The link between intelligence and correct interpretation of reality is unfortunately weak. That is one of the reason why someone like cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker can be very smart and yet be consistently wrong. Pinker champions his latest wrong idea in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, which posits that humans are evolving to become less violent.
The fact that you can publish a book making a claim so easily debunked by both empirical evidence and common sense says a lot about the publishing industry. But the idea that Pinker believes it to to be true—and so many people are willing to entertain the notion—says even more about the delusions of liberal humanism. As philosopher John Gray says in his devastating review,
The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient.
There is a deeper difficulty. Like so many contemporary evangelists for humanism, Pinker takes for granted that science endorses an Enlightenment account of human reason. Since science is a human creation, how could humans not be rational? Surely science and humanism are one and the same. Actually it’s extremely curious—though entirely typical of current thinking—that science should be linked with humanism in this way. A method of inquiry rather than a settled view of the world, there can be no guarantee that science will vindicate Enlightenment ideals of human rationality. Science could just as well end up showing them to be unrealisable.
October 10th, 2011 | 12:18 pm
The fact that you can publish a book making a claim so easily debunked by both empirical evidence and common sense says a lot about the publishing industry.
What a statement!
October 10th, 2011 | 1:28 pm
This is not necessarily meant as a defense of Steven Pinker (whose ideas, while consistently provocative, I often find myself approaching with guarded suspicion) however I do feel compelled to inquire if the author of this “devastating review” might not be the same philosopher John Grey (Gray?) whose is mentioned in another article linked to today at First Links?
I am referring to the profile of neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, in which, in passing, he characterizes the writings of John Gray as “misanthropic ravings”.
Might they be one and the same (in spite of the deviation of the surname spelling)?
Just curious.
October 10th, 2011 | 1:34 pm
Andre Might they be one and the same (in spite of the deviation of the surname spelling)?
Yep, they’re the same guy (I misspelled his name). Both Pinker and Gray are fans of evolutionary psychology, they just have a different perspective on it. Gray’s view is that if naturalistic evolution is true, then all the talk about progress is poppycock. He’s one of the few secular intellectuals to follow naturalistic evolution to its logical conclusion.
Naturally, I disagree with him about naturalistic evolution being true (it is not) but I admire his willingness not to shy away from the implications of his belief.
October 10th, 2011 | 2:55 pm
It’s a religion. It makes sense if you share the fundamental assumptions.
External reality can be reshaped, and facts that come from sources you don’t approve of aren’t real.
October 10th, 2011 | 3:52 pm
If Pinker really is claiming that humans are evolving to become less violent, it doesn’t matter if Gray is a drunken chimpanzee, he’s right to criticize whatever leads to that conclusion. Pinker is a really, really smart guy, but he needs to get his head out of his books for a bit if he’s capable even of positing that.
October 10th, 2011 | 4:08 pm
I suspect, without having read the book, that Pinker is confusing personal with impersonal violence. Certainly, living in first world countries is becoming safer and the number of first world countries are increasing. Then again, I would be very interested to see how he explains the organized violence of the 20th century given a progression supposedly from the Enlightenment. What in pre-20th century human history compares with the Kampuchean Killing Fields, let alone WWI, WWII and all their fallout? Does he provide graphs to cover these?
October 10th, 2011 | 4:12 pm
The European Left has always rejected the Liberal’s dream of a decaffeinated revolution – 1789 without 1793. Radicals are, on the contrary, possessed by what Alain Badiou called the “passion of the Real”: if you say A – equality, human rights and freedoms – you should not shirk from its consequences and gather the courage to say B – the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.
As Alain Badiou put it in Logiques des mondes, “Since, as Saint-Just asked: “What do those want, who want neither Virtue nor Terror?” His answer is well-known: they want corruption – another name for the subject’s defeat. Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly: “That which produces the general good is always terrible.” “These words should not be interpreted,” says Badiou, “as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.”
October 10th, 2011 | 5:12 pm
Some people are bent on preserving the myth of the continuing Fall and Decline of humanity, seemingly in some desperate attempt to deny that a slowly secularising world could possibly be getting better in any way.
Pinker’s book is responding to this very common view, namely the widespread regressive narrative which seems to imagine an ancient ‘golden age’ from which we have, for want of a better word, fallen. It’s a narrative that says that modern times and going to hell in a handcart (and then usually this is blamed on something like liberalism or atheism).
There are (at least) two problems with that view.
But first, let’s recognise that in part the everything’s-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart theory has some good motivations. The proponent of hell-in-a-handcart doesn’t want to downplay the very real suffering and violence that people obviously still face today. There is mass rape in parts of Africa, bombs going off across swathes of the world (with relatively low fatalities but with significant ‘terror’ implications), children are still beaten by teachers in many countries, women are still punched or raped by husbands, and so on. All this and more must be accepted and recognised and addressed.
But we mustn’t allow our position in the here and now to blind us to the view over our shoulder. Hell-in-a-handcart theory has a total historical blindspot to what everyday life was like for a huge number of people even in the most ‘civilised’ countries throughout the vast span of history. Compare the UK now to 1,000 years ago, for example. Child-beating, wife-beating, rape, robbery, all manner of violent crime, as well as “vices” like prostitution, underage sex etc, they were a commonplace. Really understand what that word means. They were common. It was everyday. It was worse, far worse, than your worst imagining of some exaggerated inner city life in the twenty-first century. And it wasn’t just the cities. Casual violence and crime were rampant everywhere. And over time, say 500 years ago, there was a bit less. Today if you get mugged – to continue my example, in the UK anyway – you are unlucky. If it’s a worse crime, you’re very unlucky. Rape and murder and robbery are no longer “to be expected” in the way that it simply was in the dark ages and throughout medieval times right across Europe until pretty much the Victorian era.
Think of an individual tragedy now in, say, a western European country. Think of the murdered woman, the abused and now dead baby, the man knocked down by a card in a riot. These are individual tragedies and they really are tragedies and no one wants to detract from that. But think about how good we are now (sometimes, not always) in our response to this. The very fact that we wrestle with collective conscience, now, when these things happen, is historically astounding. Multiple out those same cases hundreds of times, when there was no social services to even miss the crime, when there was not the same stigma of abusing your wife or hitting your children, think of a case like those media highlights happening every day and you begin to get close to the unreported, forgotten history.
So, that first misperception is to do with the everyday levels of violence.
The second misperception is in the wider domain. Our view is always skewed towards the recent (not entirely wrongly, of course). So we all know that about 6 million Jews were killed in the holocaust. Fewer people know that about 10 million Congolese were killed in the Congo a little earlier as a direct result of European colonialism. No one knows how many millions died in slavery (of various kinds), or in a dozen or so ‘crusades’ or on the stone slabs of Inca sacrifice. Fewer people know that terrorism wasn’t invented co-synchronously with the bomb: arson, rape, the destruction of whole villages, whole territories, pervades the fogotten and invisible history. The sacrifices and murders of people (in Africa, in South America, in Asia and just about everywhere) for magical purposes. The casual discarding of unwanted infants, the bloody wars across the ancient world – we say wars, often really just genocides – which only history professors remember the names of. No one would deny for a moment that the world wars were a dark stain on human history. But they were another dark stain, they are a recent dark stain. Other older wars, without archive footage to shed light on them, were just as dark. A death by a tank shell isn’t any more of a tragedy than all the unseen deaths by machete, by the arrow, by club, by poisoned well or by plain and simple stranglehold.
