Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of our Nature

and I'm I'm one of those that put my hand up and said I've never I've actually been into the building before but never into this August room so it's great to be here now I actually sat next to someone at a dinner party very recently and we managed to get into a serious argument about whether the quality of life is higher today than it was in medieval times and I had the perspective of an economist and thought the answer to this was plainly obvious then in fact I was arguing that the average person today is better off than Queen Elizabeth was in medieval times the other person was older than me and it was a historian and seemed awfully wise and I mean I didn't want to push it because as an economist we've had a very bad a few years and I I thought I'd better just not get into too much of an argument but I was delighted to find Steven Pinker kind of pick up something along the lines of that theme it's not quite the same argument but we're delighted to have him here to talk about his new book which could be called we're not as beastly as we used to be but he gave it a more poetic title the better angels of our nature the decline of violence in history and its course it causes now I'm very glad to meet Stephen tonight sometimes books do more than just entertain or enlighten they kind of change the way you think about things interestingly his book the language instinct I don't know many of you read the language instinct yeah for me it actually flipped something in my head and so suddenly instead of thinking of things like well English is one kind of language and then there are other kinds of languages that are a bit inferior or have different qualities or it's only natural that people would come and learn English because it's a learning language unlike other languages I I came around and I realized I just got it completely completely wrong there was a line in that book as well which I just I remember about how to say that young people don't have languages you know don't speak as well as we do it about is ridiculous as old spiders grumbling about how young spiders can't weave webs like the they do anymore and it's some reason it's just completely stuck with me it is what turned me into someone who sort of reused the world in a rather evolutionary a psychological kind of way and all of that but Stephen is not here to talk about the language instinct nor his other books how the mind works the blank stage slate to the stuff of thought he's going to talk about the book on violence it's already been much talked about I'm sure you'll be glad to know Stephen it's in the special Amazon media store section which means this book is getting a lot of media attention the phrase I'm sure lots of other books and authors would like to have said about theirs it's been described by the independent as a great liberal landmark and I mentioned that line about how in the language instinct he said the old spiders would be stupid to berate the young spiders they're not weaving webs like they used to and in a way that theme continues in this book with a little innate optimism about the human race and that is clearly something we can all do with at this rather depressing time so it's a great pleasure to ask Steven Pinker to address believe it or not and I know most people do not violence has been in decline for long stretches of time and we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species existence the decline of violence has not been steady it has not brought violence down to zero and it is not guaranteed to continue but I hope to persuade you that it is a persistent historical development visible on scales from millennia to years from wars and genocides to the treatment of children and animals I'm going to walk you through six major historical declines of violence identify their immediate causes that is particularly Stora chol events of the era and then try to tie them together in terms of their ultimate causes namely general historical forces interacting with human nature the first decline of violence I call the pacification process until 5,000 years ago humans everywhere lived in Anarchy without central government what was life like in this state of nature well this is a question that thinkers have speculated upon for millennia Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a state of nature the life of man is solitary poor nasty brutish and short a century later jean-jacques rousseau countered that nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state now in reality neither of these men knew what they were talking about they had no idea what life was like in a state of nature but today we can do better because there are two sources of evidence about rates of violence in non-state societies the first is forensic archaeology you can think of this as CSI Paleolithic namely what proportion of historic skeletons prehistoric skeletons have signs of violent trauma such as bashed in skulls decapitations arrowheads embedded in bones or mummies found with ropes around their necks here we see 20 of these estimates they span quite a range but they average out to 15% that is 15% of the owners of these skeletons met their end through violence and let's compare that 15% figure to those from some modern state societies here we have a bar for the United States and Europe representing all the battle deaths in the 20th century about six tenths of one percent here we have the entire world in the 20th century aggregating all the deaths from war the indirect effects of war genocides and man-made famines and it comes in at 3% and here is the bar for the world in the year 2005 you can't see it because it's less than a pixel high at three one hundredths of one percent the second source of evidence about violence in non-state societies comes from ethnographic vital statistics