“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine” (1987 hit by R.E.M.). There is a tendency for generations to envision aporia, endgame, or final justice. I tend to see it as the need for every generation to recreate the world and have it as its own. FL Watkins claimed that while we were the first generation physically able to sterilize the world through nuclear annihilation, many societies could visualize the utter collapse of their world as they knew it. Bounded by geology or geography or all-inclusive culture or even dispersed by diaspora, the end of the world was near and total in finality. Many of my friends bemoan often the horrible increase of violence today. They fear kidnapping, rape, and murder as if it were imminent and lock their kids inside or trade them from car to car, door to door.
Pinker demonstrates with some 200 charts and graphs and 800 pages of text we are in a decrease of violence. Violence has been declining for the last several thousand years. Tribal warfare was 9 times greater than 20th century violence. The murder rate in medieval Europe was 30 times greater than today. It’s working! I am relieved and optimistic. I was born with the polarity of nuclear discovery. Nuclear power could eliminate all hunger and energy needs, forever. Nuclear bombs could sterilize the earth, in an hour.
For all of our modern fear of increasing kidnapping, rape, murder and war now seems to be the best time to live. But I have to say Pinker comes across as a secular jew of European descent with all of its fandom of western civilization. Late in the book in the subchapter “Reflections” Pinker notes “A loathing of modernity is one of the great constants of contemporary social criticism. Whether the nostalgia is for small-town intimacy, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, family values, religious faith, primitive communism, or harmony with the rhythms of nature, everyone longs to turn back the clock. What has technology given us they say, but alienation, despoliation, social pathology, the loss of meaning, and a consumer culture that is destroying the planet to give us McMansions, SUVs, and Reality Television?”
Durkheim is useful in discussing the biases and strengths of a society that allow it to endure and then terminate for the wrong reasons. Moral foundations induce cultural biases but overall improve social stability. When we expect thriving because of resource availability we often see demise because of ideology. This is cultural suicide. It can be shown by the BIg Lies of today. Global warming doesn’t exist because if it did we might have to take responsibility, we might have to regulate, we might have to suffer economic change. Overpopulation may ruin us but we can’t regulate birth, technology will save us, and we might abort a Little Einstein. Resources will never end. Prices will raise and the market adapt. The Club of Rome was wrong. We still have titanium reserves or we will go to Carbon fiber.
Yet, there is less violence. Even more. We have had a world food surplus. The workplace is so rich we have OSHA laws and unions are being negated; 40 hr work weeks and mandatory safety equipment for the smallest of particulate matter. We have a black president named Obama. Yes, the financial crisis is a zoo but no one has killed President Obama or Jon Stewart, the acerbic comic newscaster. Is violence a sign of well being? If no one were killed but everyone were oppressed? Are 4 billion chronically sick people better than 100,000 dieing a year?
The last sentimental card drawn after many debates has been the profusion of violence in modern times. The lack of well being rooted in the physicality of violence. Yet, violence by any measure has gone down considerably. Writers who have noted the decrease in violence express puzzlement as to why. Tempting to reach for a nebulous divinity, cosmic author, almost magic, or higher power as Robert Wright infers and received Templeton prize for it with its theological emphasis. Rather, Stephen asserts “forces of modernity–reason, science, humanism, individual rights” are the cause for this peripatetic but nevertheless positive trajectory towards peace.
Be that as it may, the question does become whether societies always go to the Malthusian extreme with abandon or do they determine cultural ways to balance population and postpone the seeming inevitable? Pinker’s most interesting point is that societies destroy each other not because they lack resource. They develop conflicting ideologies for which they are willing to die. This point demonstrated is worth the price of the book!
The beginning spends considerable time demonstrating the violence of the past. For most historians it doesn’t take much critical examination to get that rape, murder, slavery, kidnapping, and physical abuse were plentiful as found in the archaeology and literature of the past whether biblical, greco-roman, medieval chivalry, or even hunter-gatherer societies.