Hell-in-a-handcart theory is chrono-centric. Its proponents see the bad stuff now (which is undeniable, it’s there, it is bad) but they can’t imagine worse, they have forgotten that they don’t see the whole span of history. Pinker’s book does an excellent job (and despite this review, is drenched in empirical evidence) at blowing away some of the fog and putting things in a bit of perspective. You should be ashamed for falling into egocentric rabbit hole that thinks that things only get worse and – at least implicitly – that nothing can be done about it. No! The world is waking up, bit by bit, to its past horrors, and to its basic empathy for others. We are refining the way we relate to each other, man and woman, locally, nation to nation, building in new and better norms and taboos which protect us individually and together. Not at all times and places, not on one long unbroken progressive climb. But nevertheless, protecting ourselves better, individually and together.
I’m not suggesting a recipe for complacency. On the contrary: the point is that what we can learn from history is that we can make the world better, we are making the world better.
October 10th, 2011 | 6:35 pm
Some people are bent on preserving the myth of the continuing Fall and Decline of humanity, seemingly in some desperate attempt to deny that a slowly secularising world could possibly be getting better in any way.
Pinker’s book is responding to this very common view, namely the widespread regressive narrative which seems to imagine an ancient ‘golden age’ from which we have, for want of a better word, fallen. It’s a narrative that says that modern times and going to hell in a handcart (and then usually this is blamed on something like liberalism or atheism).
There are (at least) two problems with that view.
I call straw man.
I have never actually met anyone – in my life – nor have I seen any serious or credible evidence to support the existence of someone who believes that the past was seriously “better” than the present.
There are people who mourn the loss of specific things – usually involving specific values, as our society has tilted away from recognizing so-called “social values” in favor of so-called “individual values”. But that is not the same thing as imagining a real “golden age” in the human past.
While it is true that Christianity posits a “golden age” at the beginning, that was before human history begins. I have never actually met a Christian who doubts that such a thing as “progress” exists. It is ironically the left – the group that calls themselves pro-science – that reveres primitivism, calling for primitive lifestyles and flocking to buy Avatar now that it’s out on blue-ray.
Your argument rebuts a straw man. The belief in the Golden Age is a liberal belief (in what they imagine their rivals believe), unrelated to anything anyone actually does believe.
Like most such fantasies, it says more about liberals than about conservatives (call this “The ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Effect”)
October 10th, 2011 | 6:59 pm
Blake,
Oh, I don’t know. It seems a lot of conservative Christians feel that things began to go downhill with the Enlightenment. I would have thought you would be in that camp, since you are constantly condemning humanism.
October 10th, 2011 | 7:45 pm
Bob — the alternatives are not empirically false “people are getting less violent” vs. “hell in a handcart.”
How about, “people are violent in pretty much the same ways and to the same degrees they’ve always been?” You don’t have to hold some theory about advance or decline to look at a pile of dead Egyptian Copts or Afghans and conclude that “humanity is getting less violent” is so much pish-tosh.
And Mike M., while I agree with you, you don’t even have to compare personal violence vs. structural violence, you just have to remember that not everyone lives in the well-regulated parts of the Western world where there’s a pretty strong social sanction against personal violence. There are plenty of places in the world where personal violence is commonplace — and some of them are in pockets right here in the good old U.S. of A., or enlightened Paris itself.
October 10th, 2011 | 8:16 pm
For those who feel it is possible to judge an 830-page book by the reviews, it might be good to read more than one. Check out the review in the liberal humanst publication the Wall Street Journal by the liberal humanist James Q. Wilson, member of the Council of Academic Advisors of the notoriously liberal humanist American Enterprise Institute.
An excerpt:
The entire review may be read here.
October 11th, 2011 | 1:18 am
Steven Pinker did not claim that humans are evolving to be less violent but that the level of violence is reducing historically.
That is, his thesis pertains to the cultural evolution but says nothing about the genetic underpinnings, if any.
His idea is that the rise of modern centralizing states was instrumental in pacifying the unruly tribes and people.
He strangely ignores the significant impact religion and the example of saints must have made in the pacification. It is probably more likely that the rise of states is a consequence of the pacification and not vice-versa.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:13 am
Hi again.
Yes it’s true, violence-is-declining theory doesn’t have to be contrasted to Hell-in-a-handcart theory. It can also be contrasted to everything-stays-the-same theory, for example. But both Hell-in-a-handcart and everything-stays-the-same are simultaneously refuted by the data and are equally pernicious. They both deny the reality of positive change, and (sometimes implicitly, or as in Gray’s case seemingly psychotically) they both deny even the possibility of positive change.
But nor do I think the stronger hell-in-a-handcart theory is a straw man. Speak to virtually any religious leader: just ask “What is your view of modern times?” and with a few exceptions (probably Baha’is, progressive Jews, some of less idiotic Anglicans) they will tell you that people are hopelessly materialistic (despite the fact that there has never been more talk about what is ethical and there has never been higher levels of humanitarianism, social security, etc); and they will tell you that crime and in particular violent crime is on the rise (no matter what the statistics say). We have lost our way, they say. Not everything is bad, they say, but when we forget the reality of God we wander in the darkness. For many, not just Jehovah’s Wittnesses but mainstream Christians and Jews and Muslims all over the world, this decline is actually a precondition of the end times. Not every believer is a literal New Jerusalem/end timer/etc. But it pervades the consciousness of the church. The churches have a vested interest in maintaining this picture, not just because they need a problem to solve, but because otherwise it seems like the problem of human interaction is being better solved by others. Which it is. We invented human rights only as the sway of feudalism and church authority waned. We stopped (some kinds of commercial) slavery against the push of the churches (much is often made of individual religious campaigners; but their opposition was very often all the other religious people in parliaments and churches!)
It’s not just the religious. Many tabloid newspapers and their readers, and many people of an older generation (as has always been the way) will bemoan the way the world is going. You must have heard this. They think that people are more violent, more sadistic, and generally less moral. It’s another example of chronocentricism: these Handcart proponents interpret changing norms and liberalism as immorality; and because we now record, and try to expose and understand it when a violent betrayal of our humanity does occur, they imagine that it only happens now.
Their mistake – a sort of error of perspective – is that there were no cameras then. But worse – there were not even the concepts then. As a historical hangover, if they didn’t call it genocide at the time, then often we still don’t call it genocide now. If they didn’t call it mass rape then (if they called it “to the victors the spoils”) then often history still calls it that now. So it’s not just the lack of video. It’s due to the fact that now we’ve actually invented the concepts like a human right (a relatively recent invention) and social services and children’s rights and equality and so on, that we can actually decry the mistakes we’re still making today; the mistake is that we often then fail to look back wearing the same modern goggles.
We had to invent the words with which to condemn abuse and atrocity and having done so it becomes harder (though not impossible) to contravene those new norms. This is how we learn (not infallibly, but sometimes) to make it all better.
People like Gray take the valuelessness of science and apply it to all human life. We are neurons firing therefore we are just squishy pinball machines therefore there is no morality. It is scientism. It’s like saying, We are a bit like all other animals therefore there’s no such thing as art. It just doesn’t add up. I’m sorry but those who don’t believe that progress is made – however fragile, however rarely, however carefully it must be maintained – have a very narrow and blinkered view of history, and a short memory even of the racism and segregation, the lynchings and terrorism, the casual oppression of women, the disregard for children, the hatred of gays, all the many and varied abuses which occurred even within many of our own lifetimes in ‘western’ countries but which are diminished, which have become shameful; which have in large part been overcome. Long may it continue, if enough people recognise that positive change is possible.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:57 am
John Gray is a great scholar but this review is disappointing and engages in false dichotomies. For instance, there is this key passage, “[The Blank Slate] provoked a storm of criticism from liberal humanists who sensed—rightly—that this emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance. Pinker seems to have come to share this anxiety, and the present volume is the result. The decline of violence posited in The Better Angels of Our Nature is a progressive transformation of precisely the kind his earlier book seemed to preclude.”