the wave of government that spread out from the half a dozen or so origins left a few pockets of the earth in Anarchy tribal societies such as hunter-gatherers and hunter horticulturalists and anthropologists who live with them for extended periods of time can tally the causes of death over generations here I've plotted 27 violent death rates plotted as in terms of homicides for a hundred thousand people per year their average comes out to 524 that is every year one half of one percent of the people in these societies lose their life lives to violence let's again compare this to corresponding rates for modern societies and I'm going to pick some of the most violent societies during their most violent periods in order to stack the deck against modernity so here for example we have Germany during the 20th century with its two world wars coming in at about a hundred and sixty here's Russia in the 20th century two world wars in a civil war at 150 Japan in the 20th century a world war that ended with two nuclear explosions at 40 here's the United States in the 20th century two world wars and half a dozen Foreign Wars at less than four here's the world as a whole throwing in all the direct and indirect deaths from Wars all the deaths from genocides all the deaths from man-made famines and it comes in at 60 here's the world in the Year 2005 once again the bar is less than a pixel high so not to put too fine a point on it but when it comes to life in a state of nature Hobbes was right Rousseau who was wrong the immediate cause was the rise in expansion of states leading to the various taxes or states of peace that history students read about the Pax Romana pacts Islamic ax pacts hispanica and so on the reason that the early States and empires drove down rates of violence is that tribal raiding and feuding are a nuisance to Imperial overlords it's not as if they had a benevolent interest in the welfare of their citizens but rather that just as a farmer has an incentive to prevent his livestock from killing each other namely doesn't do him any good it's a dead loss to him so the first kings and emperors tried to stamp out internecine feuding among their subjects who they would just as soon keep alive to provide them with taxes and soldiers and slaves the second historical decline of violence can be appreciated by examining this woodcut which shows a day in the life in the Middle Ages and happy the process that brought this under control has been called the civilizing process for reasons all soon explained in many parts of Europe homicide records go back centuries and historical criminologist such as Manuel Eisner have plotted them over time here ivory plotted his data from the Year 1200 to 2000 on a logarithmic scale from a tenth of a homicide per hundred thousand population per year to one to ten to a hundred and as you can see there is a massive decline in rates of homicide so that a contemporary Englishman has about 135th the chance of being murdered as his medieval ancestors this is not just a phenomenon combined confined to England but it is true for other European regions here we have Italy the Netherlands Germany and Switzerland and Scandinavia here we have the average of those five regions and for the sake of comparison I've also plotted the 524 400,000 per year average of the non-state societies this gap here I've been calling the pacification process this subsequent decline the civilizing process now I got the term from a classic book by the sociologist Norbert Elias Elias argued that in the transition from Italy the Middle Ages to modernity there was a consolidation of Central States and kingdoms out of the patchwork of Baron T's and principalities and duchies that had polka dotted Europe with it criminal justice was nationalized and the constant feuding and raiding of warlords otherwise known as Knights was tamed by the King's justice also during this transition there was a growing infrastructure of commerce instruments of money and finance that could be recognized within the borders of these newly consolidated states and technologies of Transportation and timekeeping that such as better carts and roads and and clocks that lubricated commercial exchange as a result zero-sum plunder gave way to positive some trade a point that I'll return to later in the lecture the third historical decline of violence can be appreciated by considering some of the ways that the early authorities kept peace within their territories extreme punishments such as breaking on the wheel burning a mistake clawing sawing-in-half & impalement but in a process that's been called the humanitarian revolution these barbaric practices were targeted for elimination this timeline shows the abolition of judicial torture by 16 major countries you can see that the abolitions are concentrated in the second half of the 18th century including in the united states the famous prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the 8th amendment to the constitution also abolished during this period was the profit use of the death penalty for frivolous non-lethal crimes 18th century England had 222 capital offences on the books including poaching counterfeiting robbing a rabbit warren being in the company of gypsies and strong evidence of malice in a child 7 to 14 years of age these weren't just archaic statutes in the law books but they were exuberantly applied Samuel Johnson for example writes of a 7 year old girl who was hanged for stealing a petticoat by 1861 the number of capital crimes had been reduced to 4 likewise in 17th and 18th century America the death penalty was used for theft sodomy vesti ality adultery witchcraft concealing birth slaver halt and counterfeiting this graph shows the percentage of American executions for crimes other than murder from 1650 to the present as you can see in the early year colonial and federal years a majority