In the IGCSE English language paper, the question was posed as to what historical time period we would most like to live in, were we given the choice. For various reasons, I maintained strongly at the time that the present was mostly definitely the place to be. I had only suspicions about an overly romanticised past to go on at the time, but now I can safely claim that I have all the empirical backing that I could need.
In Steven Pinker’s latest tome, ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’, he seeks to lay out all the evidence for the historical declines of physical violence in all its forms, encompassing everything from wars and genocides, to infanticide and spanking, before taking some time to examine the causes of these declines by delving into the worlds of neurology and psychology.
With 700 pages of text, and a further 100 of notes, the volume is an imposing one. It is hard not to be intimidated, when starting a new chapter, you look ahead and realise there are over 100 pages of information left to go through on the subject.
It is a testament to Pinker’s skill as a writer that such a hefty subject never descends into dull academic prose or incomprehensible jargon. Instead we are given sentences that flow easily, spoken with a voice that neither patronises nor simply lectures. Nothing is dumbed down either. Pinker has no hesitation in explaining concepts of proability, randomness, logarithmic scales and the like, in order to give readers all the necessary tools to understand the various graphs and patterns under examination. The comprehensibility provides no clue as to the grand scope the book is trying to capture as a whole. Were you to give any small portion to any interested layperson, they would most likely be able to read, understand and enjoy it without any great difficulty.
It is no great challenge to stay engaged either. The book’s length arises due to the vast material it attempts to cover, and not in any way because the author feels the need to languish on certain points for undue lengths of time. The experience whilst reading it is more of gaining rewarding insights on every page, with new ideas being introduced and scrutinised at considerable pace.
Though not set out chronologically, many of the chapters and their subsections have a natural arc to them, taking the reader on small journeys through different spheres and aspects of violence. But the presentations do not rely so much on the facts and dates,as the lively spirit of enquiry and questioning that transform each phenomenon into a mystery in need of an explanation.
One of the reoccurring events throughout the book is where Pinker takes some commonly held piece of folk wisdom, and turns a critical eye to it. He has already taken on the doctrine of the Noble Savage, the romantic idea that man in his natural state is a peaceful being, before in his previous (similarly eloquent) book, The Blank Slate, and here, he brings out the data to back him up. Hobbes was right when he called life in non-state societies ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’ Our best estimates put the average rate of deaths from warfare in these societies at 15%, dwarfing even the death rates in the first half of the 20th century. Which leads on to probably the most surprising aspect of the book. The century preceding our own is always looked back on with a great deal of shame. We seem to consider the most disgraceful period of our species’ history. However, if we try to ignore our tendency to give greater weight to the more recent history that comes more readily to mind, and correct for population growth (so that we can see what the chances are that we would have died had we lived in that time period), we find there are atrocities that we have barely heard of that prove us unable to make those kinds of judgements. The An Lushan revolt anyone? A Chinese war from the 8th century that tops the list of deaths corrected for population size, with 429 million. You need not have too much confidence in the number to appreciate that older civilizations were just as able to wage destructive wars. In fact, the second world war comes only ninth in the list of population corrected death tolls, and there were a total of nine events which preceded the first world war and caused more deaths than it, uncorrected for population.
It is undeniable that the destruction wreaked by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot was of incredible scale, but wars have a large element of randomness to them that can affect their length and intensity dramatically. It is worth remembering that a century consists of 100 years, not just 50. The unprecedented peace that emerged after the horrors of the world wars helps support the notion that what we saw was a freak accident, caused by an unfortunate mixture of the right men with the right ideology. Such events can happen, but they do not override the longer term trends which show that wars have declined in frequency and duration, as have genocides.
One of the points that is perhaps simpler to grasp is that there is no truth to the nuclear weapons as deterrence argument. History has run the experiment, and the results show that non-nuclear countries have no problem engaging with nuclear ones (see Argentina and the UK, or the Vietnam and the US). Anyone familiar with the story of Alfred Nobel may well have been able to make this prediction, but it is heartening to see that the current peace does not rely on such fragile foundations. Indeed, nuclear weapons seem to be gaining more of a taboo status, with many countries having halted their exploration into the possibility of acquiring them. Since 1964, four countries may have gained weapons, but an equal number went the other way and decided they were no longer worth having.
What then are some actual reasons for the Long Peace we have been enjoying? The presence of a Leviathan, a state which has a monopoly on violence, and can therefore intervene in disputes as a disinterested third party, thereby preventing escalation, was one of the first drivers towards peace. The appearance of trade and commerce, which not only turned a zero-sum fight over resources into a positive-sum game where co-operation became profitable, but also put people from different cultures together in a situation where they needed to rely on and trust each other, also played a major role.
Equally interesting is to see the things which we can say do not lead to decreases in violence, most notably religion. The European Wars of Religion are enough to do away with that claim, but the case against religion is even stronger. The types of morality valued by religion put much focus on notions of in group loyalty, and deference to authority, often alongside taboos to ensure ‘purity’ is maintained. The societal trends that underlay the rights revolutions were based on a different aspect of morality altogether that sprung from the Enlightenment thinkers including Hume, Kant and Voltaire, which places greater value on the autonomy of the individual and fairness.