But this is incorrect as is Gray’s claim that Darwinism precludes “any revolution in human behaviour.”
What modern Darwinism tells us is that characteristics of organisms come about through an often complex interaction between genes and environment. To give one clear example in a relatively “primitive” organism, queen bees and worker bees possess exactly the same genes — what causes one bee to develop into a queen and another to become a worker depends on the interaction of genes and larval environment, never on genes alone.
Given this, there is simply no inherent tension between modern science and the question of whether humans can reduce violent tendencies. Indeed, Pinker gave several reasons to think this with reference to the relevant academic literature in “The Blank Slate.” I haven’t read his newer book but I have no reason to doubt that Pinker pursues these same lines of thought further.
Gray barely touches on the question of what the data say on the subject and what patterns they reveal. Since Gray is not a social scientist, this omission isn’t surprising but then that also makes for a very ineffective book review. At the end of the day, Pinker’s argument stands or falls on the data.
October 11th, 2011 | 3:18 am
“Gray’s view is that if naturalistic evolution is true, then all the talk about progress is poppycock. He’s one of the few secular intellectuals to follow naturalistic evolution to its logical conclusion.”
Naturalistic evolution is true but the “logical conclusion” stated above is not, in fact, the product of logic or an understanding of the relevant science.
Gray is at his best when he is tearing down people like Hegel who view history as a slow march toward progress. I agree that such a view is fanciful. On the other hand, since human behavior would be seen as the result of extremely complex interactions between genes and environment by people who understand biology, there is no scientific basis for asserting that changing environments (what Pinker is mostly talking about) would fail to change human behavior.
My sense is that Pinker, much like Gray, is skeptical about certain claims of progress and would view any progress that has been made as hard-won and prone to the risk of erosion.
October 11th, 2011 | 4:04 am
Mr Carter’s endorsement of the not-so-devastating review by John Gray is a textbook example of confirmation bias. For a rather different view of John Gray see:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/10/but-peace-does-reign/
October 11th, 2011 | 8:51 am
I am hardly a fan of Pinker, but I feel to see the “devasting” part in gray´s review. Where are the numbers that refute Pinker statitistics? Where is the criticism of the metholodogy used by Pinker to get his own statistics? Nowhere. Gray´s review looks to me like a long ramble with little substance.
Now, I will like to see some evidence of Mr Carter statment that if “naturalistic evolution” is true, all human progress is “poppycock”.
October 11th, 2011 | 10:14 am
Steven Pinker did not claim that humans are evolving to be less violent but that the level of violence is reducing historically.
That is, his thesis pertains to the cultural evolution but says nothing about the genetic underpinnings, if any.
yea I’m not reading anything here that actually refutes or even tries to address Pinker’s thesis. In fact, its amusing to see the review state that “While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence—the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics….” he then goes on to cite absolutely no problem with any of Pinker’s actual evidence, his reading of it, or counter evidence that tells a different story!
This ties in nicely with the recent story about Saudi Arabia beheading a man. The fact is there’s a lot to be said for Pinker’s thesis. The long run trend of humanity has been towards less violence. Long run here means hundreds to thousands of years and Pinker’s trend seems to be real. I think secular humanism is a very likely candidate for it. Let’s face it, while WWII was violent and a lot of killing has been done in by ‘Enlightened’ countries the fact is if you pre-enlightened countries of any faith had what we have they almost certainly would have brought humanity close to extinction.
Joe can balk as much as he likes, but the facts do not easily let him avoid honestly being obligated to give secularism its due in this regard. It doesn’t mean that atheism is right in all aspects, nor does it mean that there’s no downsides. It does mean that those who claim the enlightenment was a huge mistake have a very tough case to make.
October 11th, 2011 | 11:07 am
As others have noted – citation needed! I want the exact page number on which Pinker makes this claim.
From what I’ve seen, his book posits that humans are learning to become less violent. For example, humans haven’t evolved to become better engineers since the Bronze Age, we’ve learned to become better engineers.
October 11th, 2011 | 11:28 am
Ray Ingles As others have noted – citation needed! I want the exact page number on which Pinker makes this claim.
If Pinker is right, humans can’t “learn” (a process that requires free will) because humans don’t have free will. We can evolve (a process that occurs to us and is directed by the laws of nature) but we cannot learn in the sense that most people use the term.
This is one of the reasons that I say that Pinker (a smart guy) believes one of the dumbest ideas in history (evolution is a completely naturalistic process).
October 11th, 2011 | 11:42 am
Actually logically false Joe. If you lack free will you can’t choose to learn, but you can learn if instructed by whatever is running the show. (I.e. ‘naturalistic processes’, God, etc.)
October 11th, 2011 | 12:07 pm
Pigeons can learn. Ask B. F. Skinner. Do pigeons have free will?
Whether or not humans have free will depends a lot on your definition of free will.
October 11th, 2011 | 12:15 pm
Boonton Actually logically false Joe. If you lack free will you can’t choose to learn, but you can learn if instructed by whatever is running the show. (I.e. ‘naturalistic processes’, God, etc.)
David Nickol Pigeons can learn. Ask B. F. Skinner. Do pigeons have free will?
It’s interesting that both of you cite examples that shore up my point. Sure, if you mean “learn” as a synonym for “adaptation,” then yes, beings without free will can “learn.” But that sort of adaption is a part of evolution, is it not? And isn’t Ray saying that Pinker might not be talking about evolutionary process? And didn’t I mention that evolutionary adaption is not really how most people use the term “learn”?
I know you guys have a knee-jerk reaction to whatever I write but should you at least try to advance the discussion.
October 11th, 2011 | 12:27 pm
“If Pinker is right, humans can’t “learn” (a process that requires free will) because humans don’t have free will. We can evolve (a process that occurs to us and is directed by the laws of nature) but we cannot learn in the sense that most people use the term.”
This is both dubious and irrelevant. Dubious because you have not stated what definition of “free will” you are employing and irrelevant because the fact that humans can learn is plainly true and is not something that is disputed by Pinker or by any other scientist.
For instance, here is a two-minute video where Pinker does a decent job of sketching out his views on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxJi0COTBo.
I can’t quote him word for word but what he says is roughly that because the brain is made up of 100 hundred bill neurons connected by 100 trillion synapses, that allows for such vast complexity that behaviors and choices are never going to be “predictable in any simple way.”
The study of complex systems and neural networks is still in its infancy but it’s pretty clear that anything even a fraction as complex as the brain is going to have some awfully complex and even opaque properties.
October 11th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Honest question, as I have only scanned the link provided by Ray Ingles to Pinker in another blog entry here.
Does Pinker factor into his pacification scenario deaths that result ~indirectly~ from the imposition of political ideology? By which I mean does he include the numbers from Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’ (estimated conservatively at 30 million) or Mao’s various purges (again conservatively estimated at 40 million)? It would seem to me that it is something of a shell game if one does not include passive murder (eg. the intentional starvation of citizens) in the category….
Additionally, I did note that he included the rise in vegetarianism as a sign of the increase in peacefulness which struck me as humorous/tendentious. If one is going to consider fewer people eating animals as a sign of increased peace, then one wonders how we are to interpret 1.2 ~billion~ abortions worldwide since 1970?
October 11th, 2011 | 12:45 pm
Sure, if you mean “learn” as a synonym for “adaptation,” then yes, beings without free will can “learn.” But that sort of adaption is a part of evolution, is it not?
Joe,
No, it is not part of evolutionary adaptation.
See this video.
I know you guys have a knee-jerk reaction to whatever I write but should you at least try to advance the discussion.
