Ch. 1 - A Foreign Country

[Chris OConnor]

Please use this thread to discuss Ch. 1 - A Foreign Country.

[DWill]

I'm behind the curve and didn't realize this book had been selcted for NF discussion. I had already checked it out from the library, though, and when I get back from my vacation in Texas I hope to start reading and discussing it. I look for books that can dispel some of the gloom about the future, without bias, and Pinker promises to do that. One point he raised in the intro is that almost all of us assume that the world is more violent than ever; the news and images of violence we see daily are more than enough to convince us of this. Events such as 9/11 seem to nail down the certainty that we haven't gotten any better at living peacefully together. But this only shows the availability heuristic controlling our judgment. We humans judge the probablility of events by the ease with which we can call to mind similar past events, providing a poor gauge of both probability and relative frequency of events.

"The better angels of our nature" is from Lincoln. It so happens that I'm going to see Spielberg's movie tonight. It might be a good antidote to the Texas Civil War Museum I toured today. I believe slaves were mentioned maybe twice in the exhibits and short film. The war was all about protecting "rights and home."

[tbarron]

In his preface, Pinker writes, "The most satisfying explanation of a historical changes is one that identifies an exogenous trigger [i.e., a trigger that originates outside the system whose behavior is being explained]. To the best that the data allow it, I will try to identify exogenous forces that have engaged our mental faculties in different ways at different times and that thereby can be said to have caused the declines in violence."

An immediate question that springs to mind for me is whether religion will be one of the forces he will identify and if so, whether his analysis will show it reducing or increasing violence.

Happily, his next statement is that he will preview his major conclusions, delineating them as six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.

The six trends:
1. The Pacification Process: forager tribalism to agricultural civilization (~3000 BCE)
2. The Civilizing Process: feudalism to unified monarchies (1500 CE - 1900 CE)
3. The Humanitarian Revolution: organized movements to oppose various kinds of violence (slavery, dueling, judicial torture, etc., 1600s - 1700s)
4. The Long Peace: warfare between major powers has disappeared (1945 - present)
5. The New Peace: reduction in organized conflicts of all kinds since the end of the Cold War (1989 - present)
6. The Rights Revolution: cultural rejection of aggression against minorities, women, children, homosexuals, animals (late 1950s - present)

These trends are covered in chapters 2 through 7.

Chapter 8 discusses "five inner demons":
1. Predatory, or instrumental violence, where the violence is simply way of achieving a goal.
2. Dominance: the "urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power."
3. Revenge: the drive for "retribution, punishment, justice."
4. Sadism: pleasure taken in the suffering of another
5. Ideology: a shared belief system that typically involves a utopian vision and "justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good."

Chapter 9 describes "four better angels": empathy, self-control, moral sense, and reason. Empathy allows us to find our commonality of interest with others. Self-control allows us to project the likely outcomes of acting impulsively and restrain ourselves in the interest of more desirable outcomes. Moral sense "sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it." Reason helps us generalize from the specific to derive principles that can help us live well.

Finally, chapter 10 identifies five historical forces:
1. The Leviathan -- a "state and judiciary with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force."
2. Commerce -- "a positive-sum games in which everybody can win," in which others become potential trading partners and therefore "more valuable alive than dead."
3. Feminization -- "the process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values of women."
4. Cosmopolitanism -- "literacy, mobility, and mass media," which help different groups of people around the world understand each other.
5. The Escalator of Reason -- "an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs [which] can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won."

Thus, Pinker's preface provides a roadmap for the rest of the book, without answering my question about religion directly. I think the features in the roadmap that seem most likely to act as links to religion are:
- The Humanitarian Revolution was driven to some extent by religious thinkers and activists.
- The description of the inner demon ideology could include religion.
- The moral sense better angel could be related to religion, although he points out that in some cases this can actually increase violence rather than decreasing it.

[tbarron]

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received seven honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

"short bio" from http://stevenpinker.com/biocv. There's lots more on his website, including a funny cartoon rendition of his image on the about page linked at the beginning of this paragraph.

[tbarron]

In Chapter 1, Pinker takes us on a tour of the "foreign country" known as the past. He argues that the past was much more violent than our present world.

Do you find his argument convincing? Why or why not? (My answer is in the spoiler section below, so you can write your own answer without being influenced by mine if you'd like to.)

Do you think the optimism shown in the imaginary commencement speech near the end of chapter 1 is justified? Does the imaginary speech provide an accurate description of how the world has changed in the last thirty-five years?

