David Bentley Hart on Steven Pinker’s “decline of violence” thesis:
In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about “progress” or “Enlightenment”—or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.
And yet, oddly enough, I like Pinker’s book. On one level, perhaps, it is all terrific nonsense: historically superficial, philosophically platitudinous, occasionally threatening to degenerate into the dulcet bleating of a contented bourgeois. But there is also something exhilarating about this fideist who thinks he is a rationalist. Over the past few decades, so much of secularist discourse has been drearily clouded by irony, realist disenchantment, spiritual fatigue, self-lacerating sophistication: a postmodern sense of failure, an appetite for caustic cultural genealogies, a meek surrender of all “metanarrative” ambitions.
Pinker’s is an older, more buoyant, more hopeful commitment to the “Enlightenment”—and I would not wake him from his dogmatic slumber for all the tea in China. In his book, one encounters the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt. For me, it reaffirms the human spirit’s lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood, not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them.
December 20th, 2011 | 2:15 pm
I just read this whole essay in my latest edition of FToDT (First Things on Dead Tree). Hart is the master of the subtle but decisive takedown and he accomplishes that here. He lays the lumber to the idea that percentage of violent deaths in a given population is a reasonable metric for measuring “violence” . He further cites the historical ignorance and deplorable level of statistical cherry-picking that Pinker does in the work. Definitely worth reading the whole thing…
December 20th, 2011 | 3:49 pm
Something Hart left out of his essay – what, if anything, would convince him of Pinker’s thesis? Anything like this?
Except that’s hardly the only comparison Pinker makes. Even in war, well… compare today to this or this.
December 20th, 2011 | 4:26 pm
Ray, yes, I think the comparison has been made, for example 700,544 casualties at the Battle of Kiev in 1941 vs. 21,900 at the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. The Star Trek utopia article is about the United States only, which, you are right, is wealthy. We enjoy low prices on consumer goods, however, because of very low wages paid to the people who make them.
December 20th, 2011 | 7:18 pm
Patrick –
One involved troops, one involved civilians.
A valid point in some ways… although the article didn’t talk only about consumer goods.
December 20th, 2011 | 8:27 pm
Kiev was almost completely destroyed during the war, and around 100,000 civilians perished. After the defeat of Germany, it was rebuilt in the
Stalinist style. War has become more, not less, terrible due to its industrialization — that is the flip side of Enlightenment rationalism which Pinker glosses over.
Yes, certainly us Westerners enjoy many luxuries, not only cheap electronic gizmos. Most people do not, which Pinker does not seem to be aware of.
Certainly, there has been moral and material progress in many areas. Whether this is due to Enlightenment rationalism or Christianity is debatable. It’s interesting that most of the most advanced societies are those which are historically Christian. Personally, I think the Enlightenment is merely a truncated form of Christianity and could not exist without it. There is not much of worth in the Enlightenment that is not also present in Catholic thought.
December 20th, 2011 | 10:37 pm
Nonetheless, suppose the Roman Empire had nuclear weapons, suppose the Huns had mustard gas…..I’m not at all sure they wouldn’t gleefully embrace the most genocide they could get for their buck. Relatively speaking it is interesting that even the evil regimes of our post WWII modern era (Stalin, Mao) came nowhere close to killing as many people as they could kill if they really employed their full abilities to the task.
Granted % of deaths makes for a clumsy metric but there’s something to be said for it. If someone two people in a village of 200 die in a fist fight then how is that really less than 2 million who die in a huge empire of thousands of villages that add up to 200 million people?
The reason we insist on the 2 million representing something worse is because in absolute terms its a bigger number and because when we see the worlds ‘nation with 200 million people’ we think of that as a single unit. As though it was some type of machine that had a button that causes 2 million violent deaths, therefore we shouldn’t push it. But in reality that concept exists only in our head. Any nation of 200 million or more is not some single thing that can be controlled from the top down. It’s just a large collection of those supposedly more simple villages of 200 people.
So yea if a village of 200 people had 2 violent deaths ever year 10,000 years ago but today a nation of 200 million only has 50,000 violent deaths per year its a real reduction in violence.
December 21st, 2011 | 8:49 am
Patrick –
Over the course of the war, yes. Not in one orgiastic massacre a la Magdeburg.
Actually, civilian casualties in modern warfare are amazingly low by past standards.
And capture of enemy troops is feasible now. Before the invention of automatic weapons, you’d need almost as many guards as prisoners. And modern logistics allow sparing food for prisoners.
December 21st, 2011 | 10:46 am
Ray notes “Actually, civilian casualties in modern warfare are amazingly low by past standards.”
This is true recently given western powers, particularly the U.S., are involved. It is not true in general. Take the Iran-Iraq war with thousands of Kurds gassed by their own country.
As to numbers of civilian deaths, how to you compare the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, among other cities, to those lost in the Siege of Magdeburg? Or if you want something more completely civilian, try the Killing Fields of Kampuchea in the 1970s or the Rwandan massacre of Tutsis in the 1990s. If more recent is your goal, try Juarez just across the border in Mexico with a murder rate well beyond any American or Western European city thanks to the illicit drug demand in the U.S. Does abortion figure into this, if just as Freakonomics has suggested? Do the mass starvations in the various Communist countries (most recently North Korea) count? Was Communism made possible by the Enlightenment as well?
