Hello, thanks for this interesting discussion. Although I have not read Pinker, I disagree with his assertion of a decline in violence over history. The institutional latent violence of armies, borders, laws, nuclear weapons, mass extinctions and indifference to climate change is far greater now than at any time in the past.

Violence is a function of scarcity. In conditions of scarcity, violence increases, while in conditions of abundance violence declines, as seen in the difference between bonobos and chimps arising from environments of varying natural productivity.

This question of trends in violence should be assessed over the long sweep of human history since emigration from Africa 80,000 years ago, a period in which human brains have been the same size, indicating that intelligence has not increased. Over that period, precession of the equinox has driven 20,000 year cycles of golden and iron ages of plenty and scarcity, seen in the glacial record. The last golden age of plenty was at the dawn of the Holocene 10,000 years ago, when universal abundance enabled peaceful matrifocal societies. There is no evidence of war from before the rise of agriculture, technology and private property. It is only more recently that rising populations produced conflict.

For Pinker to take the evidence since the rise of settled agriculture is far too short a time period to assess trends in violence.

There is a strong link between this debate and politics. The key to reducing violence is increasing productivity. As societies become richer they become more peaceful. And productivity requires a focus on wealth creation, more so than on wealth distribution.

March-Hare wrote:Hey DWill,

Sorry for taking so long to reply. I moved on to some other books and I'm just getting back to Pinker.

I'll take another crack at explaining what I mean by contiguity. Let me go back to Rousseau and I will try to point out what I think is useful. First, for the moment, let's just drop the whole noble savage thing. We then have this schema:

"state of nature"=amour de soi=violence

society=amour propre=exploitation and, of course, there is still the potential for reverting to a "state of nature" and violence as well

My example was meant to highlight the transfer from a state of nature where violence reigns to society where exploitation is added to violence. The violent acts of the Prussian soldier are serving the strategic ends of "exploitation" not self-preservation so they are not continuous with the hunter gather. They are not playing the same strategic game.

Yet does this matter to Pinker's argument, which is after all focused solely on the degree to which violence has decreased? Different types of violence, or whether a less violent society might still not be a better one by some measues, don't interest him here. He tries to make the book about this single factor, that members of socieities are harmed less by their fellow citizens and by foreign citizens. He doesn't comment (yet, anyway) on a North Korea being perhaps a safe society but also one which wouldn't be seen as desireable.

This brings me to the what makes me think Pinker has a political axe to grind question. I'm not so sure he has an axe to grind, but I do detect a tendency towards a conservative mentality.

In my view, it's typical of the conservative mindset to see the violence part and not the exploitation part. In other words the only thing to be eliminated is the violence of the state of nature even when one has progressed to society. This is how you end up with the minimal state of Leviathan + "gentle" commerce. I'm latching onto this because "gentle" commerce is a key component of the conservative narrative as to why the minimal state is sufficient. (Caveat--there is an additional component to Pinker's narrative that muddies the water for my interpretation. I am ignoring it for the moment.)

In this context, go back and read the passages around page 111 (Viking hardcover edition not sure if your pagination is the same) which lead up to the parable of the watch. In a word, Calvinism. Calvinism is the mythology of "gentle" commerce.

Unfortunately the library confiscated my copy of the book, so I'll have to get another. I suppose that Pinker does find himself on the side of conservatism now and then in the book, but is this due to having an agenda? That would be plausible if it could be shown that he's manipulating his data. I don't have the expertise to say whether he could be or not; I think not. He praises commerce, business, and capitalism as perhaps the strongest forces for reducing the urge of countries to attack each other. He endorses social institutions for their civilizing powers. He at one point criticizes the 60s radicals for causing a regression toward violence and lack of civility. All of these are positions that conservatives have taken. They are leanings if he could have arrived at different conclusions based on his data. Maybe he could have; I don't feel qualified to judge that.

Robert Tulip wrote:Hello, thanks for this interesting discussion. Although I have not read Pinker, I disagree with his assertion of a decline in violence over history. The institutional latent violence of armies, borders, laws, nuclear weapons, mass extinctions and indifference to climate change is far greater now than at any time in the past.

Violence is a function of scarcity. In conditions of scarcity, violence increases, while in conditions of abundance violence declines, as seen in the difference between bonobos and chimps arising from environments of varying natural productivity.

This question of trends in violence should be assessed over the long sweep of human history since emigration from Africa 80,000 years ago, a period in which human brains have been the same size, indicating that intelligence has not increased. Over that period, precession of the equinox has driven 20,000 year cycles of golden and iron ages of plenty and scarcity, seen in the glacial record. The last golden age of plenty was at the dawn of the Holocene 10,000 years ago, when universal abundance enabled peaceful matrifocal societies. There is no evidence of war from before the rise of agriculture, technology and private property. It is only more recently that rising populations produced conflict.

For Pinker to take the evidence since the rise of settled agriculture is far too short a time period to assess trends in violence.

There is a strong link between this debate and politics. The key to reducing violence is increasing productivity. As societies become richer they become more peaceful. And productivity requires a focus on wealth creation, more so than on wealth distribution.

Robert, Pinker does begin his analysis before the beginning of settled agriculture. He presents data he claims shows that "nasty, poor, brutish, and short" isn't such a distortion, after all, of hunter-gatherer life. (I realize that it's not such a distortion of agricultual life, either, but things do get a little better on the violence side.) It's also important to understand, as I said in my reply to March-Hare, that he is talking only about people being killed or in some way physically assaulted. At least as far as I have read, he doesn't consider all the other quality-of-life factors that certainly bear on the question of whether we are better off. The level of violence we face is perhaps the biggest quality-of-life concern, however. It doesn't matter to his thesis that we have enough nuclear weapons stockpiled to kill perhaps everything on the planet. We haven't used them in 67 years.

DWill wrote: Chimps come off as dangerous thugs in many of the media stories that come out. Maybe that portrait distorts their character, though, and a correction is needed.

I believe this occurred especially after the story came out of the woman who was mauled by a neighbor's chimpanzee and required considerable surgery to repair her face.

beechnut79 wrote:

DWill wrote: Chimps come off as dangerous thugs in many of the media stories that come out. Maybe that portrait distorts their character, though, and a correction is needed.

I believe this occurred especially after the story came out of the woman who was mauled by a neighbor's chimpanzee and required considerable surgery to repair her face.

So, what I wonder is whether these prominent "evil chimp" stories have made us generalize unfairly. It's hard for me not to think that I don't want to be anywhere a chimp who isn't under the control of a trainer, or behind a wire screen. But can they really be that bad?