I understand how you feel, since I experience the same thing here on First Things.
October 11th, 2011 | 12:49 pm
Mark The study of complex systems and neural networks is still in its infancy but it’s pretty clear that anything even a fraction as complex as the brain is going to have some awfully complex and even opaque properties.
It doesn’t matter how complex the system is, consciousness is not (nor can it be) a “property.” When people start talking about the mind being an “emergent property” of the brain they are merely using advanced terminology for “it’s a magical process.”
October 11th, 2011 | 1:05 pm
“It doesn’t matter how complex the system is, consciousness is not (nor can it be) a “property.” When people start talking about the mind being an “emergent property” of the brain they are merely using advanced terminology for “it’s a magical process.””
The bottom line is that Pinker is a scientist and science concerns itself with proposing falsifiable hypotheses and then proceeding to falsify them or failing to falsify them. What kind of experimental evidence can be brought to bear on the question of “free will” versus “100 hundred trillion-synapse biochemical computer that we cannot even begin to model in any way that gives us predictive power”? None as far as I can tell.
All this has little to do with the sociological and psychological question about whether there is something about modern civilization that makes people less violent, though. Even animals that no one thinks have any “free will” can become more or less violent depending on the stimuli they are exposed to without any genetic changes.
October 11th, 2011 | 1:05 pm
David Nickol No, it is not part of evolutionary adaptation.
Operant conditioning is a form of evolutionary adaption. As Pinker says, there is nothing special about humans. The implication of that is that we are merely a part of “nature”, so anything we do that leads to adaptation is merely part of the evolutionary process.
October 11th, 2011 | 1:14 pm
Mark All this has little to do with the sociological and psychological question about whether there is something about modern civilization that makes people less violent, though.
Indeed. So getting back to the question, I recommend this review by Tyler Cowen (who liked the book):
That is what makes the concept so silly. Sure violence has almost vanished if we don’t include the two World Wars, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Killing Fields, the Iraq War, Al Queda, the Rawandan genocide . . . .
If you exclude all those data points (i.e., any data points that conflict with the thesis) then it might be possible to make the case that we are “learning to be less violent.”
October 11th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
Operant conditioning is a form of evolutionary adaption.
Joe Carter,
The capacity to learn through operant conditioning is a capacity that almost all living creatures have. Pigeons clearly have it. If you believe in evolution, then you believe that capacity evolved. If you don’t believe in evolution, then presumably you believe that God created creatures with the capacity to learn through operant conditioning. Operant conditioning has nothing to do with evolution, per se. If you teach pigeons to do something like peck a colored dot for a reward, that is not something that will be passed along to their descendants. It won’t effect evolution.
As Pinker says, there is nothing special about humans. The implication of that is that we are merely a part of “nature,” so anything we do that leads to adaptation is merely part of the evolutionary process.
Operant conditioning doesn’t necessarily lead to adaptation. As the video points out, getting hooked on gambling is a result of operant conditioning.
As someone pointed out, human beings obviously do learn, as do pigeons, dogs, horses, monkeys, and (on some level) just about any creature you can think of. I suppose what you are getting at is if there is no free will, what looks like learning isn’t really learning, but you would have to define free will (and learning) to make your case.
If human beings evolved purely by natural processes, we still have the capacity to learn, to write poetry and music, to love, to sacrifice, and to do all the other things that human beings do that other animals can’t do (at least at a human level). You seem to want to say that if humans evolved by purely natural processes, then we aren’t really human and we can’t do the things we think we can do.
I haven’t read the book yet, but I believe that Conor Cunningham argues in Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong that human beings did indeed evolve by a purely natural process, and he does not find that incompatible with Christianity.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:18 pm
Joe Carter –
Ah, I see! You’re equivocating on your definition of ‘evolution’. That explains a lot.
You’re implying that Pinker is claiming that the human species is being genetically shaped by natural selection to be less violent – which is false (both the proposition itself, and the notion that is Pinker’s proposition).
What you actually intend to say is that Pinker claims that individual humans – without any actual change to their genetic inheritance – are developing in a less violent direction. Whether you consider learning to be mystical or ‘evolution of populations of neural network configurations’, that can be a true statement.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:33 pm
David C –
Joe Carter –
David, Joe – Pinker does in fact address those points, but you’re going to have to do more than skim what he writes to pick up on that. I’ll post the link again: http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
For a start, you could search for the phrase “Here we see 2500 years of human history” and read on from there.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:54 pm
“That is what makes the concept so silly. Sure violence has almost vanished if we don’t include the two World Wars, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Killing Fields, the Iraq War, Al Queda, the Rawandan genocide . . . . ”
But that is not what Pinker argues nor is it even what Cowen says Pinker argues.
The data are pretty clear as James Q. Wilson pointed out in the review linked above — the 20th century was less violent than past centuries when you measure the percentage of people dying violent deaths divided by the total population of the world.
If that is counter-intuitive, that’s because our intuition doesn’t handle statistics as well as it should. As terrible as WWII was, according to Niall Ferguson’s data in “The War of the World”, it killed 1.3% of the world’s population. That’s very high for an armed conflict among Western nations but Pinker’s point is that it was more than counterbalanced by a decline in violence from other sources.
Cowen’s point is that measuring violence in this manner is subject to the “black swan” problem where even long-term trends might be interrupted by an unforeseen catastrophe.
In other words, the trend toward lower violence is simply an observation that pops out of the data. You can take issue with the data and the primary sources upon which it is based but Gray certainly did not do that. Leaving that statistical question aside, though, the question is whether we can extrapolate this trend into the future or whether we are simply being misled by a “temporary” [over several centuries] trend that will lead to an outbreak of violence even worse than all the horrors of the 20th century combined.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:54 pm
Joe Carter –
Why not? Hip us to your definition of ‘consciousness’.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:55 pm
Ray Ingles David, Joe – Pinker does in fact address those points, but you’re going to have to do more than skim what he writes to pick up on that.
Pinker doesn’t address them so much as wave them away. His analysis is also laughably naive. To pick a 65 year period out of all of human history and assume it is statistically relevant is just silly.
What Pinker’s thesis really shows is that when there is a one or two global hegemons, the likelihood of intrastate violence is reduced.
October 11th, 2011 | 2:59 pm
Mark If that is counter-intuitive, that’s because our intuition doesn’t handle statistics as well as it should
The problem is not that it is counter-intuitive, but that it is a silly metric to make the point that humans are becoming less violent. Say someone breaks into my house and kills my daughter but spare me and my wife. I could say that the act wasn’t all that violent since only 1/3 of my family was killed. Statistically, that would be correct. But it would also be a ridiculous claim to make.
The fact that we are not killing off the population in the same proportion merely means that our birth and longevity rates are increasing faster than our propensity for violence. That doesn’t mean that we are becoming less violent.
October 11th, 2011 | 3:00 pm
Joe
It’s interesting that both of you cite examples that shore up my point. Sure, if you mean “learn” as a synonym for “adaptation,” then yes, beings without free will can “learn.” But that sort of adaption is a part of evolution, is it not?
Not really. You were once a baby and you were taught the King’s English (or something close enough to it). You didn’t choose to learn this by any means. Acquiring language is almost certainly written into your DNA as a biological human. But there was no choice in the fact that you learned English. You can ascribe this to the free will of your parents (if they had choosen to live in China, France, India or Russia you would have probably picked up one of those languages). Or you can argue your parents had no free will (i.e. they were slaves of their culture, economics, whatever that lead them to be in the US when you were born and lead them to have no interest in leaving it).