From what I’ve read, I believe Pinker confuses the very recent relative safety of the western world with the world at large and then compounds it by limiting his context further to his immediate milieu.
I would think such advances that are made come from the medical arts supported by the Industrial Revolution. Remember, the Enlightenment’s first big success was the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, followed by decades of war started by a French Emperor.
December 21st, 2011 | 11:27 am
I’ve read several pieces that claim that Pinker’s statistics are completely misleading and invalid. Since they form the basis of his entire thesis, these are really devastating. I haven’t seen a response from Pinker or his defenders to these challenges.
Here’s one from Psychology Today, critiquing one central claim:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201103/steven-pinkers-stinker-the-origins-war
Pinker includes so many of these charts and comparisons from so many different disciplines, that I think it would be difficult to analyze each of them. But when you see so many questionable (if not simply incorrect) claims in a single chart, it does make you wonder about the rest.
December 21st, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Mike Melendez –
Ah, but now you’re comparing apples to apples. You could take a look and see how Pinker addresses such things in his own words…
December 21st, 2011 | 1:57 pm
Ray,
Could you point me to the relevant sections? I searched for Dresden, Tokyo, and fire bombing and found none of them.
December 21st, 2011 | 2:49 pm
So I looked through some the graphs in web page Ray pointed to.
The main strength of what is presented there is for the last 65 years. Of course, the Pax Americana has reigned during that time, Europe having exhausted itself during WWII. The graphs show another downturn in 1990. I would link that to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. So we know the immediate causes of the limited peace of the last 65 years.
Graphs going back from there are suspicious in my mind. One in particular stands out. It plots the 100 worst wars of known human history. WWII is only among the worst. Why? The metric is deaths per 100,000. For WWII we know the number of deaths within 10s of millions. At least, the highest figure is within 100% of the lowest proffered by historians. For ancient history, the battle estimates are, not infrequently, known only within an order of magnitude. To put it simply, the data presented is widely varying in its quality. Even given the apples and oranges data measured by a curious yardstick, the trend — except for the last 65 years — looks distinctly flat.
I agree with some of Pinker’s context. We as individuals seem no less violent in the heart than we ever have been. The Pax Americana may be a temporary fluke. But, put gently, his comments that the perceived trend derives from civilization and enlightment seem facile at best.
December 21st, 2011 | 11:55 pm
“suppose the Roman Empire had nuclear weapons, suppose the Huns had mustard gas…..I’m not at all sure they wouldn’t gleefully embrace the most genocide they could get for their buck.”
A couple of points. First, it was a point of pride for Roman soldiers to be well-trained, disciplined, dispassionate, and precise professionals. The Roman army virtually invented military organization, clear rank structures, standardized uniforms, etc. They were certainly cruel: in a newly conquered territory, 10% of the population would be executed in order to discourage rebellion. But it was exactly 10%. They did not rape and pillage, but conquered orderly and methodically. Moreover, they did so based on the theory that people would be better off under Roman rule, not out of racial hatred. Many of the generals and emperors of the later empire came from peripheral provinces, so they must have learned to appreciate Roman government.
Be that as it may, the industrialization of war undermines the faith in rationalistic progress that Pinker adheres to. Merely increasing our powers of reason, without correction by religion, does not necessarily lead to a better world. For every advance we make in medicine, transportation, and material comfort, there is a corresponding advance in our ability to kill and destroy.
December 22nd, 2011 | 7:30 am
Mike
The main strength of what is presented there is for the last 65 years. Of course, the Pax Americana has reigned during that time, Europe having exhausted itself during WWII. The graphs show another downturn in 1990. I would link that to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. So we know the immediate causes of the limited peace of the last 65 years.
The USSR collapsed in the 1990′s but still had a huge amount of firepower. Several serious wars were fought between the Communist bloc and the US between the late 1940′s through the 1970′s, the death rate due to war was still less than WWII and previous eras. It certainly wasn’t the case that they lacked the ability or weapon firepower to do much more killing. It’s been about 20 years now since the USSR collapsed and despite areas of instability, 9/11, the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq the world still appears much more ‘mellow’ than it did in previous eras.
You’re right that this may just be a tiny blip in the data. 65-100 years is a very tiny sample compared to human history spanning maybe 5,000 + years. But then if the world has made a major shift, we’d only have 65 years or so of data. Imagine a prediction made about new religions in 165 AD
Patrick
They were certainly cruel: in a newly conquered territory, 10% of the population would be executed in order to discourage rebellion. But it was exactly 10%. They did not rape and pillage, but conquered orderly and methodically.
The population of the USSR in 1991 was about 293M. Just say the US military had defeated the Soviet military in 1990 and conquered all of the USSR. If it had applied the above, ‘orderly’ principle, they would have killed 29,300,000 civilians methodically for no other purpose than as an insurance policy against possible rebellion. If Hitler killed 6M Jews then the US would have had to have done nearly 5 times that if it was operating at the same rate as the ‘enlightened’ Romans.