of the executions were for crimes other than murder more recently the only crime other than murder that's been punished by death is conspiracy to commit murder the death penalty itself of course has been abolished by most Western democracies the red timeline extending from 1775 to 2000 shows the number of European countries that still have capital punishment on the law books but the blue line shows the number of European countries that actually carried out executions and as you can see well before capital punishment was struck from the law books European countries had lost their taste for applying it the a decline that began in the 18th century and on average 50 years elapsed between the last actual execution and the time that people got around to wiping it off the law books the United States is notoriously an exception to the abolition of capital punishment in that 34 of our 50 states still have capital punishment but it's even misleading to say that they have capital punishment because the death penalty in the United States is a shadow of its former self this graph shows the number of execute American executions scaled by the population from 1625 to the present and as you can see even though capital punishment has not been abolished in the United States it is relatively rarely applied there approximately 45 executions per year in a country that has 17,000 homicides per year also abolished during the humanitarian revolution were witch-hunts religious persecution such as burning heretics at the stake dueling blood sports debtors prisons and perhaps most famously slavery slavery used to be legal and unexceptionable everywhere in the world all the ancient states practiced slavery starting in the 18th century whoops countries started to abolish slavery this is the number of abolitions a process that inexorably led to the last abolition of slavery as recently as 1980 in Mauritania but we are now living in an era unique in human history in which slave chattel slavery is illegal everywhere on the planet what were the immediate causes of the humanitarian revolution one might guess that it was the the growth of affluence it's plausible to think that as people's lives become longer and more pleasant they place out a higher value on their lives and by extension a higher value on life in general unfortunately the timing doesn't work the expansion in affluence really only began with the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century that led to the exponential growth of income in the 18th century when most of these humanitarian reforms were launched the standard of living was barely higher than what it was in the Middle Ages a more plausible explanation is that it was the rise of printing and literacy book production was the only industry that showed a rise in productivity prior to the Industrial Revolution this graph shows how between 1500 and 1700 the efficiency in book production went up by a factor of 25 a kind of early version of wars law the efficiency was put into practice and an exponentially increasing number of books were published in England in the 18th century and for the first time in history there a majority of Englishmen could read those books that is literacy exceeded 15% a 50% in the 18th century why should literacy matter well this era has also been called the Enlightenment because knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance if enough people are disabused of notions such as that Jews poison wells heretics go to hell witches cause crop failures children are possessed by the devil Africans are brutish and so on it will undermine many rationales for violence as Voltaire said during this era those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities also literacy is a technology of cosmopolitanism of one that lifts people out of their parochial station and exposes them to new people and ideas and it's not implausible that as people read fiction and history and journalism they start to put themselves in other people's shoes inhabit their minds try to imagine what life is like from their point of view and plausibly that would decrease that would increase empathy and decrease cruelty if you're in the habit of imagining what it's like to be someone else perhaps you'll take less pleasure in watching them be disemboweled the fourth historical decline of violence has been called the long peace and it speaks to the frequently made claim that the 20th century was the most violent in history however no one who makes this claim ever cites any numbers from any century other than the 20th and there is reason to doubt whether it's true take the supposedly peaceful 19th century which is often held as a invidious contrast to the 20th it is true that there were two stretches of several decades of peace in which Europe had a relatively low rate of interstate war but if you step back and you look at the century as a whole and you look at the world as a whole it's far from clear that the 19th century was so peaceful the century began with the Napoleonic Wars one of the most destructive wars in Europe with 4 million deaths the Taiping rebellion in China the most destructive civil war in history with 20 million the most destructive war in American history the American Civil War with 650,000 deaths the conquests of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa which killed 1 to 2 million people I don't want to leave any continent out so here is one from South America what sometimes considered the most destructive interstate war proportionally of all time the War of the Triple Alliance which killed 60 percent of the population of Paraguay and African slave raiding Wars and imperial wars in Africa Asia and the South Pacific whose death tolls we can't even begin to estimate also while it is undoubtedly true that World War two was the deadliest event in human history in terms of the absolute