Spoiler

I do find his argument convincing. He counteracts the availability bias that makes us think of the present as violent because we see plenty of news stories about present violence by reminding us of ancient patterns of violence that we know about in a vague way but that we mostly forget about or disregard. He walks us through Homer's account of the Trojan war in the Illiad and the Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible (his deconstruction of the story told in the Bible, while amusing, strongly supports his thesis), how things were in the Roman Empire and the time of early Christianity, the behavior of medieval knights, the behavior of monarchs in early modern Europe (e.g., Henry VIII beheading two of his six wives, "Bloody" Mary burning 300 religious dissenters), literature in early modern Europe (Shakespeare, the stories of the Brothers Grimm, etc.), the duelling code in Europe and the early US up to the early 1800s, and finally he explores how fairly recently public monuments have shifted from celebrating military prowess to decrying the waste of war and tolerance for exhibitions of violence in everyday life has declined. I was especially impressed by the story about President Harry Truman.

I wonder whether China really is off the radar as a military threat. I am concerned about the current conflicts in Israel, Syria, and Egypt (of course, these were not going on when he was writing this book several years ago). Except for South Africa, he makes no mention of Africa which has been torn by regional conflicts for some time now. So I think his description is accurate as far as it goes but it seems to me he doesn't mention some conflicts that I find worrying.

[tbarron]

Some of my favorite lines from chapter 1:

• "Rather than framing the scourge of warfare as a human problem for humans to solve, [the ancient Greeks] concocted a fantasy of hotheaded gods and attributed their own tragedies to the gods' jealousies and follies."
• After recounting David's various murders and robberies from the Hebrew Bible, "Finally [David] manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census."
• "Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki."
• "Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, the certainly thought it was a good idea. The possibility that a woman had a legitimate interest in not being raped or acquired as sexual property did not seem to register in anyone's mind. The writers of the Bible saw nothing wrong with slavery or with cruel punishments like blinding, stoning, and hacking someone to pieces. Human life held no value in comparison with unthinking obedience to custom and authority." (This makes me think of Jonathon Haidt's five dimensions of moral consideration, contrasting "harm/care" with "loyalty/authority".)
• "Eat Cheese or Die" (a proposed state motto for Wisconsin)
• more to come...

I really like that Dr. Pinker takes some pain to distinguish modern sensibilities, even of religious people, from what is reflected in ancient writings: "Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles."

[geo]

I'm thinking about joining in this discussion. I'll have to see if our local library has a copy of the book.

Pinker's thesis is not really very intriguing to me, it actually seems rather obvious that we are living in relatively peaceful times. If you've ever read anything about Greece or the Middle Ages, you would know that things have calmed down considerably.

I recently started reading Pinker's Blank Slate and was sort of summarizing the first chapter for my wife. Her response was to ask why I would even bother reading the book. Because it's so obvious that humans aren't blank slates, but I don't think Pinker is arguing so much that we aren't blank slates, but that the idea that we were has historically influenced much of western thought and that many of these basic assumptions still influence society a great deal.

But more than that even, I think Pinker presents a grand overview of science, history, and philosophy to show us where we were and where we're going to some extent. Presumably that's what he's doing in Better Angels.

My first thought is that we're living in relatively peaceful times because much of the world is on more solid economic footing than in the past. Therefore, it's all cultural. So to answer tbarron's question—is Pinker's optimism of human nature justified?—I'd have to say probably not (strictly off the cuff). Our progression into relative peace must tie into Robert Wright's "conditions on the ground" that strictly relate to new non-zero sum scenarios between nations as the world becomes increasingly smaller. But if our economy collapsed tomorrow, humans would quickly degenerate into violence once again. It seems to me that we're currently living in a bubble that's mostly fueled by cheap energy. I'm really curious to see if Pinker addresses any of these issues. Does he suggest that humans are by nature more peaceful beings? If so, I'm very skeptical perhaps cynical. Regardless, I think Pinker will take us on an interesting journey.

[heledd]

Interesting comments here. At the moment can't really join in as my debit card was damaged and can't order downloads from Amazon

[Mr. P]

I love everything Pinker has written! I will endeavor to read this book during this discussion and join in...endeavor is the key word here as my time is short.

Mr. P.

[March-Hare]

Geo,

I think you are correct regarding what Pinker is doing in both books (although it was some time ago that I read the Blank Slate). The interesting part isn't the conclusion, but the thought process behind thinking one way or the other.

From the preface (page xxi):

Though theories of human nature rooted in biology are often associated with fatalism about violence, and the theory that the mind is a blank slate is associated with progress, in my view it is the other way around...The belief that violence has increased suggests that the world we made has contaminated us, perhaps irretrievably. The belief that is has decreased suggests that we started off nasty and that the artifices of civilization have moved us in a noble direction...

In chapter 1 he goes on to associate these two view with Hobbes and Rousseau, with Rousseau representing the politically correct, but mistaken, belief that civilization is corrupting.

At this point, it's not clear to me how his argument hangs together so I need to read more before I can say anything further.