TheAgitator.com
The Slow Death of Violence
Monday, August 24th, 2009A fascinating, counterintuitive article by Steven Pinker on the slow decline of of violence over the ages:
Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that “war is not an instinct but an invention.”
But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth…
When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is…
When the criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured the records of every village, city, county, and nation he could find, he discovered that homicide rates in Europe had declined from 100 killings per 100,000 people per year in the Middle Ages to less than one killing per 100,000 people in modern Europe.
And since 1945 in Europe and the Americas, we’ve seen steep declines in the number of deaths from interstate wars, ethnic riots, and military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, the number of battle deaths has fallen from 65,000 per conflict per year to less than 2,000 deaths in this decade. Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, we have seen fewer civil wars, a 90 percent reduction in the number of deaths by genocide, and even a reversal in the 1960s-era uptick in violent crime.
There’s a terrific book by political scientist James L. Payne (who’s also mentioned in Pinker’s article) called A History of Force that documents all of this in much more detail.
In his excellent book “The Third Chimpanzee” Jared Diamond discusses our place in the animal kingdom, and seeks understanding of our behaviours by looking at the chimpanzee and bonobo for similarities. He finds many, including genocide, where one tribe of chimps killed another off entirely, for no apparent reason. Violence is, in fact nature, not nurture.
macro view perhaps. micro it seems like the violence has to be more frequent today in America than say, a hundred years ago, especially when you consider the increase in state violence and imprisonment against the people. I ain’t got no stats but it seems like that anyway.
Does anyone know where he pulled that number of 100 million from? It seems like he was definitely low balling how many people where killed by other people during the 20th century. If he only counted war that might be accurate but just between Soviet Russia and China’s collectivization the numbers reach roughly 70-80 million killed by government action. I highly doubt 20million people died in both World Wars (I know more then that died), or is he not counting domicile?
So, we’re due for a real kill-off of massive proportions? Pessimistic today as I have a bad case of the Mondays.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Seems pretty friggin’ obvious actually, though those numbers are even more dramatic than I expected. As some of the free staters up in NH would say, it’s the “peaceful evolution to a voluntary society”, and it’s yet another rebuke to Jefferson’s “the natural course is for liberty to yield…” statement. No, the natural course of things is for people to become more peaceful, which is the same thing as liberty expanding. Libertarianism being for, as Leonard Reed put it, “anything that’s peaceful”
It’s fascinating that as governments have gotten larger, more monolithic, more powerful, violence has decreased.
JS-
While arguably the amount of coercion going on has increased, even the state is less overtly, physically violent than it used to be, relying more on threats and “voluntary” compliance than it used to. We don’t have public executions, or their close cousin lynchings, any more for one example. As a per capita deal, I doubt the number of people being extremely, violently victimized (arbitrarily defined as bad enough for Radley to report on) by the state today is higher than the times when the police had no qualms about turning a gatling gun on a crowd. Perhaps the “milder” forms of coercion, that are today more common, balance out, but I have no idea how you could measure that since the study just counted the number of homicides. And regardless, it’s important to offer some rebuke to those who want to portray the golden age of liberty as being somehow in the past. It’s still an unknown ideal, and pointing to 1776 or the mythically laissez-faire 1800s or the 1950s as being better than today rightfully turns people off to your message, because of the so many obvious ways that’s not true.
What’s undeniable is that private violence, true criminality outside of those with state-issued costumes, is at an historic low. And remember, government is always a lagging indicator…
What’s happened is that the violent thugs have congregated in government, and the rest of us are too cowed to risk being assaulted by them. We simply do as we’re told.
Naturally there was more violence before the thugs organized.
Daniel Quinn explores this idea quite a bit in his books. His conclusion is not that we’re more or less violent, but our violence is different.
It’s a question of eradication versus, as Quinn put it, erratic retaliation. We now wage war to eliminate others, versus waging war to show others that we won’t be messed with without consequences.
Nature is a violent and cold place. We would love to forget that as humans, but we really can’t.
…there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is…
Also, why would that be horrible? It’s the way of nature, also called competition.
This makes perfect sense in that current “wars” (not really wars by World War standards), small time casualties make big news.