Hunter-gatherer societies in particular raise sentiment to a high fever. It is tempting to extrapolate the journals of the early Spaniards eulogizing specific HG cultures like the Coastal California, Florida, and Japanese areas where resources remained plentiful and various tribes, Chumash, Ohlone, and PreCalusa lived the good life; though they traded off death by warfare with, for example, death and maiming by grizzly attacks, the biggest killer of California Coastal Native Americans. HG societies having found internal peace may still be plagued by other contingencies of their environment and ideology. Tempting too to extrapolate the low hours required by HG societies to sustain themselves, 2-4 hrs per day versus the 10-12 of modern man. Would you trade a life duration of 40 versus 70 if you only had to work 2-4 hrs per day?
But these examples do not scale or universalize easily and their exceptionalism is notable as means of supporting potential benefits but also require geographic, geologic, and cultural boundaries not likely to ever be seen again. Alfred Kroeber, the anthropologist also tempted to universalize western values, notes in the over 1,000 tribes of California tribes cultural mores range from slavery to freedom, money to barter, peace to full warfare, stability to nomadism. This hodge podge of cultures serves as excellent idea sources but not as scalable models easily obtained by modern society. The Society of Primitive Technology and works by Norm Kidder and Pegg Mathewson as well as myself have shown the ease of living off the land but that may be irrelevant to the contingencies of living together. Living in a resource rich area does not guarantee the good life.
While there are paradigmatic examples of a less intensive life style with a surplus of free time for gaming, story-telling, and time consuming functional art work it is no guarantee against violence. For years I listened to the debate about Anasazi and cliff dwellers. Whether those painful cliff climbs were for defense or some perverse kind of architecture. It has been with great difficulty that even trained anthropologists could accept such ritualized violence. We deeply want to believe in an Eden, primitive purity, at some time or that humans are basically peaceful but easily corrupted. Consider the rejection of Lorenz’s Territorial Imperative or Adler’s will to power. Such a dream is a balm to the everyday violence we experience and see as our own and worse than all before.
Hobbes exaggerated the solitary tooth and fang aspect of the precivilized world. Frankly the pedantic western notion of preenlightenment savagery aggrandized colonialism. It is questionable whether we had a right to dominate the planet and whether it was worthwhile. The accidental and intentional transmission of disease and inappropriate flaura and fauna to the rest of the world has repercussions not translated as violence but nevertheless caustic to the world’s environments and peoples. One wonders if Pinker counts the many many people killed by these things not directly held by a human hand in wanton aggression. Pinker notes how quickly a city resorts to looting or violence when the lights go out or the police aren’t present as if we caged humans are coiled springs of violence compressed fitfully in our civilization. One wonders how to deal with the fact of rampant inequities not yet met and the chronic anger and depression incurred. To be fair Pinker often notes some of these issues but seems to go on in an all’s well that end’s well panacea to good feeling about western civ.
Even the noted pimatologist Jane Goodal hoped her chimps were peaceful but they weren’t and she relates a horrifying incident where a just ruler is overthrown by a thug who figures out how to scare the crap out of his tribe by clanging and chasing members with a stolen garbage can lid.
It is not at all clear that humans have been a blessing to this planet and one cannot help but sympathize with the Jewish joke that if god had a house on earth people would throw rocks through his windows. Only if we assume a grand design of benevolent human domination can we accept our fate. Many religiously inclined deny this and state emphatically the arrogant and indulgent belief the earth was made for man whether in toto pristine or destroyed and left in waste as we colonize other planets as the secularist physicist Stephen Hawkins recommends. Leaving these serious concerns aside… We are here and we need to make the best of it.
Pinker quotes Hobbes commenting on the logic of violence of one intelligent species to another “So that in the nature of man, we find three principles of quarrel. First competition; secondly diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second for safety; and the third for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second to defend them; the third. for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.”
Hobbes’ solution is that a tyrant of the most vicious sort is better than precivilized life. His contempt and fear of nature is replete and many modern people see it that way as well. He completely misses the boat for democracy and commerce as amelioration but nails the psychological problem on its head. Reputation is the most critical aspect most undervalued as a human motivator. It is not resource depletion so much that encourages internal warfare but the unabated zeal for reputation and status as a means of ensuring competitive and defensive success over time. While R. Buckminster Fuller said boredom breeds creativity it is not true unless within a structure of accomplishment. Boredom leads to negative group dynamics. Time needs to be filled with activity or humans turn to each other for entertainment and it is often cruel and vicious to preserve or enhance reputation.