Also, I think you’re friendly view of Roman Power applies only to its more easy conquests. Look at what they did when they ran into more serious opposition, Carthage for example was completely destroyed. That wasn’t the case for West Germany or Japan. It wasn’t even the case for East Germany and the Soviet bloc in Europe (and the USSR had more reason to be pissed at Germany than Rome had for being pissed at Carthage).
I think the ‘Pax Americana’ theory is pretty much refuted by the history of Rome. When Europe had a hedgemon it was still pretty violent. Simply having a single great power controlling large areas rather than numerous small nations does not ensure peace and non-violence.
Be that as it may, the industrialization of war undermines the faith in rationalistic progress that Pinker adheres to….
well there’s two questions at play here. The first is Pinker right that we have become less violent as a species. The second is why? Pinker may be right on the first but partially right or wrong on the second. For example, I could come up with a evolutionary hypothesis that has nothing to do with the enlightenment. As humanity advanced its knowledge of technology, ‘war mongering’ genes got selected out. Why? Because nations filled with war mongering leaders and people got exactly what they wanted, wars, and advancing tech. ensured that they got wiped out by wars. What’s left was a more peaceful gene pool that has fewer wars for the same reason Europe hasn’t seen any serious plagues since the Black Death. The genes for being vulnerable to plague all got wiped out when the Big Plague came to town.
December 22nd, 2011 | 9:16 am
Patrick –
Er… well, the most you could say is “they did not rape and pillage” as much.
December 22nd, 2011 | 10:43 am
What I was trying to say about Rome was that it was able to adapt itself to local cultures (authentic multiculturalism about 2000 years before it was cool), and did not make war for the purpose of destruction, but to extend the rule of law and ultimately to make the world more civilized. (Of course that’s not always what actually happened, but at least that was the theory.) Compare that to the 20th c. Nazis, which sought to completely destroy, rather than merely subdue, groups of people, and Communism, a totalitarian system demanding complete uniformity in all aspects of life. I’ll take the Romans over either one.
December 22nd, 2011 | 10:56 am
We are only talking about rates of violent death here. Rome vs Nazi Empire isn’t really the question. For one thing Rome was a civilization that lasted centuries, Nazi Germany couldn’t even do a full quarter of a century. The USSR might be a marginally better empire to compare, but it too failed to really make it that long.
The US is a better comparision. During the Civil War it raised a military greater than any in Europe. That gives us 145 years or so. If you consider the US a successor to the British Empire, then you have at least a few centuries of history to compare to the Roman Empire.
While the Roman Empire was no Nazi Germany or even Stalinist Russia, it doesn’t compare very well to modern times. And the world would be many more times as bloody today if it followed Rome as the model.
But then again its not clear that the ‘rates of violence’ really tell the story. It’s a fair criticism that advances make a lot of violence unnecessary. For example, today an occupier has a lot of high tech tools at his disposal to suppress rebellions and insurgencies. If Rome had that maybe they wouldn’t have used the ’10% policy’ as much as they did.
December 22nd, 2011 | 11:32 am
Yeah… actually I misremembered that little fact. Having looked it up, the practice of “decimation,” as it was called, was actually a means of preserving discipline in the Roman army itself, by executing every tenth soldier in unruly units.
December 23rd, 2011 | 8:49 pm
Here’s one from Psychology Today, critiquing one central claim
The quote I found interesting from that link:
December 27th, 2011 | 9:41 am
I think that issue has been addressed before and demonstrated to be false. Pinker did include the highest estimates of total deaths in World War II both civilian, miliatary as well as even indirect deaths (such as disease and famine caused by the war disrupting civilization). Pinker is, though, not arguing which eras had the highest absolute levels of death but the rates of death. With the population of the earth in the billions, our wars and violence will easily kill more people than when the population was in the millions to hundred million zone. I don’t think its so easy to challenge Pinker on the facts (although I haven’t read his book yet, fair balance). I think several more valid areas of challenge are:
1. Technology makes violence less needed. Today North Korea can monitor its citizens, make them rat out each other and only torture and kill a handful of them to keep its grip on power. In earlier ages such fine tuned control wasn’t technologically possible. The tyrant had to wait until a province or village tried to rise up and then slaughter them by the millions.
2. We have only a very short blip of history that can be described as ‘modern’, say from the 1700′s onwards and even then that’s only the tiny portion of the world. Ever declining rates of violence might simply be one leg of a perpetural cycle of ups and downs.
3. A somewhat related possibility; a certain amount of violence is caused by material depreviation, ignorance, unsophisitication etc. As those things disappear, the violence they cause disappears. But once you’ve achieved that level of work, you’re still left with some core level of violence that you won’t get rid off by just making things more ‘enlightened’. Think of height. The average height of people has been going up over the last 100 plus years as living conditions improve. Yet it’s simply not the case that humans will grow to infinite height by just being able to eat more and more fresh meat and veggies and having better antibiotics. At some point the declining violence trend may bottom out and stay there rather than continuing to go down just as the increasing height trend tops out.
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