This is not to say that such tragedies are any less meaningful to those affected, but our current thinking is such that a dozen killed in action is news, where in WWII, such casualties would only make the news by their lack of severity.
I thought everyone knew this?
That Rousseau was wrong? (Thoreau and a few idiot greens aside)
And since 1945 in Europe and the Americas, we’ve seen steep declines in the number of deaths from interstate wars, ethnic riots, and military coups, even in South America.
OTOH that could just reflect a shift in theater.
The decline in the rate of death by violence can be attributed to the advancement of the science of controlling the citizenry by deception as perfected by institutions such as religion and politics. Oh, and the invention of the taser, of course.
I’m shocked that anyone is surprised by that study.
Of course there’s an inverse correlation between social stability and violence. If you bring kids up in a world where upheaval is routine and the need for physical self-defence at a moment’s notice is a given then they’re going to be more violent.
It’s like being surprised that the US is better at baseball than countries that don’t teach their kids to play baseball. Wow!
Pinker doesn’t have much good to say about the anarchists…
#14 and #15 are the highest contributing reasons to decline of violence. Unfortunately, there is a direct correlation between “societal peace” and “subservient/compliant” behavior. Soon we shall reach nirvana, with most of society being pliant chattel, praying to our masters The State due to fear of the strong hand of The Law correcting our abhorrent behavior to wish for freedom. Those that don’t fall in line will be renditioned to the nearest reeducation camp.
Well, it makes sense, then, that the world is so overpopulated. Maybe the killing rates in the past (15-60% chance of being killed by someone in your tribe) kept the numbers low.
I’m surprised nobody has quoted Hobbes on the natural state of makind before the advent of central government.
As you may have surmised, I’m no anarchist.
Total bullshit.
What is seen and not seen.
The violence is still there — it is a constant in human behavior. It’s just been channeled into less overt means like voting and taxes. And because there is such a drastic imbalance of power between the State and the individual due to technological advancement of weaponry, the ability to resort to defensive violence by the individual has been practically eliminated — at the cost of freedom.
Humanity is just as violent as it has ever been. If it is not manifesting itself in open warfare, it is because the violence is being contained behind a dam of Statist oppression. I wonder how sturdy that dam is?
What is seen and not seen.
Is the threat of violence violent?
If one lives in a world where humans no longer maim or kill one another but this is due to the threat of violence by the State and results in total lack of individual freedom, is this desirable?
#16 Spleen: “Pinker doesn’t have much good to say about the anarchists…”
Not many do. No offense to the anarchists on this forum, but true, principled anarchists are few and far between. And people recognize this. Many who call themselves anarchists in the U.S. are “communists in anti-authoritarian drag,” as one commenter called the anti-globalization clique. And then you have the primitivists (the Unabomber is an extreme example) and others who seek to bring about their “anarchy” by any (violent) means necessary. So much for the voluntary society! On the Right side of the divide, there are anarcho-capitalists, whom the Left would call “anarchists who require a police force to protect them from their slaves/serfs/workers.” And the battle between “anarchists” rages on! Who would want to get mixed up in that? I’ll settle for being a plain old liberal myself. ZZZZZZZZZ.
Outside of the college campus, punk clubs, and internet forums, few call themselves anarchists, and even fewer understand the meaning of the term. Voluntary cooperation should be the usual condition for society, but this ideology always leaves one with more questions than answers. This is why anarchism is not seen as a viable alternative to many outside of a small circle of devotees.
Well summarized Helmut. And that’s coming from a principled anarchist.
The only practical hope for the anarchist is in solitude. Anarchy disappears with the joining of two humans in society.
With that admission comes the uncomfortable fact that humans in society are forever doomed to a violent existence.
I guess the only question after that is who is to be master, who is to be slave.
ZZZZZZZZZZ.
Thank you, Cynical. The fact that anarchists like you and non-anarchists like me can have civil conversations on this blog and share ideas without demonizing each other tends to give me hope.
I don’t think we have to be “doomed to a violent existence.” That does not mean that some people won’t be violent. I think we can agree that a small number of people in our society will always feel the need to express themselves through violence. They will need to be repelled, and that is one reason I continue to work in the field of protective services. Those of us who prefer reason over force can try to set a positive tone in our homes, workplaces, social settings, etc. We can also promote changes that will reduce violence and undue coercion in our society (I realize you and I will disagree on some of the specific remedies) and give more power to individuals and less to governments OR employers. Start from the grassroots and you never know what new forms of social organization may emerge.