Jim Riggs ran an aboriginal living skills program where individuals learn HG material culture and then survive on the land in the resource depleted Northwestern open spaces, the only nonprivate free nature to be found. It is a twisted unreal and difficult game as the skills involved take time to learn for expertise and the environment is bleak; any native american would survive quickly and easily. Nevertheless there is considerable leisure time. I have met a number of these students, some Phd anthropologists, and the complaint I heard the most was not being hungry, not being tired, but the difficulty of group dynamics.
In the end the greatest difficulty of living together is interpersonal relationship. Jared Diamond writes of an annual meeting between tribes and notes an exceptionally difficult period when a wronged member repeatedly, annually, raised anger of a past wrong to the group. For the sake of the reputation of a single member the only intertribal meeting a year is hijacked by one grievous member. Other family members, peacemakers, assuage the wrong feeling but with difficulty. This is full democracy and is reminiscent of the dysfunctional premodern Polish democratic government that had to disband when a member disagreed. Consensus has its price.
Resource rich tribes of the Pacific Northwest arrived at a culture of totem and potlatch one upmanship where status was raised to the pitch of the impoverishment of families by giving away everything and more. No longer the hunter coming home and sharing the meat but a drive to wanton excess no different than the missionaries in the America’s plundering all resource and capital to destitution to render ever larger missions in an absurd competition to have the biggest dick, uhh I mean mission. The former no longer having anything to do with egalitarianism and the latter having nothing to do with God’s word. It has been physically painful for me to visit these missions. I try to see the physical beauty. Instead I hear the groans of pummeled bodies, see the crimson color of flagellated flesh, and feel the denigration of my worth for another’s. I don’t understand why they come in, light a candle, and pray.
Pinker notes Laura Betzig who has shown that “complex societies tend to fall under the control of despots; leaders who are guaranteed to get their way in conflicts, who can kill with impunity, and who have large harems of women at their disposal.” Pinker adds “People were less likely to become victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptomaniacs.” Not until the enlightenment, democracy, and individual rights will there be a cultural ideology that lowers the desire for violence.
Glossing over several dense chapters discussing the flow of violence Pinker resets his path in “Inner Demons”. Sadism, Masochism, ostracizing, excommunication, all contribute to violence yet seem to be part of the nature of man. It is tempting to either say someone is evil or they are the victim of their passions. Neither is correct. A keen insight is revenge, the policeman and cretin henchman of reputation.
In various experiments and games revenge does have an advantage but only at cost. “Revenge can work as a deterrent only if the avenger has a reputation for being willing to avenge and a willingness to carry it out even when it is costly.” The better other side of reputation is just punishment.
Pinker quotes Daly and Wilson “The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane pragmatic matter; discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.” The danger is the escalation of revenge. Innocence is exaggerated as is their adversary’s malice. Heuristic biases have a home in all of us and as our reasoning escalates the conflict of conscious and conscience also escalates. We aren’t reasonable and you don’t have to be be a psychopath or sociopath to not get the punishment as aversion versus oppression.
Too often we punish more and more severely way past the pragmatic end of prevention. The way out “The desire for revenge is most easily modulated when the perpetrator falls within our natural circle of empathy. We are apt to forgive our kin and close friends for trespasses that would be unforgivable in others. And when our circle of empathy expands…our circle of of forgivability expands with it”
Men strive for dominance. People are overconfident of their success. In contests of dominance parties are no longer sorted by merit. People can overcome the revulsion of violence but seek it and privatize it as in S & M games and worse. They spread the pain like a meme. Getting the word out has no intrinsic merit; it is merely an inherent communication channel. “And people can avow a belief they don’t hold purely because they think everyone else avows it; such beliefs can sweep through a closed society and bring it under the spell of collective delusion.” Like a bad story on Facebook and Twitter expansive communication does not define the content. Just because you are talking doesn’t mean you are saying anything.
The chapter “Better Angels” is a pleasure to read. It is the optimist’s antidote. The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist is afraid that it is true. What is it that has allowed us to reject violence? What are the underlying forces of democracy, commerce, and individual rights that make them work? It’s not be happy but I am happy because there are good things present.
Empathy, sympathy, understanding, and compassion all encourage the expanding circle of self. The facile mantra of oneness is annoying but its merit is the desire for inclusion. Pinker rightly notes “What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights–a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm or exploitation.”
