If I ruled the world: Steven Pinker

We should stop idealising the past and appreciate the present. The world is much less violent than it used to be

by Steven Pinker / October 19, 2011 / Leave a comment

My first edict as global overlord would be to impose the following rule on pundits: No one may bemoan a decay, decline, or degeneration without providing (1) a measure of the way the world is today; (2) a measure of the way the world was at some point in the past; (3) a demonstration that (1) is worse than (2).

This decree would, first of all, eliminate tedious jeremiads about the decline of the language. The genre has been around for centuries, and if the doomsayers were correct we would now be grunting like Tarzan. But not only do we see vast amounts of clear and competent prose in everyday outlets like Wikipedia and Amazon reviews, but a gusher of superb writing appearing daily, as anyone who has lost a morning to sites like The Browser and Arts and Letters Daily can attest.

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. A century ago editors issued fatwas against barbarous innovations such as “standpoint,” “bogus,” “to run a business,” and “to quit smoking.” Decades ago they fulminated against “six people” (as opposed to persons), “fix” (for repair), and the verbs “to contact” and “to finalise.” Today this linguistic contraband is unexceptionable, if not indispensable. Also vilified is the seepage of new technological jargon into the language (leverage, incentivise, synergy). Yet old technological jargon (proportional, placebo, false positive, trade-off) has made it easier for everyone to think about abstract concepts, and may even have contributed to the Flynn effect, the relentless increase in IQ scores during the 20th century.

And speaking of technology, today’s Luddites have a short memory. Parents who lament the iPods and mobile phones soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their bedroom telephones and transistor radios. The abbreviated prose in tweets and instant messages is no more likely to corrupt the language or shorten attention spans than the telegrams, radio ads, and advertising catchphrases of yesteryear. Email can seem like a curse, but who would go back to stamps, phone booths, carbon paper, and piles of phone messages? And now that dinner companions can fact-check any assertion on an iPhone, we are coming to realise how many of our everyday beliefs are false—a valuable lesson in the fallibility of memory.

But nowhere is the confusion of a data point with a trend more pernicious than in our understanding of violence. A terrorist bomb explodes, a sniper runs amok, an errant drone kills an innocent, and commentators ask “What is the world coming to?” Yet they seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?”

By just about any quantitative standard, the world of the past was much worse. The medieval rate of homicide was 35 times the rate of today, and the rate of death in tribal warfare 15 times higher than that. Collapsed empires, horse-tribe invasions, the Crusades, the slave trade, the wars of religion, and the colonisation of the Americas had death tolls which, adjusted for population, rival or exceed those of the world wars. In earlier centuries the wife of an adulterer could have her nose cut off, a seven-year-old could be hanged for stealing a petticoat, a witch could be sawn in half, and a sailor could be flogged to a pulp. Deadly riots were common enough in 18th-century England to have given us the expression “to read the riot act,” and in 19th-century Russia to have given us the word pogrom. Deaths in warfare have come lurchingly but dramatically downward since their postwar peak in 1950. Deaths from terrorism are less common in today’s “age of terror” than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, with their regular bombings, hijackings, and shootings by various armies, leagues, coalitions, brigades, factions and fronts.

And no, I am not hypocritically tilting at my own “disturbing new trend.” In 1777 David Hume wrote, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature.” A century before him, Thomas Hobbes identified its source: “Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.” People also blame the present out of historical ignorance and statistical illiteracy, and because they mistake changes in themselves—the responsibilities of adulthood, the vigilance of parenthood, the diminishments of ageing—with changes in the world.

Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young. And it corrodes an appreciation of the institutions of modernity such as democracy, science, and cosmopolitanism which have made our lives so much richer and safer.

Steven Pinker is professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes” (Allen Lane)

IF YOU LIKED THIS, WHY NOT TRY:

Familiar future – Steven Pinker writes that the future is constrained by human nature

Human conditions – John Gray is a tragic fatalist. Steven Pinker believes in a progressive science of humanity. Kenan Malik asks, are either of them right?

Delusions of peace – Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray

Sell Descartes, buy Spinoza – Investors, take note: this Dutch rationalist is a hot stock, writes Rebecca Goldstein