number of people that were killed there were a lot more people around in the 20th century and it's not so clear that it was the deadliest event in terms of the percentage of the world population that was affected I'm going to show you the hundred worst things that people have ever done to one another that we know of taken from a set of estimates from a man who calls himself an atrocity latest Matthew white and I've taken his figures and I've scaled them by the population of the world at the time and plotted them in a graph from 500 BCE to 2,000 seee and as you can see World War two only comes in at ninth place and World War one doesn't even make the top ten moreover history's worst atrocities are pretty evenly sprinkled over 2,500 years of human history there is a the data cloud doesn't seem to funnel down as we get to the present but presumably that's not because in ancient times they only committed truly massive atrocities where as we commit massive and medium-sized and small atrocities much more likely it's a reflection of the fact that the closer you get to the present the more complete the historical record becomes and that the smaller atrocities in ancient times were never written and remember today let's zoom in on the last 500 years period in which the the data are more complete and look at trends in great power war these are the wars that involve one of the 800-pound gorillas of the day that is the small number of nations that can project military force beyond their own boundaries and whose Wars account for a majority of all the deaths from all wars combined first graph from 1500 to 2000 shows the proportion of years the Great Powers fought each other and the line grazes the ceiling a number of times in the 16th and 17th century indicating that it used to be that the Great Powers were almost always at war with each other that's what Great Powers did if they fought other great powers but in more recent centuries the great powers are hardly ever at war with each other here we have the duration of wars involving a great power and here too the trend is downward history used to have things like the 30 Years War the eighty years war 100 Years War the 20th century had the Six Day War here's we have the frequency of wars involving a great power how often would a new war be hatched and that too shows a downward trend here however is a trend that over most of this stretch shows an upward trajectory in the opposite direction and that is once a war begins how fast does it kill people and this graph shows the number of battle deaths per nation year and it has increased over most of this period a time which weaponry and military organization became more efficient although after 1950 that trend as well does a u-turn and so we've been living through a period unique in history in which the frequency of war has gone down the duration of war has gone down and the number of deaths per year of war have all gone down if we combine these three graphs to tally the total number of deaths from all great power wars we get a zigzag which terminates in the lowest point in the entire showing that we're living through a period that has the lowest rate in of death and great power warfare in 500 years once again let's zoom in on the period closest to the present when the data become even finer grained namely the 20th century here we see that this graph aggregates deaths from all wars not just great power wars but while it's undoubtedly true that the century had two blood baths corresponding to the two world wars they were not part of an escalating trend nor even a new normal but rather something closer to a last-gasp and for the last two thirds of a century we've been living through a period where the line pretty much hugs the floor this is the period called a long piece the historically unprecedented decline in interstate war wars between two countries there were no wars between the two greatest powers of them all the United States and the Soviet Union defying every expert prediction that a third world war was inevitable no nuclear weapon has been used since Nagasaki again confounding the prediction of every expert that World War three would be a nuclear war there been no wars between any of the great powers since the end of the Korean War in 1953 there been no wars between Western European countries since the end of World War two a fact that I often have to emphasize is worth noting because we've grown up in an era where you might think well of course France and Germany you aren't gonna go to war why would they ever do something like that but needless to say this is a historically highly unusual state of affairs before 1945 Western European countries started two new wars a year for 600 years after 1945 that went to zero and there'd been no wars between developed countries the 40 countries with the highest GDP per capita again it's all too easy to take that fact for granted we've grown up in an era where wars are things that happen down in those poor primitive parts of the world but it wasn't always so it used to be the countries that were constantly at war and rich countries because they can afford better militaries can do a lot more damage well what about the rest of the world in a process that I've called the new piece the long piece is starting to spread to the rest of the world let me explain that the trends since 1946 as I've mentioned there have been fewer interstate wars all over the world however there have been more civil wars as newly independent states with inept governments defended themselves against insurgent movements and both sides were armed financed and ed gone by the Cold War superpowers let me show you these trends in a stacked layer graph where the thickness of the layer corresponds to the number of wars in a given year from 1946 to 2009 and where in this graph a war is defined as an armed conflict with a government