The great side of modern times is that science, reason, democracy, and commerce open the interhuman channels that enable better solutions by eliminating excessive bias. Trust, justice, and an expanding circle of inclusion allows us to be horrified at the death of the other. Even in resource depletion we now see the essential need to forge peace. We even seek what John Rawls calls, in his revision of A Theory of Justice, an overlapping consensus, the disparate source of an agreed upon common action where we agree for different nay contrary reasons. An atheist and theist may both seek the same law for opposing reasons. Do we really all have to agree?
Peter Singer does not use empathy or emotion to expand the circle of self though Singer coined the phrase. Reason is sufficient. It is reason that expands the circle beyond self, family, nation, and species and not rubbing shoulders or the imagining of rubbing shoulders. It makes sense to include others. He is a utilitarian and while rich with calculation it does deny the role of passion and and flattens the distance of relation. Their is good reason why tribal members called everyone a familial name, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, or aunt and these terms reinforce the feeling of compassion and democracy by expanding the circle of kin.
Commerce encourages empathy, or at least sex and drinking together. My mother loved the Medic as business was business and enemy be damned. The trade routes of the world are littered with Romeo and Juliet stories. Business cuts through class and preference. Trade encourages integration. Physical contact encourages acceptance of varying views. People will engage in commerce as an excuse to socialize. Integration works but is not initially accepted except by a big carrot like commerce.
Self control helps contain violence and civilization provides value added techniques. “Economists have noted that when people are left to their own devices, they save far too little for their retirement, as if they expected to die in a few years. “ Pinker spends considerable time supporting Elias that self-control and violence are related. Furthermore that practicing self-control and impulse-control lowers violence. This is mostly a futuristic chapter with ideas and plans best stated “It’s also possible that people can learn strategies of self control, enjoy the feeling of mastery over their impulses, and transfer their newfound tricks of discipline from one part of their behavioral repertoire over another.” Apparently though considering world news in spring of an Arab Spring we have room for improvement here. The world is still on an unsustainable track due to violence, birth rates, and wanton resource depletion. Stephen would add but it’s getting better.
The historic difficulty is the compulsion to prioritize present needs over future needs. In the past delaying gratification removed motivation to action now for immediate survival. Now, delaying gratification benefits future states. It is as if the extent of reputation has extended far into the future. Grandparents, oral tradition, writing, and governance are all means of allowing the individual to extend the perception of life into the future. Overall, Pinker calls this the Civilizing Process. Who would have guessed that we would live beyond the reproductive phase? Anthropologists note the advantages of historical memory. The value of grandparents, physical recordings of events, and finally codified governance contained in writing.
Moral process. Pinker quotes Fiske and Tetlock “Over the last three centuries throughout the world there has been a rapidly accelerating tendency of social systems as a whole to move from Communal Sharing to Authority Ranking to Equality Matching to Market Pricing” Further Pinker writes “The trend towards social liberalism, then is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and towards values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights.” Haidt has researched this and many chafe that conservatives are authority, purity, and loyalty based but the up side is that conservatives no longer invoke authority, tradition, or religion to justify racism, female domesticity, and gay bashing. Or at least not as much as they did.
Reason takes a dive in society now but the interesting point is the proliferation of reasoning and arguments to accomplish the goal. Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes did not opine from the heart and emote their intuitions. Some of the most extravagant and difficult arguments come from postmodernism. Neuroscience has used tremendous amounts of reason to show how we are biased as do economists. Never has reason been abandoned but rather if anything fetishized. Only conservative authority adherence discussions abandon reason for abeyance.
The best part of this chapter was a note on Hume. Many people think Hume refers to rationalizations. That people follow passions and support with reason. Pinker rightly notes “…he was not advising people to shoot from the hip, blow their stack, or fall head over heels for Mr Wrong. He was basically making the logical point that reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of the propositions.” Henry in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged continually made this point that it’s not the logic, it’s the premises–one of the few truths remaining in her books after time.
Nevertheless reason according to Pinker allows us to modify self control and moral sense. What is important here is that reasoning leads to accuracy. Bad arguments, bad inferences, and bad premises are more easily sorted out by reason. Reasoning allows us to moderate the more instinctive and rapid reasoning required in quick thinking.
