments has been systematically reversed.
The decline of violence isn’t a
steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed.
Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out
new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. The point of Better
Angels is that in each case humanity has succeeded in reducing them.
I even present some statistical evidence for this cycle of unpleasant shocks
followed by concerted recoveries (pp. 292–294).
As to whether violence might
increase in the future: of course it might. My argument is not that an increase
in violence in the future is impossible; it’s that a decrease in violence has
taken place in the past (pp. 361–362, 377, 671). These are different claims.
Isn’t it inevitable that some
fanatical terrorist group will get its hand on a nuclear weapon, and send the
death counts through the roof?
I discuss kooks with nukes on pp.
361–362 and 368–373.
Speaking of kooks with nukes, isn’t
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to hasten the arrival of
the Twelfth Imam by attacking Israel with nuclear weapons?
I discuss this possibility on pp.
373–375.
Won’t climate change lead to
widespread war?
Maybe, but maybe not (pp. 375–377).
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water,
and most shortages of resources don’t lead to war. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s
did not lead to an American Civil war; nor did the tsunamis of 2003 and 2011
lead to war in Indonesia or Japan. And several statistical studies of recent
armed conflicts have failed to find a correlation between drought or other
forms of environmental degradation and war. Climate change could produce a lot
of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict,
which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource
scarcity.
Will the moral momentum of the
various rights revolutions culminate in universal vegetarianism? Will our
22nd-century descendants be as horrified that we ate meat as we are that our
ancestors kept slaves?
Maybe, but maybe not. See pp.
473–474.
So are you really unwilling to make
any predictions about violence in the future? Isn’t
that a copout?
I think that the humanitarian
movements that have gathered momentum since the Enlightenment will continue to
make progress. The burning of heretics, gruesome executions, blood sports,
slavery, debtors’ prisons, foot-binding, eunuchism, and wars between developed
states won’t make a comeback any time soon. Most likely capital punishment,
violence against women, human trafficking, the beating and bullying of
children, and the persecution of homosexuals will continue to decline, albeit bumpily
and unevenly, over a span of decades. I’m willing to go out on this limb
because international moral shaming campaigns in the past (such as those
against piracy, whaling, and slavery) have generally succeeded over the long
term. I think there is also a non-negligible chance that within the next 25–50
years there will be fewer bloodthirsty despots, and that nuclear weapons could
be abolished (see pp. 276–278). But terrorist attacks, civil war, and wars
involving non-democracies are too capricious to predict, since they depend so
much on the actions of individuals. Also, crime rates have defied every expert
prediction, and it would be foolish to say that they could not go back
up.
Questions about Explanations of the
Decline of Violence
Are you saying that in recent
centuries people have literally evolved to be innately less violent?
It’s possible, but that’s not my
argument. See the section called “Recent Biological Evolution?”, pp. 611–622
You attribute a part of the decline
of violence to the forces of modernity and enlightenment. Yet Germany before
the Nazi takeover was the most cultured, advanced, sophisticated, civilized,
enlightened, cosmopolitan society in the world. Doesn’t this show that
cultural and intellectual sophistication are no protection against
barbarism?
It’s misleading to essentialize an
entire society as if it were a single mind. Weimar Germany did have subcultures
that were sophisticated and cosmopolitan. But it also had subcultures, both
elite and grassroots, that loathed secular modernity and Enlightenment
universalism and signed on to Counter-Enlightenment sentiments of romantic
militarism and nationalism—the valorization of blood and soil. The problem was
that members of the second subculture murdered the members of the first. In a
section called “Ideology” (pp. 556–569) I discuss computer simulations and
social psychology experiments showing how the silencing of dissenting views can
result in the takeover of a society by a belief system that few of its
individual members hold individually—the phenomenon of “extraordinary popular
delusions and the madness of crowds.”
Why do we need a fancy explanation
of the decline of violence? People are innately empathic and averse to harming
others, as we see in the fact that most soldiers can’t bring themselves to fire
their weapons in battle. If violence is not encouraged by a society, it will
naturally die out.
It’s true that people have an
aversion to causing direct bodily harm to a stranger (presumably because it
gives that person and his allies a motive to fight back). But it’s wrong to
conclude that people are averse to harming other people in general.
Skittishness about personal violence is easily set aside under a variety of
circumstances. One is vengeance, in which a person coolly plots to harm an
adversary under conditions where the adversary cannot defend himself. A second
is rampage (sometimes called Forward Panic), where a group of men who have
endured a prolonged state of fearful apprehension suddenly isolates a vulnerable
adversary; this can trigger an explosion of savage aggression. A third is
sadism, where a person pleasurably savors the ability to overcome the
inhibition to harming someone else, much like a connoisseur acquires a taste
for strong flavors or extreme sports.