on at least one side that results in as few as 25 deaths a year the red wedge represents the number of colonial wars a category of war that no longer exists since the European powers have given up their colonies here we have the number of interstate Wars Wars with a government on each side and that has been dwindling downward but here we have the number of civil wars both the number of pure civil wars that are fought only by forces within the country and internationalized civil wars where some external country butts in two different help the government defend itself against the rebels note though that even the number of civil wars has shown a decline since the end of the Cold War in around 1990 but the key question is which Wars kill more people the civil wars that have burgeoned or the interstate wars which have almost disappeared and this graph provides the answer here we have the number of battle deaths per conflict per year for the interstate wars which used to be very destructive but have declined with the disappearance of interstate war here we have the internationalized and the pure civil wars and what you can see is that a typical civil war kills far fewer people per year than the interstate wars that the world used to have to live with if we now combine these two figures how many wars there were with how much damn how many people were killed in each of the wars and simply add up the deaths we get a stacked layer graph that looks like this here are the deaths 4 here is the death rate from colonial wars which tapers down to nothing here we have the deaths from interstate Wars which show a bumpy but unmistakeably downward trajectory this spike includes the Korean War this one the Vietnam War this one the iran-iraq war and here we have the pure civil wars and the internationalized civil wars showing that even with the expansion in the number of civil wars the total number of people killed is far less than it used to be the first decade of the 21st century has a paper-thin laminate hugging the floor showing that the dream of the 1960s folk singers is starting to come true the world has almost put an end to war well what about genocide is often said that more people were killed in the 20th century in genocides than in wars indeed the 20th century has often been called the age of genocide once again though this is a claim based on examining only the 20th century and historians who have looked back for signs of genocide in previous centuries unanimously dismiss the claim that the 20th century was the age of genocide I'm gonna read to you from page one of one of these histories Frank chalk and Kurt Jonas ins the history of genocide genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history we know that in ancient times empires have disappeared and that cities were destroyed but we do not know what happened to the bulk of the populations involved in these events their fate was simply too unimportant when they were mentioned at all they were usually lumped together with the herds of oxen sheep and other livestock looking at the available evidence from antiquity one might've a hypothesis that most wars at that time were genocide all in character what has changed is that for the first time historians have become interested in genocide and counted as a significant historical event what are some examples well if you take old the Old Testament seriously there's a genocide every few pages commanded by God who instructs the Israelites to put every living thing to the edge of the sword every last man woman and child resulting in the extermination of the Amalekites amirite Canaanites Hittites Hittites and so on now I don't believe that these events took place there's no archaeological evidence for them on the other hand it does record a common practice of the time and it does record a common attitude at the time namely genocide is an excellent thing as long as it doesn't happen to you more historically plausible are the massacres by the Athenians in Melos the Romans in Carthage the Mongol invasions the Crusades the European Wars of Religion and the colonization of the Americas Africa and Australia in the 20th century there we do have some estimates of the trajectory of genocide and they can help speak to the commonly made assertion that the recent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda mean that the world has learned nothing from the Holocaust and that the planet is as genocidal as ever this graph puts the lie to that assertion it's undoubtedly true that there was a horrendous bloodbath in the middle decades of the 20th century but the trajectory has been bum Polly downward and once again here in the 21st century there is a relatively low rate of death by genocide by historical standards what were the immediate causes of the long peace and the new peace well three of them were thrown out by Immanuel Kant in his essay perpetual peace in 1795 excuse me which he suggested that democracy trade and an international community all changed the incentive structure to disincentivize countries from waging war more recently Bruce Russert and John O'Neill have tested Kant's hypotheses and have found that all three of these pacifying forces have increased in the second half of the 20th century and all of them are statistical predictors of peace holding everything else constant in a regression analysis here we see the number of democracies and the number of autocracies worldwide from 1946 to the present as you can see the number of democracies is increased steadily and now largely outnumbers the number of autocracies this wasn't always apparent and in the dark days of the 1970s when the trend seemed to be going in the opposite direction Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an article in which he claimed that democracy was going the way of monarchy it was a nice idea while it lasted but it was a form