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Dylan Nickelson
October 21, 2011 at 13:24
"Collapsed empires, horse-tribe invasions, the Crusades, the slave trade, the wars of religion, and the colonisation of the Americas had death tolls which, adjusted for population, rival or exceed those of the world wars." Professor Pinker, where did that "...rival or..." come from? With all sincerity, Dylan Nickelson.
Laurie McGinness
October 24, 2011 at 08:36
Of course, pleasing as the statistics are, it is worth remembering we still live in an age which, in a few minutes of madness, could render them out of date. The weapons of mass destruction remain and the notion that it cannot happen is as dangerous as it is naive, given that the largest nuclear arsenal is owned by the most warlike nation on Earth. Not to mention the collection of raving lunatics currently in serious running for their presidency. Let's hope the trend line holds!
Ephemeralrant
October 24, 2011 at 22:41
"We should stop idealising the past and appreciate the present. The world is much less violent than it used to be" -------------------------------------- Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 in a population of 100,000 would mean 950 deaths per year in that entire population, or 0.95% out of the total.During ancient times and the Middle Ages (Which is from where the word directly originates), the crude death rate was about 40 deaths per year per 1,000 people.Today, in places such as Swaziland it is still estimated to be as high as 30.83. This is not a globally representative figure. Yet, Mortality IS decreasing Metcalfe's law – In communications and network theory, states that the value* of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users* of the system. Framed by Robert Metcalfe in the context of ethernet. Could this be applied to the human network from beginning to present to explain 'economy' of scale linked with it's growth and expansion(network optimization due to increasing connectivness/information transduction = decreased mortality, increased volition/agenic behaviours and propensities) Maybe the etmology of the word violence is related to the word violate which somewhat denotes transgression, impedence or impetuosity beyond/against that which is expected or is more probable (in what is a complex system or network) Violence could be related to the violating of that which is highly probable (Latin violentia - 'impetuosity', impetus - drive/will...). However violence is something nostic and so is the highly probable without quantification and linear historical narrative which are linked to their own quantum modes of representation and inference. "Volition" or will is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. "Violence" could be related to the frustration of volition (similar derivative)... “…there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it (violence): the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking (Zizek, Violence 3-4).” Violence is a distractor Violence is not important “…the task is precisely to change the topic (Zizek, Violence 11)…” 'We should stop idealising the past and appreciate the present' (Pinker) Violence comes in many tacit forms 1)subjective violence: “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent (Zizek, Violence 1).” 2)objective violence symbolic violence of language: “…its imposition of a certain universe of meaning (Zizek, Violence 2).” 3)systemic violence: “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems (Zizek, Violence 2).” Violence is the subjective, objective and systemic frustration of volition Violence is the subjective, objective and systemic rhizome of volition (perhaps their common derivitive assumes potentiality for the organic growth of this rhizomatic relation). Metcalfe's law posits the exponential aggregation of complexity in a system of units/members/users as units/members/users increases. This complexity is a square exponential of each aggregated unit/member/user. Each unit/member/user apprehends a similar infinite such is the complexity of the system. Sometimes less probable effects are required in this system. systemic violence “…has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what may otherwise seem to be “irrational” explosions of subjective violence (Zizek, Violence 2).” These 'explosions' or 'peaks' in a complex system are linked to systemic violence as a 'rhizomatic'(Deleuze and Guattari) phenomena which obstructs the direct volition of "the one"(Deleuze and Guattari)The one is the unitarian network in itself and for itself, though separate from the 'rhizome'. This is a necessary paradox characteristic of rhizomatic thinking which precedes further quantification. Anyway, the sublation of violence in language and understanding is saticficed to fit the regulation of volition,chaotic synchronisation and casscading of the "violent" subjective,objective and systemic rhizome which will augment or diminish the volition of "the one" in such a way which may leave us vulnerable to extenuating volition (exogenous) which the human network in toto will be weakened by if the rhizome part of a ribosome of multiplicity which does not apprenhend the unitarian rhizomatic nature of the ribosome or does so with ambiguity or lack of volition as defined by the one and their shared reprentation of the infinite I infer thus through the coincidence of opposition or what many call the tao/chi etc...
Granite Sentry
October 25, 2011 at 03:01
No question Prof. Pinker is right, but I wonder if the doom-saying accelerated once the hard Left, with its focus on replacing Western Democracy with its own model, achieved critical mass in the early part of the last century?
Jacquie Green
October 25, 2011 at 15:02
Also see Louis CK's Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk for a comedian's version...
Alex
November 1, 2011 at 20:05
The desire for everything to be measurable and so every claim refuted or supported by data is understandable, but sadly a flawed wish. Violence is inherently an abstract concept. The idea it can be reduced to a number(s) makes about as much sense as claiming that "Envy has quantifiably increased". One can make an argument for such a claim, but it can never be objectively scientific - only subjective. By hiding the subjectivity of his claim, Pinker is hiding his ideology. "Deadly riots were common enough in 18th-century England to have given us the expression "to read the riot act,"" No, state repression of democratic and workers' movements was common enough then that that expression was invented. "and in 19th-century Russia to have given us the word pogrom" And 20th century Germany gave the word "Holocaust" new meaning. Note how none of your examples say anything about non-Western societies. Convenient I would say.
Aldebaran
January 20, 2012 at 15:31
An excellent demolition of Pinker's book appears here: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136957/timothy-snyder/war-no-more?page=show
Ekes
January 30, 2012 at 08:22
@Aldebaran - the piece you link to is actually a very poor piece of work, which totally misrepresents Pinker's book. For example, it implies that he argues in favour of libertarianism, which is total nonsense. And Snyder's "scientific" objections to Pinker's data are just head-slappingly wrong, as any numerically literate person could recognise. @Alex - Pinker's book deals with non-Western examples in depth. And no, "violence" is not an abstract concept: it's perfectly possible to define carefully what you mean by it. And Pinker means physical violence - murder and rape and so on - rather than more subjective interpretations such as economic inequality or false consciousness.
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