The growth of education and the expanse of reason leads to less violence. “It is not a big leap to conclude that an education-fueled rise in reasoning ability made at least some parts of the world safe for democracy. Democracy by definition is associated with less government violence, and we know that is statistically associated with an aversion to interstate war, deadly ethnic riots, and genocide, and with a reduction in the severity of civil wars.”
In ”On Angel’s Wings” Pinker makes a strong supposition for protective government or the Leviathan, albeit more pleasant than Hobbe’s. “A state that uses a monopoly on force to protect its citizens from one another may be the most consistent violence-reducer that we have encountered in this book…A Leviathan–or his female counterpart–Justitia, the goddess of justice–is a disinterested party whose penalties are not inflated by the self serving biases of the participants, and who is not a deserving target of revenge.” By imposing a cost that is greater than the benefit a governance can make peace more attractive than aggression.
My mother used to say Italian mothers hated to send their sons to war. Pinker, acknowledging Yamaguchi the only survivor of both atomic bombs “The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers , those who are still breast feeding their babies.” Furthermore “Several varieties of feminization, then–direct political empowerment, the deflation of manly honor, the promotion of marriage on women’s terms, the rights of girls to be born, and women’s control over their own reproduction–have been forces in the decline of violence.” This is a long way from the biblical admonishment that a rapist must marry his victim.
Pinkers’ penultimate reflection concerns humanism. “Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force.”
His ultimate plea is that while he understands the mother’s cry for a lost child that it is the proportion of violence that does indeed count. It is not the number of people but the percent of people. Many reviewers criticize this aspect. That 1 death in 50 is better than 10 of 500 and so on. I present that we are more sensitive to death in numbers than ever before. The battle of Antietem took 23,000 lives in one day. 9/11 a tenth of that. Our wars now measure casualties in double digits rather than thousands or tens of thousands. Our sensibility towards individual death is now so great that we watch the news of murders with the same kind of anger we reserved for battles.
Yet, when 9/11 occurred my reaction was it’s not so many people to justify a war. Not that there isn’t a good reason to battle totalitarianism in the world but effecting horror sated the terrorist desire to terrorize and we have colonized the world. While respecting Christopher Hitchen’s fine hawkish mood I would blame the provoker as well as the responder even if it’s a crook. As a policeman I would not provoke a known killer just so I could send a slug into his side. All violence is to be nill. I was chastised by my friend the physics teacher who said he’d lost a friend in there. Even with insurance of 5 million dollars the loss of a life is deep when it’s yours and cheap when it’s an enemy’s.
In a tribe of 50, the loss of a member instills grief that may last years and can hurt the survivability of the group. Yet modern relations of dead victims are also often permanently psychologically scarred–I think of a mother carrying a photo of her miscarried fetus for years–and the death of a leader has great impact. I am not sure 1 in 50 is worse than 100,000 of a million. Nor am I sure that loss is scalable. While not wanting to revert to a soul counting blessing I am not sure the percentage is good enough.
How often we tease death because we can get away with it and then at some point it happens on a really grand scale? Thinking you are going extinct is nearly as harmful as actually going extinct and the one may incur the other when it was preventable. I bet most of old europe would kill for our misery! Though Amsterdam in the Tulip bulb bubble era must have been amazing! In spite of its fall there wasn’t massive violent death. I can only tease at the cost of injury and misery versus death by number. Are 10 deaths equal to 100 life imprisonments? Would you accept a flogging of 10 lashes for 2, 5, 10 years in prison?
Only the belief in a finite number of souls that requires preservation could prioritize number over percent. An absolute number of saved souls makes sense only if a single soul has greater merit that several souls or there is some number to be reached. I would avoid the argument of is it better to save an Einstein than Joe Bagodonuts. The flattening of social class and status encourages the greater preservation of individuals versus the sacrifice of many to save a few.
Nevertheless I hope this heightened sensitivity to death shows how far we can continue. Perhaps even the respect to animals and pets will ramp up our empathy and we will not eat animals nor abuse our pets if we even choose to have them.
“For all of the tribulations in our lives, for all of the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.” I only hope this meme spreads and the best part of the enlightenment, reason, compassion, generosity, passion, individual autonomy, and self control ring true for many more.
Copyright 2012 Jim Newman