of government that was doomed and happily he turned out to be mistaken here we see international trade from the late 19th century to the present as a proportion of GDP which shows a huge take off in international trade following the second world war and here we have membership and intergovernmental organizations which is also increased throughout the 20th century with a bit of an acceleration after World War two finally this graph shows a different kind of international community the closest thing we have to an international police force namely peacekeeping missions such as the Blue Hen helmeted soldiers of the United Nations forces this too shows an increase particularly after the end of the Cold War both in the number of operations but more importantly in the number of soldiers making them more effective and contrary to a widespread stereotype peacekeepers really do keep the peace not always there been some conspicuous failures but far more often than when the two sides are left to fight it out to the bitter end finally there's a historical development that I call the rights revolution the targeting of violence on smaller scales develop aimed at vulnerable sectors of the population such as racial minorities women children homosexuals and animals the civil rights movement in America put an end to the practice of lynching which used to take place at a rate of a hundred and fifty a year in the late 19th century by 1950 the number had been driven down to zero since the 1990s the FBI has counted hate crime murders of blacks they were never very prevalent to begin with about five per year even that has dwindled down to one non lethal hate crimes against blacks have declined since they were first measured crimes like intimidation and assault and the kind of racist attitudes that would often license violence against racial minorities has been in steady decline here we have the results of a opinion polls that asked white Americans do you believe that black and white students should go to separate schools and would you move if a black family moved in next door and in both cases there has been a decline since the 1940s that has continued pushed the approval rate down into the single digits the rate of crank opinion and the questions are not even included in modern surveys if this is a seems to be a worldwide phenomenon this graph shows the number of countries that discriminate against ethnic minorities in their laws and that's been in steady decline the blue line shows the number of countries that have bent over backwards in the opposite direction with various affirmative action or remedial discrimination policies that favor their disadvantaged ethnic minorities in the world today more countries try to help their disadvantaged minorities than discriminate against them the women's rights movement has seen an 80 percent decline in rape in the United States since the it was first measured in the 19th nice a two-thirds decrease in domestic violence particularly directed against female victims and that I have a similar graph in the book from statistic with statistics from the UK a decline in the most extreme form of domestic violence namely ixora side the murder of a wife and Merida side the murder of a husband the rates have declined for both female victims and male victims although you'll see that the decline is steeper for male victims the women's movement has been very very good for husbands the children's rights movement has seen a steady decline in the number of American states that allow paddling and strapping and other forms of corporal punishment in school every public opinion poll in the West has shown a decline in the approval and the use of smacking and spanking and other forms of violence against children and there's been a decline in both physical abuse and sexual abuse since these practices were first measured in 1990 and a decline in the amount of violence that children perpetrated against each other and in form of fights and non-fatal crimes at school the gay rights movement has seen an increase in the number of states that have decriminalized homosexuality both nation states across the world and American States which is now at a hundred percent I every public opinion poll has shown a decrease in anti-gay attitudes such as whether people consider homosexuality to be morally wrong whether it should be criminalized and whether gay people should be denied equal opportunity hate crime intimidations directed against gay people have been in decline since they were first measured and the animal rights movement has seen a decline in hunting an increase in vegetarianism both in the UK and the US and a sharp decrease in the number of motion pictures in which animals were well all of this now raises the question why has violence declined on so many scales of time and magnitude one possibility is that human nature has changed and that somehow our taste for violence has literally been bred out of us for many reasons I consider this possibility unlikely one of them is that our children still seem to engage in plenty of violence a large proportion of two-year-olds hit bite and kick and play fighting in boys is one of the biggest and most universal gender differences grown-up little boys and little girls take enormous enjoyment in vicarious violence such as murder mysteries Greek tragedies Shakespearean dramas video games hockey and movies starring a certain Xcover nur of California and then there are homicidal fantasies a number of social psychologists have asked their subjects the following question have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like say someone who has stolen your boyfriend or girlfriend or someone who's humiliated you in public turns out that 15 percent of women and a third of men frequently fantasize about killing they don't like and more than 60% of women in three quarters of men at least