Anyway, let’s just say Baby Joe had no free will when it came to learning language, English in specific. Does that mean English is a result of evolution? Well no there’s no biological English language gene that Joe inherited that was selected from many generations of English speaking Carters.
In a broader sense you can say language follows an evolutionary path where English is ‘reproduced with variation’ as each new generation learns the language, but do not learn it in exactly the same way so you don’t get a carbon copy of their parents’ English but a copy with variations and some variations end up being more ‘useful’ than others leading some aspects of the language to change and others to stay the same. But strictly speaking this is only an analogy to biological evolution.
I know you guys have a knee-jerk reaction to whatever I write but should you at least try to advance the discussion.
I only knee you so often because you like to stand in the way of advancing the discussion ;)
Mark I think zeros in on the problem with your statement. What definition of free will are you talking about? Pinker’s? Yours? Someone else’s?
David C
Does Pinker factor into his pacification scenario deaths that result ~indirectly~ from the imposition of political ideology? By which I mean does he include the numbers from Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’ (estimated conservatively at 30 million) or Mao’s various purges (again conservatively estimated at 40 million)?
Yes he does but he scales up previous great deaths to adjust for population. In short he seems to be finding that if, say, the Roman Empire & neighbors had as many people as modern day Europe and neighbors had its wars and oppressions would have been much bloodier than modern European history is. I have to read more but I don’t think he is adjusting for technology. I.e. what if Rome or Ancient China had not only as many people as they do now but also had the technology they had now? I don’t doubt for a second that a 1500′s Europe with nuclear weapons would have caused the extinction of mankind. Stalinism & Mao were very bad but even with that blemish humanity seems different these days than the far past.
October 11th, 2011 | 3:19 pm
No one yet has answered my question (and I suspect I know why) about Pinker and the question of abortion. Can we really claim that the planet is a less violent place when 1.2 billion human beings have been killed in utero?
To the objection that this is a medical procedure not violence and ergo not in the purview of Pinker’s study — let me ask this — why are the statistics with regard to slavery, domestic violence, lynching, decriminalization of homosexuality, and increases in vegetarianism (to name but a few of Pinker’s citations) all allowable signs of the oncoming peaceable kingdom and abortion rates not?
October 11th, 2011 | 3:31 pm
Joe Carter –
Um, wait – isn’t that what you’re doing when you talk of “two World Wars, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Killing Fields, the Iraq War, Al Queda, the Rawandan[sic] genocide…”? Why are those cases ‘statistically relevant’ for you and not for Pinker?
October 11th, 2011 | 3:43 pm
Ray Ingles Why are those cases ‘statistically relevant’ for you and not for Pinker?
Because on my side of the argument, they are just extra data points on the longitudinal study that humans have always been violent. Saying that “humans have become more/less X” and looking only at a 65 year period would be a bit suspect on just about any area. But on an issue like violence it is just absurd.
Pinker also seems to confuse “willingness to engage in violence” and “opportunity to engage in violence.” How many countries would love to unleash violence on Israel but are held back because of fear of retaliation by the U.S.?
I truly believe my “hegemon theory” is sufficient to explain almost all of the decline in violence over the past 65 years.
October 11th, 2011 | 3:49 pm
The fact that we are not killing off the population in the same proportion merely means that our birth and longevity rates are increasing faster than our propensity for violence. That doesn’t mean that we are becoming less violent.
Joe Carter,
But James Q. Wilson, in the WSJ review, says:
October 11th, 2011 | 4:00 pm
Lord Acton sums it up best: “Every generation is equidistant from eternity.”
October 11th, 2011 | 4:17 pm
Joe Carter –
How fortunate that Pinker doesn’t do that!
No, seriously, he doesn’t. For example, from the link I posted before:
Let’s zoom in now on the last 500 years. There is a data set from Jack Levy on trends in great power war. These are wars that involve the 800-pound gorillas of the day, that is the countries that can project military power outside their boundaries, which account for a disproportionate amount of the damage due to war (because wars fall along a power law distribution of damage).
The first graph shows the percentage of time that the great powers were at war. We see that five hundred years ago, the great powers were pretty much always at war with one another, and then the proportion of each quarter-century filled with great-power wars declined steadily. The next one shows the duration of wars involving the great powers—also a decline. Here is one that shows the number of great-power wars initiated per year, and that figure, too, declines steadily over the half-millennium.
But now we see a graph of the deadliness of war, which shows a trend that goes in the opposite direction—though wars involving great powers were fewer in number, they did more damage per country per year. Even that trend, though, did an about-face after 1950, when for the first time in modern history, great-power wars became simultaneously fewer in number, shorter in duration, and less deadly per unit time.
War alone isn’t Pinker’s focus, too, – as david c. complains. He documents long-term (i.e. beyond a 65-year-window) reductions in homicide, state torture, etc.
October 11th, 2011 | 4:25 pm
In my message above of October 11th, 2011 | 3:49 pm, only the first paragraph of the blockquote belongs to James Q. Wilson. The two following paragraphs are my own. Apologies!
October 11th, 2011 | 5:06 pm
Pinker also seems to confuse “willingness to engage in violence” and “opportunity to engage in violence.” How many countries would love to unleash violence on Israel but are held back because of fear of retaliation by the U.S.?
So as a whole we all want to engage in violence as much as we did centuries ago…but we don’t have the opportunity? If we all want to do something then what is holding us back? Ourselves? In other words you’ve just argued yourself into Pinker’s corner.
And this would apply to homicide rates. Certainly non-US residents do not really think the US military is going to come avenge the killing of a neighbor in some obscure village on the other side of the globe. Even if the US is acting as a hegemon that’s keeping the global ‘rate of warfare’ unusually low that doesn’t quite explain enough.
Joe
The problem is not that it is counter-intuitive, but that it is a silly metric to make the point that humans are becoming less violent. Say someone breaks into my house and kills my daughter but spare me and my wife. I could say that the act wasn’t all that violent since only 1/3 of my family was killed. Statistically, that would be correct. But it would also be a ridiculous claim to make.
All things being equal if someone broke into your house and killed your daughter AND your wife AND you that would be much more violence than the hypothetical you provided.
The fact that we are not killing off the population in the same proportion merely means that our birth and longevity rates are increasing faster than our propensity for violence. That doesn’t mean that we are becoming less violent.
Blah, our birth rates have, if anything, declined. Longetivity doesn’t really seem to make much sense as an explanation. Over the last 2000 years our ability to kill has become much more honed than our ability to save people who are targets of killing. In other words, guns have gotten better faster than our ability to treat gunshot wounds (to say nothing about military violence).
Pinker doesn’t address them so much as wave them away. His analysis is also laughably naive. To pick a 65 year period out of all of human history and assume it is statistically relevant is just silly.
Well it is if its the turning point in a trend, its not if it isn’t. If it isn’t then we are due for a massive regression to the mean which means hold onto your seats we should soon expect to see casual killing every day roughly on a par with a Mad Max or Escape from NY type movie. Barring a Doomsday scenario (nuclear war, zombies, etc.), I don’t think that’s plausible.
October 11th, 2011 | 5:30 pm
How fortunate that Pinker doesn’t do that!
I started reading one of his books – I caught six major fallacies…six is the point at which I “recategorize”….I put his book down and haven’t paid him any attention since.
October 11th, 2011 | 5:39 pm
Bob: “It was everyday. It was worse, far worse, than your worst imagining of some exaggerated inner city life in the twenty-first century.”
If there is anything that truly is capable of turning my stomach with disgust is privileged people describing what they think is the trivial level of violence that they have never encountered or experienced themselves in developed or underdeveloped countries in the 21st century, such as in the inner cities they drive by but never live in.
It only attests to how much personal experience filters gobs of reality, making people as blind as their ideology wants them to be.
