Homicide rates aren't really reliable metrics for violence, at least in the US. Here in Chicago, homicides are down a bit, but shootings are up. That's actually more violence, but the homicide is the only politicized fact. More shootings and less deaths probably have more to do with surgical outcomes than any sort of peaceful nature argument. Kids are getting shot left and right here. Its not getting better.
Humans are basic creatures that engage largely in rational game theory. A south-side kid with no prospects joining a violent gang is 100% rational. Shooting a rival for turf makes perfect sense in that socio-economic system. Under those circumstances violence is the most efficient way to gain resources, solve disputes, and build social capital. 70% of homicides in Chicago are never solved, so you don't need to worry about jail time either.
Pinker's stuff is a bit too idealistic for my tastes. He ignores that humans really just adapt to circumstances. We're only less violent, if we even are, its because circumstances dictate it so. My milquetoast bureaucratic life has no room for violence, but if things drastically changed for me, I'd be the one buying a gun and shooting rival gangbangers. Its just makes sense for me to do so. I wouldn't necessarily be averse to this. I'd try to maximize my life, protect my family, and collect resources that best way I personally can.
Thankfully, my parents immigrated to this country and gave me the luxury of never having to shoot anyone. I'm not a good person. I'm just a person. I can, and often will be, what circumstances demand if need be. I've never been tested like a south side kid. I doubt I'd take more a more moral or peaceful approach under those circumstances. I'm certainly not overly-moral today and I imagine most people aren't either. Are we all wringing our hands over not buying fair trade goods? Do we really care who makes our ipads, computers, etc? Why would I be overly-moral when it comes to violence if I suddenly found myself in certain situations?
Pinker did a TED talk on this book. In the talk he makes a note that the book does not try to explain why, though he has some ideas as to why the numbers are declining.
> In the talk he makes a note that the book does not try to explain why...
Ummm, the book was published only in 2011. The TED talk is from 2007. Even without seeing the TED talk, one can claim that your observations don't add up.
I looked for the dates because in my reading of The Better Angels of Our Nature, there seems to be plenty and more answering the question of 'why' violence has declined.
Hmm, if the author is right about "better behavior" over centuries, I wonder how much is due to larger groups, both in terms of raw population and social adaptations?
To draw upon the words of a fictional AI...
> The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.
> The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government.
> The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
I finished the book recently, it was quite a long read. I can tell that the author definitely covered a wide variety of possible explanations to the reduction of violence. Was it exhaustive or not, I can't tell.
The most surprising and unsettling for me was the vivid depiction of the levels of violence as they existed in the society (or societies) even relatively recently. I kind of take it for granted that I am fairly physically secure in my everyday life, my chances to die in a war are vanishingly small, and chances to be robbed not that much higher. Makes me grateful that I was not born just a few hundred years ago, and of course that I live in the more developed part of the world.
I think the one absolutely inarguable factor would be intelligence. Humans, through better health, nutrition, and education, have become on the whole vastly more intelligent and educated, and thus have more choices than "breaking bones" to resolve disagreements.
And the decline of child abuse: The most seriously abusive punishments people thought nothing of a few centuries ago are seriously out of favor today, which leads to children who weren't raised to think the bigger and stronger inherently have the right to hurt them, and therefore don't think that once they're bigger and stronger they have the right to hurt others.
>>The Better Angels of Our Nature explains some ideas that I think should be widely understood, like the idea that the basis for morality – and the continued decline of violence – lies in empathy, strengthened by rules, codes and laws.
This statement contradicts itself. Laws, at the end of the day, can only be enforced by the threat of eventual violence. You can't force someone to be empathetic or moral, they need to choose to be that way through their own understanding of the world, their place in it, and what they view as right and wrong.
I'd say it's your comment that is somehow contradictory. Most people are law-abiding citizens not because they fear the threat of eventual violence, but because of their moral & empathy. Laws are just a framework around it to negate deviations from this stable state, but it's usually not the amount of violence you can unleash that will really convince people to follow laws they don't perceive as legitimate.
You can't force them, but you can definitively "nudge" them, creating the conditions to change the values in a certain direction. For example, assuming that daily interaction increases empathy with people that are foreign to you, a law that promotes the development of mixed neighbors (be it mixing ethnicities, income levels, number of children, etc) might increase that empathy without resorting to any violence.
Not all laws are enforced by the police and courts.
People learn to be empathetic and moral via cultural norms. Laws create cultural norms.
A law forces me to behave, yes, but it also makes everyone else behave, and that makes a _completely_ different world for me. One where I can trust people in general to, e.g., not murder me.
Pinker frequently points back to Hobbes' Leviathan as a turning point in understanding violence and human societies - that man's "state of nature" is brutish and violent and that a strong "leviathan" government is central to taming the brutish impulses. There's some irony there, but it's no coincidence that the great civilizations of history are by and large marked by sophisticated, powerful governments.
"A History of Violence" was the title of a long article (book?) I read by Pinker online sometime ago. I can't find the site anymore, just reviews of a book by the same name. It's worth a read. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
It might be that one factor is the decline in importance of manual labour.
Guys who are proud of their physical strength, which also gives them status and respect, may be more likely to resolve their differences through violence.
It's hard to take that article seriously when it's surrounded by anti-vaccine stuff[1] and various conspiracy theories[2][3][4].
I tried reading the actual content, but the unnecessary verbiage and hostility forced me to skim it. The counterarguments I did read are mostly FUD. For example: How can we know that people in prehistoric tribes were likely to die from violence? Well, there's an entire field of forensic anthropology that's up to the task. Pinker's just citing the experts.