occasionally fantasize about killing people they don't like and the rest of them are lying a more likely possibility is that human nature has always been extraordinarily complex and that it comprises both inclinations toward violence and inclinations that counteract them what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and that historical circumstances have increasingly favored peaceable inclinations that have been around the whole time what are the motives for violence there's exploitation the pure calculating elimination of a person that has happens to be an obstacle on the path to something that you want resulting in rape under conquest and the elimination of rivals there's dominance the drive to climb the pecking order and become alpha male played out at the level of individuals and the corresponding competition paid played out among groups for ethnic racial national or religious supremacy there's moralistic violence various kinds of revenge that demon not just permissible but mandatory to harm someone who has committed some infraction resulting in vendetta's rough justice and cruel punishments and then there are ideologies that proliferate belief systems that proliferate through a population such as militant religions nationalism Nazism and communism which license vast outlays of violence by a kind of utopian cost-benefit analysis imagine that your belief system holds out the prospect of a world that will be infinitely good forever well how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in order to bring about that infinitely perfect world well as much as you want and you're always ahead of the game also imagine that there are people who hear about your scheme for an infinitely perfect world and don't get with the program they might even oppose you and stand in the way of your bringing your your bringing your own dreams to reality well if they're the only one standing in the way of an infinitely perfect world how evil are they well you do the math and it's for this for these reasons that paradoxically it's been utopian ideologies that are often resulted in the true outliers in the history's atrocities what do we have to combat these inner demons what are the better angels of our nature well their self control the ability to anticipate the consequences of behavior and inhibit violent impulses presumably explaining why 75% of men fantasize about killing people but a needless to say a far far smaller number actually do kill people there's empathy the ability to feel others pain there's the moral sense a family of intuition some of which can actually increase violence such as tribalism authority and Puritanism but at least one of which a sense of fairness can decrease violence and then there's reason cognitive processes that allow us to engage an object objective detached analysis of how we should live our lives the crucial question then is which historical developments bring out our better angels and stay our hands before they can commit acts of bloodshed the first possibility is that Hobbes got it right when he called for a Leviathan a state and judicial system with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence which can eliminate the incentives for exploitative attack by penalizing an aggressor and therefore cancelling out his anticipated game that can calm everyone down as they come to realize that not only are you punished for aggression but so is your neighbor and outsourcing vengeance to the state can reduce the total amount of vengeance because it reduces the need for the temptation to preempt pre-emptive attack that is wiping them out before they can wipe you out it reduces the need to maintain a belligerent stance in order to deter attacks on you and it reduces the need to follow through on vengeance and to avenge blood with blood the reason that vengeance outsourced to the state is bound to be less bloody than vengeance when each side serves as judge jury and executioner is that we are all prone to self-serving biases everyone always believes that their opponents attacks are naked unprovoked aggression whereas their own attacks are justified retaliation and when you have two sides both in the throes of these self-serve illusions you can have endless cycles of vendetta and feuding some historical evidence for the effectiveness of the Leviathan comes from the civilizing and pacifying effects of states that I mentioned in the first two historical developments and the fact that you can watch this movie run in Reverse when states retreat and leave behind zones of Anarchy which are almost inevitably highly violent such as the American Wild West where the cliche was that the nearest sheriff is ninety miles away so you have to defend yourself with your own six-shooter failed States collapsed empires and mafias and street gangs that are engaged in illegal contraband trades that don't allow them to avail themselves of the dispute resolution apparatus of the state if you're dealing in cocaine and you feel you've been cheated on a business deal it's not as if you can press a lawsuit or if you feel threatened you can't call the police to to to save you and so illegal activities often give rise to zones of violent anarchy at because a credible threat of violence is one's only defense against being cheated the second possibility has been called gentle Commerce the idea is that plunder is a zero-sum game the victors gain is the vanquished Schloss whereas trade can be a positive sum game one in which everybody wins and as improving technology allows the trade of goods and ideas over longer distances among larger groups of people and at lower cost more and more of the rest of the world becomes more valuable alive than dead much has been written about the impending rivalry between the United States and China as the dominant world power but I doubt that they're actually going to fight a shooting