I love how the obvious is stated here with such a sense of discovery! Liberals are so cute; I just want to pinch their simple little cheeks until my fingers hurt!
Oh, btw, Pinker gets the definition of anarchy all wrong with the classic fallacy of conflation with chaos, as evidenced by this passage:
“These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence. States can inflict disinterested penalties [LOFL!!!] that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Manuel Eisner attributes the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.”
The last sentence is as close to a definition of Statism as an anarchist could possibly construct.
He is closer to a definition of anarchy with this passage:
“A third theory, championed by journalist Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.”
That is as close to a summation of free-market anarchy as one will find in the mainstream, yet Pinker doesn’t even understand what he’s writing about.
I respect Pinker for his work in linguistics, I own a copy of “The Language Instinct.” But he’s no expert on political systems. Oh I suppose there’s no harm in theories that can’t be conclusively proved one way or the other. Very convenient for him.
Good ol’ “anarchy” in Alabama:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090824/ap_on_fe_st/us_odd_feuding_families
Oh shit, wait. Alabama’s a State, right? Forget about the anarchy remark then.
“When the criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured the records of every village, city, county, and nation he could find, he discovered that homicide rates in Europe had declined from 100 killings per 100,000 people per year in the Middle Ages to less than one killing per 100,000 people in modern Europe.”
Yeah, the old Soviet Bloc had very low homicide rates. As others have stated the reduction in citizen violence(as opposed to State violence) is the result of the rise of repressive and centralized government.
But I still wonder how accurate and complete those homicide stats from the Middle Ages are. I have some Michael Bellesiles induced skepticism about claims like these.
The Second Congo War (1998-2003) resulted in the deaths of an estimated 5.4 million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
A lot of the post-1945 reductions in war deaths no doubt resulted from the restraining effect of nuclear weapons.
Even without considering nukes Europe became very understandably averse to war after the 70 or so million deaths and the destruction of cultural patrimony resulting from the two World Wars. France may be the major exception but they fought their colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria with gung-ho volunteers, mercenaries and colonial troops. Conscripts were kept out of combat roles.
I think a lot of people here are missing the point by trying to draw a correlation between state power and violence between humans. It seems to me that the point here is that violence overall–not specifically violence as the results of war–is at an all-time low. Personally, I can see it through three generations of my family. My grandfather told all sorts of crazy stories about the constant violence he and his brothers encountered growing up in Chicago (and that’s taking into account the fact that the elderly have a propensity to exaggerate). My father tells similar stories, though they were less frequent and less violent. By the time you get to me, I think I may have punched three people in my entire life (the last incident being early high school). The common thread? My family’s steady economic advancement. I’ll give another example. Poor neighborhoods are almost universally more violent than affluent ones. Simply put, this is the most peaceful time, historically, because it’s the most prosperous time. Even if you apply it at the macro level, you see that wealthy countries are much less prone to war than poor ones. To ascribe this phenomenon to strong statist governments is to miss the point. The Soviet Union had the strongest statist government and how did that work out for the citizens, violence-wise?
Cynical in CA,
“What is seen and not seen.
Is the threat of violence violent?”
This. Ironically, the overwhelming power of the threat of state violence that perpetually hangs over all our heads is so powerful that it is much less visible than in the past. The modern state can bring such overwhelming violence to bear that it almost never has to actually do so; the threat is enough. This allows the primary aggressors in society to loot everyone else without needing to do anything as crude as sack cities or hang rebels in the town square or club people over the head. I suppose that’s progress of a sort, in the same way that muggers and rapists who leave their victims alive are preferable to those that don’t, but it’s not nonviolent.
Addendum to my last post: A limitation of violence statistics is that they only include people directly killed by the state, and leave out people who died of other immediate causes because of state coercion- the thousands of sick people who die every year because of FDA regulations that deny them the use of effective drugs, for instance. Not as dramatic as cavemen bludgeoning each other, but just as dead.
I believe Rummel’s work explodes the empirical basis for Pinker’s claim. And, as icr said (comment #28) – I’m very curious about where they get the information.