The claim that Pinker misconstrued numbers particularly annoyed me. If we want to compare violence across societies, we need to compare homicide rates, not the absolute numbers. Pinker rightly acknowledges this, but the authors of this article claim only absolute numbers matter.
And throughout the piece, the authors try to push their own agenda. Something about modern society corrupting humankind. It quickly grows tiresome to read.
I'm sure there's a decent critique of Pinker's book somewhere, but your link isn't it.
Thanks for highlighting this, it was an interesting read if a little long. For those without much time probably the most interesting part is "Massaging the Numbers: Pinker’s Non-Proofs of Long-Term Violence Reduction".
This great article debunks a lot, but also acknowledges some important underlying points:
"Pinker has no serious evidence for ..., even though his sources’ evidence for the decline in homicide rates in European countries over many centuries is solid."
And some points in the article are also highly questionable:
"Perhaps most important, the absolute numbers of people who die because of armed conflicts are a first-order measure of the true human cost of violence, and we should never permit the moral gravity of this loss and suffering to be relativized by the juggling of numbers until they all match the same global population in any given year."
This would mean that we can never compare the past with the present...
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|11 years ago|reply
Humans are basic creatures that engage largely in rational game theory. A south-side kid with no prospects joining a violent gang is 100% rational. Shooting a rival for turf makes perfect sense in that socio-economic system. Under those circumstances violence is the most efficient way to gain resources, solve disputes, and build social capital. 70% of homicides in Chicago are never solved, so you don't need to worry about jail time either.
Pinker's stuff is a bit too idealistic for my tastes. He ignores that humans really just adapt to circumstances. We're only less violent, if we even are, its because circumstances dictate it so. My milquetoast bureaucratic life has no room for violence, but if things drastically changed for me, I'd be the one buying a gun and shooting rival gangbangers. Its just makes sense for me to do so. I wouldn't necessarily be averse to this. I'd try to maximize my life, protect my family, and collect resources that best way I personally can.
Thankfully, my parents immigrated to this country and gave me the luxury of never having to shoot anyone. I'm not a good person. I'm just a person. I can, and often will be, what circumstances demand if need be. I've never been tested like a south side kid. I doubt I'd take more a more moral or peaceful approach under those circumstances. I'm certainly not overly-moral today and I imagine most people aren't either. Are we all wringing our hands over not buying fair trade goods? Do we really care who makes our ipads, computers, etc? Why would I be overly-moral when it comes to violence if I suddenly found myself in certain situations?
[+] [-] wodenokoto|11 years ago|reply
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
[+] [-] shas3|11 years ago|reply
Ummm, the book was published only in 2011. The TED talk is from 2007. Even without seeing the TED talk, one can claim that your observations don't add up.
I looked for the dates because in my reading of The Better Angels of Our Nature, there seems to be plenty and more answering the question of 'why' violence has declined.
[+] [-] Terr_|11 years ago|reply
To draw upon the words of a fictional AI...
> The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.
> The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government.
> The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
[+] [-] Evgeny|11 years ago|reply
The most surprising and unsettling for me was the vivid depiction of the levels of violence as they existed in the society (or societies) even relatively recently. I kind of take it for granted that I am fairly physically secure in my everyday life, my chances to die in a war are vanishingly small, and chances to be robbed not that much higher. Makes me grateful that I was not born just a few hundred years ago, and of course that I live in the more developed part of the world.
[+] [-] nakedrobot2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbd1984|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsbechtel|11 years ago|reply
This statement contradicts itself. Laws, at the end of the day, can only be enforced by the threat of eventual violence. You can't force someone to be empathetic or moral, they need to choose to be that way through their own understanding of the world, their place in it, and what they view as right and wrong.
[+] [-] rjaco31|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply
Not all laws are enforced by the police and courts.
[+] [-] lkbm|11 years ago|reply
A law forces me to behave, yes, but it also makes everyone else behave, and that makes a _completely_ different world for me. One where I can trust people in general to, e.g., not murder me.
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james1071|11 years ago|reply
Guys who are proud of their physical strength, which also gives them status and respect, may be more likely to resolve their differences through violence.
[+] [-] gizmo|11 years ago|reply
http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-...
[+] [-] chroma|11 years ago|reply
I tried reading the actual content, but the unnecessary verbiage and hostility forced me to skim it. The counterarguments I did read are mostly FUD. For example: How can we know that people in prehistoric tribes were likely to die from violence? Well, there's an entire field of forensic anthropology that's up to the task. Pinker's just citing the experts.
The claim that Pinker misconstrued numbers particularly annoyed me. If we want to compare violence across societies, we need to compare homicide rates, not the absolute numbers. Pinker rightly acknowledges this, but the authors of this article claim only absolute numbers matter.
And throughout the piece, the authors try to push their own agenda. Something about modern society corrupting humankind. It quickly grows tiresome to read.
I'm sure there's a decent critique of Pinker's book somewhere, but your link isn't it.
1. http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-australias-vaccine-mafia...
2. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-walls-are-crumbling-down-ar...
3. http://www.globalresearch.ca/just-as-isil-gets-exposed-as-a-...
4. http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-killings-terrorism-or-fal...
[+] [-] UnGravitas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriscool|11 years ago|reply
"Pinker has no serious evidence for ..., even though his sources’ evidence for the decline in homicide rates in European countries over many centuries is solid."
And some points in the article are also highly questionable:
"Perhaps most important, the absolute numbers of people who die because of armed conflicts are a first-order measure of the true human cost of violence, and we should never permit the moral gravity of this loss and suffering to be relativized by the juggling of numbers until they all match the same global population in any given year."
This would mean that we can never compare the past with the present...