war among other things they make all our stuff and we owe them too much money some historical evidence comes from regression analyses showing that countries with open economies and greater dependence on international trade are embroiled in fewer Wars are riven by fewer civil wars and hosts fewer genocides a third possibility first suggested by Charles Darwin but named the expanding circle by Peter Singer is that evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy but unfortunately by default we apply it only to a narrow circle of blood relatives close allies and adorable little things like babies and cute fuzzy animals but over history one can see the circle of empathy expanding to the village the clan the tribe the nation of the races both sexes children and perhaps eventually to other species this just begs the question of what caused the circle to inflate continuously and it's plausible that the technologies of cosmopolitanism that I mentioned earlier were a cause that the consumption of history literature and journalism and laboratory experiments have shown that if people adopt the perspective of a real or fictitious other person by reading or listening to their stories recounted in the first person they become more sympathetic to that individual but also to the entire category of people that that individual represents some historical evidence includes the fact that the humanitarian reforms of the 18th century were preceded by the Republic of Letters the dense interchange of information via print the second half of the 20th century with the long peace and the rights revolutions were also the age of the electronic global village and in the 20th century first century it's too early to know whether the color revolutions in the Arab Spring will have a happy ending but it's unquestionable that they were fostered by the rise of the internet and social Media finally there's the escalator of reason the possibility that the centuries-long growth of in literacy education and public discourse has encouraged people to think more abstractly and more universally that is they rise above their parochial vantage point this makes it harder to privilege their own interests over those of others it encourages them to replace a morality based on tribalism authority and Puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules it allows them to stand back and recognize the futility of cycles of violence and increasingly to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won some historical evidence includes the little known fact that abstract reasoning abilities as measured by IQ tests have increased over the course of the 20th century the so-called Flynn effect by which IQ scores have increased by 3 IQ points per decade throughout the 20th century other studies have shown that people in societies with higher levels of education and measured intelligence holding all else constant commit fewer violent crimes cooperate more and experimental games have more classically liberal attitudes such as resistance to racism and xenophobia and are more receptive to democracy 10 years down the line the final question all addresses why so many forces seem to be pushing in the same direction that is in reducing violence and I think the answer is that violence is what game theorists might call a social dilemma namely it's always tempting to an aggressor to enjoy the ill-gotten gains of picking on a victim but of course it's ruinous to the victim since in the long run anyone can be either an aggressor or a victim all parties would be better off if they could just somehow all agree to avoid violence the human dilemma is how to get the other guy to refrain from violence at the same time you do because if you unilaterally lay down your arms you could be a sitting duck one can well imagine that over the course of history human experience and human ingenuity have gradually tamed this problem just like we've dealt with other scourges of nature like pestilence and hunger and in fact all of the pacifying forces that I invoked increase the material emotional or cognitive incentives of all parties to avoid violence simultaneously well whatever the causes of the decline of violence turn out to be I think that the phenomenon has implications that are profound for one thing they call for a reorientation of our efforts toward violence reduction from a moralistic mindset to an empirical mindset perhaps instead of asking why is there war we should ask why is there peace not just what are we doing wrong but what have we been doing right because we have been doing something right and it sure would be good to know what exactly it is also I think the decline of violence calls for a reassessment of modernity of the centuries long current that has eroded family tribe tradition and religion and replaced it with individualism cosmopolitanism reason and science now everyone acknowledges that modernity has brought us certain gifts longer and healthier lives less ignorant and superstition richer experiences but there's always been a thread of nostalgia and romanticism that questions the price whether it's worth it if we have to live in fear of terrorism genocide world wars and nuclear weapons on the other hand if despite impressions the long-term trend though halting and incomplete is that violence of all kinds is decreasing I believe this calls for a rehabilitation of the ideal of modernity and progress and it's a cause for gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible thank you very much you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 31,734

Keywords: Steven Pinker, Violence, Civil Rights, Death, War, Society, Sociology, Psychology, History, Crime, Enlightenment, Population, Justice, Peace, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Id: feuq5x2ZL-s

Length: 54min 18sec (3258 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2012