“There is mass rape in parts of Africa, ”
How much rape do you need to have in a society to call it mass?
October 11th, 2011 | 8:04 pm
How much rape do you need to have in a society to call it mass?
Patrick Holmes,
Killing is evil, but committing genocide takes killing to a new level of evil. Rape is evil, but rape as a weapon of war takes rape to a new level of evil.
October 11th, 2011 | 9:41 pm
david c
No one yet has answered my question (and I suspect I know why) about Pinker and the question of abortion. Can we really claim that the planet is a less violent place when 1.2 billion human beings have been killed in utero?
I would say yes for 3 reasons:
1. If you want to count abortion you have a real measurement problem. We can use ancient human skeletons to determine what portion of people’s lives ended violently in ages past, there’s no real objective way to measure the abortion rate from previous ages.
2. We do know infanticide was disturbingly common in ages past so it wouldn’t be surprising if ancient populations had plenty of abortion to go around.
3. Technology I think is a wash here. Yes abortion tech wasn’t as advanced in the past so maybe that lowered the abortion rate. But then again contraception was also less advanced so those seeking abortions may have been higher. Calling it a wash seems fair until someone presents an objective way to measure abortion.
Ray
How fortunate that Pinker doesn’t do that!
No, seriously, he doesn’t. For example, from the link I posted before:
Here’s the thing, humanity may have changed over the last 1500 years or so but Joe’s rate of change will be much slower. He presented some big whoppers but no matter how many facts are marshalled, he will never be willing to back down one inch…instead he will dig in his heels come hell or high water…..but don’t listen to me as I don’t advance arguments very well.
Blake
I started reading one of his books – I caught six major fallacies…six is the point at which I “recategorize”….I put his book down and haven’t paid him any attention since.
He took a whole book to make six major fallacies! Wow, you can do that in a single two paragraph comment. This Pinker guy is a lightweight.
Judge not, least ye be judged.
Notice that Blake doesn’t actually do anything to refute Ray’s defense of Pinker against Joe’s charge. Just tosses around some mud. Which book? Which major fallacies? Don’t bother asking.
Patrick Holmes
If there is anything that truly is capable of turning my stomach with disgust is privileged people describing what they think is the trivial level of violence that they have never encountered or experienced themselves in developed or underdeveloped countries in the 21st century, such as in the inner cities they drive by but never live in.
I agree but in this topic we are all lack first hand experience. Even if you have lived in a very violent area of a developing country, you haven’t lived in, say, 17th Century London when public executions were considered entertainment and rape was probably not vigerously investigated by a professional police force.
A few weeks ago I was at a relative’s and she brought out papers she had saved from the moon landings. I was perusing the small articles from the paper until I landed on this tiny article buried on page 12 or so….it was about a man arrested for killing his wife and SIX KIDS! His oldest son, who he did not kill, tried to visit him in prison and he refused to see him.
What was amazing about it was that today in NJ if a man killed his wife and 6 kids in a single frenzy it would be a huge story, probably make state and national media. But just a bit over 30+ years ago it was given this ho hum treatment. Our perceptions of whether things have gotten better or worse are woefully biased.
October 11th, 2011 | 9:46 pm
Joe might have a counter argument not in terms of population growth allowing us to ‘grow people’ faster than we can kill them but in terms of age. As we cure more and more illnesses that take us out quickly, we grow as a population older and older.
A population of 20 yr olds is going to have a pretty high rate of violence. A population of 50 yr olds doesn’t. Maybe our rate of violence hasn’t come down becase we’ve learned to be more humane as a global culture but simply because we’ve grown into old fuddies who lack the energy to get up off the couch and throw a punch at that next door neighbor whose annoying us.
October 12th, 2011 | 12:27 am
Boonton,
Surely you are not arguing that historical rates of infanticide and abortion are comparable to those of today? In the last 30 years the number of children aborted is equal to 20% of current world population. If abortion and infanticide were killing ~more~ than one in five (remember Pinker’s thesis is that things are getting less violent) we would surely have evidence of killing on that scale in the historical record.
As for the “measurement problem” — why this particular one? Pinker has no trouble positing his more peaceable planet from a lot of things that are not easily quantifiable. Like “hate’ crimes. Like rates of vegetarianism. Like criminalization of homosexuality. Like incidences of domestic abuse. Do you honestly mean to say that those historical numbers are more easily discerned than the rate of abortion?
Or could it be that Pinker does not believe that the destruction of human life in the womb is an act of violence? Having to account for an additional 1.2 billion deaths would certainly put a rather large dent in his thesis. Of course, Pinker would likely argue that abortion rates should not be considered an indicator of violence, which is fair enough – he gets to choose the metrics and the parameters. But it seems awfully tendentious to consider a growing preference for broccoli over Bessie as a sign of increasing peace while ignoring the destruction of so many human lives.
October 12th, 2011 | 6:51 am
Boonton,
“Calling it a wash seems fair until someone presents an objective way to measure abortion”
I think David C is right that you’re slighting abortion as a form of violence as does Pinker. Liberals simply don’t tend to take abortion very seriously. Abortion is complicated in lots of ways. High infant and maternal mortality certainly created a smaller abortion rate in the past, but your desire to wait for “an objective way to measure abortion” seems like a dodge since Pinker is necessarily dealing with lots of factors that are hard to pin down with any exactitude.
That said, I think Pinker is generally right.
Your story about the New Jersey murders sounds about right. Several studies have shown that people think cities and crime are more violent when the rates have decreased. Media has made us feel less safe.
I read an article the other day about why so many young people are leaving the faith, and high on their list of reasons was that they felt that Christianity was asking them to reject science. Joe’s column certainly illustrates that point. He makes a lot of bad arguments in this thread.
October 12th, 2011 | 7:48 am
If abortion and infanticide were killing ~more~ than one in five (remember Pinker’s thesis is that things are getting less violent) we would surely have evidence of killing on that scale in the historical record.
david c,
Pinker does deal with infanticide and abortion in some depth. I haven’t read the book yet, just looked up various topics in the index, but he does indeed consider the view that abortion could be considered a form of violence against infants: “Opponents of abortion may see the decline in every form of violence but the killing of fetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy.” He seems to imply that abortion occurs at about the same rate as infanticide: “It is true that in much of the world today, a similar proportion of pregnancies end in abortion as the fraction that in centuries past ended in infanticide.” (I have barely glanced at the section on infanticide, but I get the impression that it was more common than we imagine.) He also says the following:
The graph (on page 428) is quite dramatic.
From the very limited passages that I have read, Pinker doesn’t dismiss the idea of counting abortion as violence outright, but takes an “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” approach. I doubt it would satisfy anyone who insists that abortion is obviously violence and in the same league as infanticide, but in fairness to Pinker, you have to deal with what he actually says, not what the reviews say or what you think he says.
October 12th, 2011 | 9:29 am
david c
Surely you are not arguing that historical rates of infanticide and abortion are comparable to those of today? In the last 30 years the number of children aborted is equal to 20% of current world population.
And what was the rate in the Roman Empire? Do you have a way to measure this objectively? I don’t think there is any but its hard to see how a society that casually accepted infanticide for unwanted *born* children would have avoided abortion for unwanted *unborn* children.
As for the “measurement problem” — why this particular one? Pinker has no trouble positing his more peaceable planet from a lot of things that are not easily quantifiable. Like “hate’ crimes. Like rates of vegetarianism.