These and other avenues toward and
away from violence are systematically laid out in the two chapters on the
psychology of violence, Inner Demons and Better Angels. I argue against various
popular theories that paint Homo sapiens across the board as innately
violent (killer apes, a death instinct, aggression genes, a violent brain,
testosterone poisoning) or innately nonviolent (peaceful savages, reluctant
soldiers, empathy neurons, universal moral rules). Humans, I argue, are
equipped with five distinct motives of violence, and four faculties that allow
them to inhibit or avoid violence.
Oh yeah, I’ve read about why
violence has declined. It has something to do with the Roe v. Wade Supreme
Court decision.
You’re referring to a theory
proposed by the economist Steven Levitt and made famous in his bestseller (with
Stephen Dubner) called Freakonomics. Levitt proposed that the American
crime decline in the 1990s was the long-term result of fewer unwanted babies
having been born after the 1973 legalization of abortion. But later he went on
to adduce three additional causes of the crime decline. Of the four, the
abortion hypothesis has pretty much been refuted, for reasons I review on pp.
119–121.
The explanation for the decline of
violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb.
The theory of the Nuclear Peace is
evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved
that conventional warfare was already unthinkably destructive, so the
superpowers were already deterred plenty from provoking a third world war.
Also, since the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so disproportionate to
any strategic goal, its threat is for all practical purposes a bluff, which is
why so many non-nuclear powers have defied nuclear ones since 1945. Finally,
the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war,
too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over
flatfish to a shooting war.
You obviously must discuss Michel Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish, the book that explains the
decline of judicial torture in Europe.
Actually, I don’t. Despite being a
guru in the modern humanities, Foucault is not the only scholar to have noticed
that European states eliminated gruesome punishments, and his theory in
particular strikes me as eccentric, tendentious, and poorly argued. See J. G.
Merquior’s “Charting carceral society” in his book Foucault (UC Press,
1985), for a lucid deconstruction.
Other Questions
What did you think of Elizabeth
Kolbert’s review of Better Angels in The New Yorker?
Not much. It begins with the
sensationalist, anecdote-driven style of journalism that has so distorted
people’s understanding of violence: five paragraphs (a fifth of the review) on
last summer’s spree killing in Norway. Kolbert must know that a single horrific
incident, however irrelevant to long-term trends, has more emotional impact on
readers than any amount of data analysis.
She then spends three paragraphs
recounting studies which show that prehistoric and medieval societies were,
contrary to popular belief, extraordinarily violent. But instead of
acknowledging that these are just the facts that the book seeks to explain, she
blows them off as “old thinking”: “The savages, it turns out, really were
savage! The medievals did, in fact, go medieval!” The sarcasm is typical
of her treatment of data: she can’t actually deny that rates of violence have
come down, yet she implies that it is somehow unseemly, or futile, or
reactionary, to acknowledge these facts and try to explain them.
Kolbert repeatedly plays the race
and colonialism cards:
•
“The scope of Pinker's
attentions is almost entirely confined to Western Europe.” In fact the section
called “The European Homicide Decline” is followed by a section called
“Violence Around the World” (complete with a world map of homicide rates, and a
detailed case study from New Guinea) and a section called “Violence in These
United States” (which, contra Kolbert, shows that the four regions in the US
duplicated the main decline documented for Europe). And chapter 5, on the
history of war in Europe and among great powers (which, incidentally, include
non-western-European powers such as the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Japan, and
China) is followed by chapter 6, on the history of war in the rest of the
world.
•
“Pinker's views on
African-Americans and Southerners probably indicate, there is much in The Better Angels of
Our Nature that is confounding.” What she calls “Pinker’s views”
are the undisputed facts, long known to criminologists, that homicide rates are
higher among southerners than northerners, and higher among blacks than whites.
•
“Pinker is virtually silent about
Europe’s bloody colonial adventures. (There's not even an entry for
‘colonialism’ in the book's enormous index.)” In fact the book’s has a list of
the 21 worst atrocities in history which includes the “Annihilation of the
American Indians,” the “Atlantic Slave Trade,” “British India,” and the “Congo
Free State.” And the book reviewer’s old trick of finding some term that was
not in the index is particularly disreputable in the age of e-books, when a
quick search would have turned up more than 25 places in which the book
discusses colonial conquests, wars, enslavements, and genocides.
•
“What does it reveal about the
impulse control of the Spanish that...they were systematically butchering the
natives on two continents? Or about the humanitarianism of the British
that, as they were turning away from such practices as drawing and quartering, they
were shipping slaves across the Atlantic?” Kolbert shows no signs of having
read the two chapters on the psychology of violence, which take up this very
question: “To understand the role of the moral sense in the decline of
violence, we have to solve a number of psychological enigmas [such as] how the
moral sense can be so compartmentalized: …[for example] why liberal democracies
can practice slavery and colonial oppression.”
