Shocker: Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/books/153762/shocker%3A_is_our_world_becoming_less_violent/

Humanity's lust for violence has undergone a long, precipitous decline at every level of social interaction, from domestic abuse to violent crime to interstate wars. That's the sweeping and somewhat counterintuitive thesis of psychologist Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The pacification of humanity, says Pinker, is “a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years.”

Pinker writes that the “very idea invites skepticism, incredulity and sometimes anger.” He sets out to overcome that barrier by surveying a broad swath of data, from examinations of ancient bones unearthed in peat bogs and on long-forgotten battlefields, to homicide statistics based on European coroners' inquests and local records dating back 800 years, to databases of modern interstate conflicts and civil wars.

Does Pinker's research validate his thesis? And if so, what forces might explain such a profound shift in human society?

Are We Really Less Violent Today?

Pinker makes his case by combing dozens of disparate datasets to pull out what he proposes is a standard measure of our tendency toward violence: the likelihood of dying at the hand of another human being in a given year. In the long sweep of human history, he makes a compelling case, noting that almost 20 percent of bones uncovered at archaeological excavations of prehistoric societies show evidence of violent trauma – a death rate unparalleled in even the bloodiest episodes in recent history.

[RC]

1. World Becoming Less Violent?

Maybe because the daily dead is not being reported from Iraq anymore.

Sure can't tell from the "If it bleeds, it leads" news stories in Kansas City

[Jim__]

2. Was Hitler less violent than Genghis Khan?

Using Pinker's measure, yes, he was. Why? Because he killed a lower percentage of the human race. Mongol campaigns caused the deaths of, say, 40 million people. WWII, Hitler's war, killed from 50 million to "over" 70 million people. But because that's less of a percentage than the Mongol invasions, Hitler was less violent. That is, if we acccept Pinker's measure, Hitler was less violent.

I think Pinker's measure, while informative, is not a valid measure for the overall violence of humanity. Hitler was striving to build an atom bomb. If he got it, I believe he would have succeeded in killing a higher percentage of humanity than Genghis Khan did. Would that actually have made him a more violent person? I'd contend that Hitler with an atom bomb would be the same person; just more enabled by technology.

Today, a number of nations possess nuclear weapons, and that number is increasing. If we stumble into a nuclear war, has our nature suddenly changed from less violent to more violent. I don't accept that it has.

Could we use as a measure of violence, the probability that one will be killed by a violent act? Is this the measure that Pinker is actually using? I don't think so. In Genghis Khan's time, what was the probability of the entire world population, or even 50% of the world's population, being wiped out in one battle? What is that probability today? Should that be included in our measure of the violence of the world? I think it should.

[tama]

4. Nukes

are challenging concrete manifestation of the "who takes the sword, dies by the sword" dictum. As you know, they've been only used once.

Mongols were pacified by Buddhism, religions etc with the message of peace might have something to do with the general trend.

[MisterP]

3. aw, this is just a ripoff of Herman Kahn saying everything was getting better forever

and archaeologists have to take into account both selectivity (how representative are sites, really?) and inescapable "prior assumptions"/paradigms (e.g., Turkana Boy was seen as evidence of cannibalism, then they found it looked more like a cheetah bite. Poor Turkana Boy). The Science Wars got very interesting in archaeology. People were called Yippies.

[Odin2005]

6. So you deny that non-state societies are extremely violent?

I see a reluctance to give up the myth of the Noble Savage, a racist and patronizing notion that has worn out it's welcome, but still has currency because it is deeply ingrained in the ideological beliefs of many Feminists, Deep Ecology folks, indigenous rights activists, and New Agers.

[Odin2005]

5. I am not suprised people refuse to believe Pinker.

Violent crime in the US has been declining in the US since 1990, but you would not know it going by people's attitudes. it just goes to show that for most people anecdote and media sensationalism win out over factual data every time.