These are just the crutons in the salad. I think the rates of homicide as calculated from historical studies of ancient graves carry a lot more weight than vegetarianism. But it is interesting how we have moved to make actual violence more and more removed from our everyday experience. For example, most of us still eat meat but we have industrialized the slaughterhouse process to make the actual killing of animals more or less invisible to 95% of us. In fact if you consider chicken nuggets, hot dogs and hamburgers we seem to try to even make our food look like it didn’t come from violence. Where executions still happen, they happen behind closed doors, rather than being public entertainment events….this is true even when you’re talking about ‘bad enlightenment’ examples like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. They took great pains to carry out their murders behind closed doors so the general public could achieve a delusion of a non-violent society. In this respect abortion might fit the same pattern. A Roman might have shrugged and said why bother with abortion, the doctors of this time are pretty crappy. Just let the baby be born and toss it on the garbage heap outside the city.
Or could it be that Pinker does not believe that the destruction of human life in the womb is an act of violence? Having to account for an additional 1.2 billion deaths would certainly put a rather large dent in his thesis.
I once had an idea for a sci-fi story. It would go like this, imagine a variation on the many worlds hypothesis is discovered to be true….whenever a fictional story is created in our universe, an alternative universe is spawned where those events really happen. So an alternative universe exists where a whole planet was blown up alown with billions of people simply because George Lucas thought that was a cool special effect for his first Star Wars movie. If this was discovered to be true, then acts of fiction and imagination would be violence. George Lucas you could excuse because he was ignorant, but any future writer, director, author etc. would be a horrible criminal if he created an entertaining story that entailed people being victims of violence of any sort.
In this world, you’d have to break your metric into two ages, ‘Before Enlightenment’ and ‘After Enlightenment’. After all, Lucas had a movie with billions of innocent deaths, but he didn’t know. But if tomorrow some director puts out a huge zombie movie that has all of humanity dying…..well since he knows this will cause this to really happen in an alternative universe he is committing a massive act of violence.
I would classify abortion as problematic for the same reason. Since most people do not consider abortion the same as killing a person, a high rate of abortion does not really indicate a very violent society. Even if they are wrong, they act of out ignorance, not comission. The Romans liked to cruicify their criminals. They knew that was violence that killed people. They also used lead pots and cups. That too killed and harmed people, esp. children. I wouldn’t add that to their ‘rate of violence’. But if today North Korea started ordering parents to serve water to their children in lead cups, I would add that to NK’s ‘rate of violence’.
October 12th, 2011 | 9:33 am
David,
Thanks for the citation. As for my not dealing “with what he actually says” that’s why I asked the question about abortion above. It was sincere and I appreciate having Pinker’s answer (or your estimation of his answer) — though I find the premise (that the rate of infanticide then equals the rate of abortion now) dubious.
October 12th, 2011 | 9:46 am
Michael
Well David Nickol seems to have the jump on all of us since he actually has the book! Your criticism of me might be fair, though, but I still think if we are discussing whether or not humanity as a whole has gotten more violent, less violent or stayed the same over the long course of history we need some way to make measurements. For the last 60 years or so we do have some good measures of things like abortion. We don’t for the deep past. The Roman Empire had no public health system, no Medicare numbers, no doctors records and a huge amount of records they did have were lost ages ago. And many other ancient societies we have even less info on! At least with human skeletons you can determine violent causes of death so we can gleam some insight into the deep past.
Your story about the New Jersey murders sounds about right. Several studies have shown that people think cities and crime are more violent when the rates have decreased. Media has made us feel less safe.
It might simply be more fundamental….when death is common it ceases to shock, when it becomes less common then the few cases become more heart wrenching. We obsess today over cases like 12 coal miners trapped underground or 3,000 people killed on 9/11. But in ages past coal miners died in the hundreds (and still do in China). Single battles in WWII cost the US tens of thousands of lives and yet were considered great successes. The London Blitz killed about 25,000 and wounded another 25,000 making 9/11 look like a sunny day on the beach. Go back to the Civil War and things just get worse.
I think it is positive that this has made us less prone to violence but it does have some cons to it. For example, we so fear death that we lock it away meaning that we shy away from those of us who are near death. It also means that once you lock death behind closed doors, it becomes very hard to confront any issues about it. For example, consider the ethical issues of animals in slaughthouses. It’s almost impossible to get a fair hearing about that without being labelled some type of kook. Since the slaughterhouse has shielded our eyes from the violence it inflicts to give us our nuggets, we’d rather keep our eyes closed than take a hard look at it which is what a reform effort would require.
October 12th, 2011 | 11:45 am
Boonton, David N,
Thanks for your responses. As I said it was an honest question and I appreciate the information you have provided. It is not surprising to me that Pinker (a secularist) and I (a Christian) would come down in different places on the question of abortion.
I continue to find Pinker’s overall argument unpersuasive but am not in the “world is going to hell in a handbasket” camp either. I have a theological commitment to a particular understanding of human nature that says, in essence, that humankind is fundamentally broken and in need of regeneration rather than mere reform. I understand that this is a controversial (to say the least!) thesis for any committed progressive or secular humanist and that agreement between us will be very hard to achieve. We certainly can, however, agree that reform is a good place to start.
My own intuition on the broader question (for whatever it is worth) is something akin to a kind of stasis. A broken humanity will do what one would expect — be at war in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of life. Which is to say that we are not becoming more (or less) peacable precisely because to quote a Russian sage “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.”
What is the “social effect”? Well it means that we have gotten “better” at both preventing violence and promulgating it. For every example of peacable progress there is a counterexample written in blood shed and lives taken. I do not take this (as some might suppose) as a counsel of despair. I simply believe that we must look elsewhere for a solution to this intractable problem.
October 12th, 2011 | 12:39 pm
I think the ‘hell in a handbasket’ concept, as serious theology, went out the window several hundred years ago. I read that Newton believed he was simply rediscovering knowledge that was well known in Soloman’s time. Back then it seemed plausible to imagine ancient ages as a time of great wonders and modern days as simply trying to keep things tolerable until the end of the world arrived. But before long it became quite clear that wasn’t the case. The world of 1850 knew more about planets than Aristotle, more about medicine than Gallen, and the nature of chemistry was more likely to be found in a research lab than some obscure notebook from an ancient alachmist.
But while Rome had flushing toilets while Medieval Europe did not, the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment put an end to the ‘hell in a handbasket meme’. You may still find some New Agers who like to imagine Ancient Egyptians or Atlantis had technology superior to today, the idea doesn’t fly anywhere anymore IMO.
But I think you overestimate progressive optimism in relation to Christianity. After all, most people you meet in day to day life have never committed murder or even a notably violent act…yet Christians hardly assert they are all ‘perfect’. Even given a population with no murders, no rapes, no acts of serious violence there’s still more than enough ‘brokenness’ to go around so I think your thesis would be less controversial than you give progressives credit for. The idea that human nature was perfectable, for progressives, never really recovered from World War I (yes I, not II), IMO.
October 12th, 2011 | 1:08 pm
Boonton,
Not that I have any claim to being a spokesman for my co-religionists, but I have to dispute your assertion that “hell in a handbasket” went out long ago. There is a significant segment of folks amongst current day Christians who are more or less theologically committed to just that notion. Pre-millenial eschatology, in at least some of its forms, more or less demands that view.
I think you are right that World War 1 killed off the human perfectibility meme in continental Europe, but I would mark that as the terminal stage of a sickness unto death that showed early signs of infection with the Great Terror. Interestingly that Continental weariness seems not to have crossed the Atlantic with as much force as it could (should?) have. Utopian communalism in both religious and secular forms seems a recurring problem/delusion here. Could it be that having not been touched in our own lands with the horrors of mechanized trench warfare we are not as immune to it’s ‘charms’?