Also twisted is my account of the
role of modernity in the decline of violence: “Though Pinker would like to
pretend otherwise, Fascism and Communism are inventions that are every bit as
modern as women's rights and the eurozone.” The book makes it utterly clear
that I am not using the term “modernity” to refer to every idea that has influenced
the world during the past 250 years. I use it to refer to one specific
idea—classical liberalism, or Enlightenment humanism—which intellectually
excludes, and has historically superseded, Fascism and Communism.
Kolbert does raise a substantive point
about the list (adapted from Matthew White) of history’s worst
atrocities: “Pinker's math here is, at best, fishy. According to his own
calculations, the Second World War was, proportionally speaking, the
ninth-deadliest conflict of all time…yet the war lasted just six
years. The Arab slave trade, which ranks as No. 3 on Pinker's hit
list, was an atrocity that took more than a millennium to unfold. The
Mongol conquests, coming in at No. 2, spanned nearly a century.” But it’s
Kolbert’s math that is fishy. She’s suggesting that historical trends in
violence should be quantified by the speed of killing: How
many people can be dispatched per unit of time? But surely it’s the amount of violence that is more relevant: For how long did the killing
at that rate last? Imagine that that slave trade was abolished after a year, or
that Genghis Khan was defeated after a month, or that the Holocaust was called
off after a week. Would we not judge those events as vastly less violent?
According to Kolbert’s math, we shouldn’t.
The penultimate paragraph
degenerates into the postmodernist sophistry that the New Yorker so often indulges when reporting on science: “Name a force, a
trend, or a ‘better angel’ that has tended to reduce the threat, and someone
else can name a force, a trend, or an ‘inner demon’ pushing back the other
way.” Well, yes, someone can always do that, but would they be right?
Would they have evidence and logic on their side? And if threats of violence
were really buffeted every which way by all those forces someone can name, then
why have rates of violence—as Kolbert grudgingly concedes—gone down? Doesn’t
that imply that some forces have been more powerful than others?
She continues: “And such is the
logic of the dialectic that these two sides are, as often as not, connected.”
The “logic” of this dialectic is far from obvious, but somehow it leads Kolbert
to the old theory that the “the most compelling explanation for Europe's past
half century of peace is the prospect of the alternative”—namely, all-out
nuclear war—but that “we have grown so used to this ‘sublime irony’ that we
barely talk about it anymore.” Actually, some of us do talk about it: me, for
example. Kolbert failed to notice the section of the book entitled “Is the Long
Peace a Nuclear Peace?” which shows that the Nuclear Terror theory of the
postwar peace, far from being compelling, is probably false.
In her final paragraph, Kolbert
waves the bloody Norwegian shirt one more time, and informs us, “Hate and
madness and cruelty haven't disappeared, and they aren't going to.” No honest
reviewer would imply that this is the message of the book.
But aren’t you just being
defensive? Authors always think that negative reviews of their book are
wrong. Has anyone else replied to Kolbert?
What’s your next book?
A style manual for the 21st century, applying the insights of
linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology to the crafting of
clear and stylish prose.
Can you recommend other books on
violence?
Violence has always brought out the
best in novelists and playwrights, and it has produced brilliant nonfiction
writing as well. Here are some good books on bad behavior, written with
insight, wit, and panache:
Brownmiller,
S. (1975). Against our will: Men, women, and rape. New York: Fawcett
Columbine.
Courtwright,
D. T. (1996). Violent land: Single men and social disorder from the frontier
to the inner city. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chagnon,
N. A. (1997). Yanomamö (5th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.
Daly,
M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.
Goldstein,
J. S. (2011). Winning the war on war: The surprising decline in armed
conflict worldwide. New York: Dutton.
Gottschall,
J. (2008). The rape of troy: Evolution, violence, and the world of Homer.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Keeley,
L. H. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage.
New York: Oxford University Press.
McCullough,
M. E. (2008). Beyond revenge : the evolution of the forgiveness instinct.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Payne,
J. L. (2004). A history of force: Exploring the worldwide movement against
habits of coercion, bloodshed, and mayhem. Sandpoint, ID: Lytton Publishing
Co.
Richardson,
L. F. (1960). Statistics of deadly quarrels. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Rummel,
R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Mueller,
J. (1989). Retreat from doomsday: The obsolescence of major war. New
York: Basic Books.
Schechter,
H. (2005). Savage Pastimes: A history of violent entertainment. New
York: St. Martin's Press.
Valentino,
B. (2004). Final solutions: Mass killing and genocide in the 20th century.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
White,
M. (2011). The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle
of History's 100 Worst Atrocities. New York: Norton.
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