“ Steven Pinker says human beings are getting less violent, especially since the Enlightenment. What do you think of his argument?
It’s a very interesting argument, which he makes with great evidence and subtlety. We no longer have prizefights where people batter each other to death. We no longer have public executions. And in most developed societies and many less developed societies, the homicide rates are way down. Your own country, the United States, is something of an outlier there. I think his argument that we are becoming more peaceful in domestic societies is right. But I don’t think that’s war. War is something different.
There’s a very interesting counterargument by Richard Wrangham called “the goodness paradox.” He argues that we have, in fact, become nicer and less violent as individuals. We may have domesticated ourselves by our choice of mates and by breeding out those who are most violent, or killing those who are most violent among us, like the way wolves have been domesticated into friendly dogs who sit on your lap. We may have become nicer as individuals, but we’ve also become better at organizing and using purposive violence. That’s the paradox. We’ve gotten better at making war even as we’ve become nicer people.
Nationalism can be the same as religion. You will die for something bigger than yourself.”
“But the groups willing to wage war have often prospered.
Up to a point. They have often got themselves into wars that have cost them dearly as well. Charles Tilly has argued very persuasively that war has helped to create bigger states that benefit those who live within their borders because they provide more stability and security. The Roman Empire was built through war, but those who lived inside the Roman Empire enjoyed a higher standard of living and could travel freely because the roads and seas were safe.
Trade could move through all the Roman territories because of the security it offered. It’s very striking that people wanted to move into the Roman Empire, not out, because life was better inside it.”
We've gotten better at making war but are making less of it. The Long Peace we are still living in has lasted from 1945 to the present day. International organizations like the WTO and the UN and the World Bank have been effective at increasing diplomacy, trade, and prosperity to the levels unseen in human history.
So there is no paradox: we have become nicer--or at least less touchy, more informal, people--while at the same time making less war, even though we have gotten better at it. Because of course we've gotten better at it. We've gotten better at everything: surgery, farming, acting (my kids on occasion when we'd watch something from before about 1980 would talk about the "time before acting was invented") and so on.
The benefits of this have not been evenly distributed, and there are certainly still places where "the past isn't dead: it isn't even past." And the long-term stability of the Long Peace is always open to question, because we are in such unprecedented territory.
But we have any number of reasons to hope, and Pinker's analysis is largely sound. There will always be a degree of violence inherent in the human condition, so pointing out that violence still exists, as Pinker's critics often do, doesn't really meet the point, which is that violence has declined. It's easy to cherry-pick dramatic counter-examples, but they don't change the sum. They are already included in it.
“ Steven Pinker says human beings are getting less violent, especially since the Enlightenment. What do you think of his argument?
It’s a very interesting argument, which he makes with great evidence and subtlety. We no longer have prizefights where people batter each other to death. We no longer have public executions. And in most developed societies and many less developed societies, the homicide rates are way down. Your own country, the United States, is something of an outlier there. I think his argument that we are becoming more peaceful in domestic societies is right. But I don’t think that’s war. War is something different.
There’s a very interesting counterargument by Richard Wrangham called “the goodness paradox.” He argues that we have, in fact, become nicer and less violent as individuals. We may have domesticated ourselves by our choice of mates and by breeding out those who are most violent, or killing those who are most violent among us, like the way wolves have been domesticated into friendly dogs who sit on your lap. We may have become nicer as individuals, but we’ve also become better at organizing and using purposive violence. That’s the paradox. We’ve gotten better at making war even as we’ve become nicer people.
Nationalism can be the same as religion. You will die for something bigger than yourself.”
http://m.nautil.us/issue/94/evolving/humans-have-gotten-nicer-and-better-at-making-war
“But the groups willing to wage war have often prospered.
Up to a point. They have often got themselves into wars that have cost them dearly as well. Charles Tilly has argued very persuasively that war has helped to create bigger states that benefit those who live within their borders because they provide more stability and security. The Roman Empire was built through war, but those who lived inside the Roman Empire enjoyed a higher standard of living and could travel freely because the roads and seas were safe.
Trade could move through all the Roman territories because of the security it offered. It’s very striking that people wanted to move into the Roman Empire, not out, because life was better inside it.”
We've gotten better at making war but are making less of it. The Long Peace we are still living in has lasted from 1945 to the present day. International organizations like the WTO and the UN and the World Bank have been effective at increasing diplomacy, trade, and prosperity to the levels unseen in human history.
So there is no paradox: we have become nicer--or at least less touchy, more informal, people--while at the same time making less war, even though we have gotten better at it. Because of course we've gotten better at it. We've gotten better at everything: surgery, farming, acting (my kids on occasion when we'd watch something from before about 1980 would talk about the "time before acting was invented") and so on.
The benefits of this have not been evenly distributed, and there are certainly still places where "the past isn't dead: it isn't even past." And the long-term stability of the Long Peace is always open to question, because we are in such unprecedented territory.
But we have any number of reasons to hope, and Pinker's analysis is largely sound. There will always be a degree of violence inherent in the human condition, so pointing out that violence still exists, as Pinker's critics often do, doesn't really meet the point, which is that violence has declined. It's easy to cherry-pick dramatic counter-examples, but they don't change the sum. They are already included in it.
An interesting analysis of some of our least explicable behaviour…