The two penultimate chapters in the book examine the psychology that is involved when humans commit evil, or allow us to act morally. After the numerous graphs and extreme rigor of the preceding seven chapters, it is sometimes possible to look at a given result and remain sceptical. In a sense, Pinker has created a problem for himself by setting such a high standard of evidence in the first portion of the book, which becomes impossible to keep up once he begins to need to extrapolate from lab studies in the field of neuropsychology. Nevertheless, he keeps the stream of interesting ideas coming, continuing his relentless process of ruthlessly testing the theories against the evidence to see what is left standing at the end.
On the subject of evil, his most important contribution consists not of any one particular idea, but simply the attitude that calling something pure evil will not suffice. To do so is to see everything from the side of the victim, and to ignore any insights that can be gained by examining the mind of the aggressor. After all, it is a tiny number that can commit a heinous action and freely admit afterwards that they are evil people. Everybody holds a positive conception of themselves, and the puzzle is how someone can maintain that belief after committing horrendous acts.
It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly given the range and extent of the violence we know to have taken place in our history, that we are not short of excuses. A trip into our evolutionary pasts reveals rage circuits, which we can now flip on and off in cats at will, and explains why actions such as infanticide, and mental states such as self-deception, would have been selected for. And this is before getting onto more obvious motives such as gaining dominance, exacting revenge, or pursuing an ideology where any harm can be justified by the infinite good that lies at the end. To understand all is not necessarily to forgive all, but to condemn all surely leads to understanding little.
Pinker gets the chance to burst another of our bubbles in the chapter on moral psychology when he comes to the subject of empathy. Much trumpeted as a kind of skill that needs to be developed, or an attitude that requires cultivation, it does not really have that much going for it in terms of being able to explain, or aid, declines in violence. For one thing, it already supposes we care for the person we are empathising with. If we don’t, empathy can simply allow us to take pleasure from their pain. More importantly, it is hardly practical to make people behave better towards each other by getting them to constantly imagine themselves in different positions. As Pinker says of Jesus’s command to love both our enemies and neighbors so that we won’t kill them, ‘But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them.’
Which is why a better candidate to explain our moral improvements lies in the Flynn effect, which shows that IQ has been rising by about 3 points per decade, and in one area in particular: abstract reasoning. Ever since I had first heard of this phenomenon, I had always found it too incredible to be true. There just didn’t seem to be the necessary selection pressures in place for such a change to occur. Here, Pinker offers the most plausible interpretation of the results I’ve come across so far.
If the increase is not due to genetic factors (it’s too fast for this to be possible), then there must be a cultural shift occurring. Pinker proposes that our move into an increasingly scientific society has led to us being more comfortable dealing with hypotheticals, and therefore more abstract reasoning in general. And this is important to the question of violence, because improved ability in this area could allow us to more easily step outside of our own personal worlds, and look upon situations from the perspective of an outsider. That would allow us to see more easily that if we wanted to be treated fairly, we need to treat others fairly, and if we become better at assuming the perspective of a different race or gender, we will start to see that we cannot justify differential treatment.
Even though I am far from certain that the above accurately describes the pattern of events, the theory is intriguing, and speculation over how the spread of books allowed us to have insights into the minds of other people seem likely to me to be close to the mark.
A feeling that came to me often when reading the book was one of amazement that all the events being described were most likely carried out by people genetically identical to the humans around today. That we have the capacity to form societies where your chances of dying in war are 25%, to start famines that kill 40 million people and to run systems of chattel slavery that kill 18 million, whilst depriving many more of their rights and chance of a good life, leaves me unsure what to think. You need only go back a few generations to find prominent intellectuals whose views we would consider, in Pinker’s words, ‘morally retarded’. Émile Zola, a French writer at the end of the 19th century said, ‘It is only warlike nations who have prospered: a nation dies as soon as it disarms itself.’ Winston Churchill declared himself to be, ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.’ The level of moral progress we have made, particularly in these last few decades, is not something to be underestimated, and is a fact deserving of wider recognition.
The natural question screaming out to be asked at the end of the book is will the trend continue. Are there any more rights revolutions left to come? How much more non-violent can Denmark really get? Is it all diminishing returns from here, or are slides backwards still possible? Pinker can at times come across as hyper-averse to making predictions, and if he won’t go out on a limb, I certainly don’t want to either. An irritating part of my conscience is warning me that the future will look back harshly on our current treatment of animals, but to speculate any further is surely a fools’ games.
It is a rare thing to emerge the other end of a book knowing that you will never quite see the world in the same light again. Considering that the book does not seek to give out advice, and avoids making predictions, the fact that it can have such a transformative effect on your worldview is all the more surprising. In the same way that it is impossible to learn about evolution without undergoing a complete shift in perspective, it is similarly impossible to know about the profound changes that have taken place throughout our history, without feeling a new sense of gratitude and humility.
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