October 12th, 2011 | 1:39 pm
I would classify abortion as problematic for the same reason. Since most people do not consider abortion the same as killing a person, a high rate of abortion does not really indicate a very violent society.
Well, in the past, people didn’t view foreign people as persons – especially black people. Killing them wasn’t the same as killing a real person, so things weren’t really violent then, either.
October 12th, 2011 | 2:46 pm
Well, in the past, people didn’t view foreign people as persons – especially black people. Killing them wasn’t the same as killing a real person, so things weren’t really violent then, either.
In the South, it was once illegal to teach a black person to read. But it was never illegal to try to teach a cow to read. Why?
Because the dispute wasn’t whether blacks were persons, it was whether people were equal on a fundamental level. Slave holders said no, abolititionists (at least some) said yes.
So teaching a cow to read would be an amusing novelty at most. Teaching a black person to read would be upsetting what they saw as a fundamental order of things.
I suspect that this was true going back to ancient times. While communities might have thought very little of foreigners, they did recognize them as fellow people on some level. I guess if you could find me a society that truely honestly believes that all other humans were literally animals of some sort rather than other people (even lower types of people), then I’d be willing to cut their ‘violence metrics’ some slack to accomodate that.
October 12th, 2011 | 10:00 pm
Boonton,
“Well David Nickol seems to have the jump on all of us since he actually has the book!”
Once again, we’re in his debt for actually looking at the sources rather than relying on assumptions, something I’m ashamed to have done.
—
David C,
“I think you are right that World War 1 killed off the human perfectibility meme in continental Europe, but I would mark that as the terminal stage of a sickness unto death that showed early signs of infection with the Great Terror.”
I don’t think one has to believe in human perfectibility to believe that the world has gotten less violent. It certainly appears to have become more materialistic. No matter what your circumstances, faith is always tested.
October 13th, 2011 | 9:57 am
Yes double praise to David, it’s a pain manually typing out passages by hand from the source material but it does certainly advance the discussion both today and in the future.
I wanted to touch on this comment by Joe:
When people start talking about the mind being an “emergent property” of the brain they are merely using advanced terminology for “it’s a magical process.”
Emergent properties are not ‘magic’. Cheesecake is an emergent property. A cheesecake is made up of atoms. Yet study the periodic table as much as you please, you’ll never spot cheesecake in the properties of ‘mere’ carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other atoms. Yet there cheesecake is and it has properties a chef will discuss like its texture, sweetness, firmness and so on.
This is simply the very objective fact that when you get very complicated systems or entities, they have properties as a whole or on the macro scale that are not visible on the micro scale. The mind or consciousness arising from a complicated system like the brain is no more magic than cheesecake emerging from the oven. It does point that creating a model of this is going to be complicated and difficult. You can build a model of a tree, you can build a model of a forest but you can’t build a model of a forest from a model of a tree unless you’re willing and able to use as many model trees as a forest has. Saying the forest isn’t visible when you’re field of view is on individual trees is technically true but doesn’t refute the fact that the forest is made up of lots of individual trees.
October 13th, 2011 | 1:50 pm
Michael,
I am as skeptical of your “more materialistic” (by which I take you to mean “consumeristic” — as in acquisitive/covetous rather than physicalist/naturalist) as I am of Pinker’s “less violent”. Like I’ve said I believe in a kind of permanence of the human condition (at least apart from God) whereby most human sins are crimes of circumstance. That is to say where want (or better yet “disordered desire”) meets opportunity. The wants are sui generis, the means and opportunities fluctuate wildly. We are more consumerist because there is more to consume and the purveyors of consumption have finely honed their craft.
October 13th, 2011 | 6:44 pm
David C,
If I understand you right, you’re suggesting that the human race is equally bad in all eras, whereas I’d say that some eras are more conducive to some sins more than others. I don’t believe that the human race is getting progressively better or regressively worse, but I do believe it is progressively harder to pursue some sins and progressively easier to pursue others. It feels to me that your last sentence agrees with the idea that it is progressively easier to commit some sins, but you obviously understand your last sentence differently.
October 14th, 2011 | 6:43 am
Michael,
I think we are pretty close to one another in thought. My only potential disagreement is that while I do believe some eras make it progressively easier to commit some sins, the potential for reform (or further decline) always exists. That is to say that I don’t believe in some sort of “pandora’s box” or “genie out of the bottle” view of sin. I am not saying that you do, mind you, but when you say you “believe it is progressively harder to pursue some sins and progressively easier to pursue others” the question I want to ask is do you believe that movement is unidirectional? That is, can the “progress” be undone.
October 14th, 2011 | 9:14 am
Michael,
I replied to your statement earlier, but my response seems to have disappeared into the ether….
I think we are close to agreement. My only caveat would be that I believe that the possibility for progression/regression of particular sins is reversible. That is to say that I don’t believe in a “pandora’s box” or “genie out of the bottle” view of sins. I am not saying that you do, mind you, but am asking if you will grant that as times change “progress” can be undone.
Or, to put it another way, it seems to me that one of the problems with a “progressive” view of the world is that it seems to regard change as both, a good in and of itself, and ineluctable. So, I guess what I am asking is if you see progress (or regress) as unidirectional? I don’t think you do, but that’s the question that lingers…
October 14th, 2011 | 10:30 am
david c.
Like I’ve said I believe in a kind of permanence of the human condition (at least apart from God) whereby most human sins are crimes of circumstance.
One thing I’d suggest considering is the fact that humans are social animals (something you probably have already heard before) AND *cummulative* social animals. There have been a few cases of so-called ‘feral children’…these children were raised with little or no human contact (supposedly with the help of monkeys, dogs, wolves, etc.). When such cases are discovered the damage done to such children is massive and they have great difficulty acquiring language and socializing with other humans.
So no functioning human has ever existed who not only was birthed genetically from human parents but also birthed culturally through socializing with other humans. That means human culture has been passed down with modification in a chain that goes back to the point when the human animal first became able to communicate. Other animals you can ‘break their chain’. You can take a few puppies from birth and raise up a new population of dogs who never had any socialization with adult dogs. Not with humans, maybe it can happen but it hasn’t.
So while human nature may have remained the same or nearly the same the impact of human socialization has not. I would venture to say that we are different people because we were born *after* 2000+ years of AD history because when it comes to people you can’t quite seperate the hardware from the software. We may be roughly the same as a 15th century man or woman genetically but we aren’t culturally….in fact we *must* be different because there’s really no way to undo the cummulative socializational impact of those six centuries plus.
October 14th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
All,
Sorry for the double posting above.
Boonton,
I won’t dispute that there is a strong “nurture” component in our makeup which is deeply conditioned by our environment. I am certain that I am a very different creature socio-culturally than your 15th century man.
I don’t believe, however, that this makes us alien to one another. My guess is you wouldn’t say that either. The argument, I suppose, comes down to how different we truly are from one another, and the mutability of that difference.
October 14th, 2011 | 3:24 pm
Considering the huge diversity in human cultures over time and space, we seem to be quite mutable. But I agree we wouldn’t really find ourselves alien to each other….but then that might be just because we all share a common ‘cummulative culture’. We have 15 centuries plus in common with 15th century man, and the 15th century man has at least 15 centuries in common with us.
But feral children, while no perfect one is known to exist (there never really has been a baby abandoned by its parents and raised entirely by animals, all cases involved at least some minimal human contact), do seem to hint that biological humans could be very close to alien.
In Ian Banks science fiction, its a common practice for aliens to steal the young of some less advanced species (like humans) and raise them. When such species finally finds its way to the larger galactic community, they often find that their kind not only is already out there but in greater numbers than they are! I wonder if such a thing happened how alien such humans might seem to us?
October 14th, 2011 | 3:38 pm
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