Good news from the Professor

Martin Bridgstock considers a major work, which gives us all some astonishingly good news

Most of us are used to being deluged with bad news. The economy is on the slide again. Violence has burst out somewhere in the world. The environmental outlook is grim. And as for the behaviour of young people … say no more!

Now Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has produced an astonishing counter to the pervasive gloom. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a blockbuster of a book - more than 1,000 pages in all, with over 100 graphs, tables and diagrams - in which he argues that violence is in decline for the human race. On the first page of the book, he puts it like this: "Believe it or not - and I know that most people do not - violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence."

The average skeptic is likely to greet this with a snort of derision. Wasn't the most savage war in history the Second World War, which is still within living memory? And wasn't there a whole mass of other wars, massacres and atrocities in the same century? And didn't the twenty-first century open with a hideous act of terrorism, followed by many more? "How can anyone call our era peaceful?" the skeptic may demand.

Pinker is aware of all the objections. And steadily, over hundreds of pages, he produces the evidence and the arguments to meet them. He stresses that his evidence is well known to specialists in various areas of research. However, the overall news has not yet seeped out to the general population. At the end I concluded that yes, it looks very much as if violence is generally declining for the human race. And that has to be regarded as some of the best news we could possibly have.

Let's be clear that the statistics which Pinker produces are not completely consistent. Most of his charts show declines in violence, but there are sudden upturns and unexpected spikes in the data. In the Islamic world there is no sign of a decline, though it isn't getting any worse. On the other hand, Pinker doesn't just chart the statistics, he also explains the processes which underlie the trends, and which seem likely to continue to reduce the levels of violence. I will put all these in a table: they are well worth a look, and mostly self-explanatory.

What sort of processes are involved? The earliest appears in the table: the Pacification Process. This took place in prehistoric times. It involved the change in lifestyle of humans from hunting bands to settled communities. Pinker estimates that this reduced the incidence of violence by a factor of about five. There is a good deal of evidence showing that hunter-gatherer societies are appallingly violent, and so this early change in our circumstances reduced all kinds of assaults greatly. Another process, the Civilising Process, took place in Europe less than a thousand years ago. This happened when 'Leviathan,' the central authority, imposed his rule upon the fractious - and violent - local rulers. In Britain this was known as the King's Peace, and it made people's lives safer again, by a factor of perhaps 10 to 50.

More recently there have been cultural developments which have led to further reductions in violence. What Pinker calls the 'Rights Revolution' has swept through the developed world. The civil rights movement in the US was one of the first, followed by women's rights, children's rights, the rights of minorities and animal rights. Pinker makes the point that these movements imitate each other. In addition, although these movements can often be thoroughly irritating, they have greatly influenced the way we all think. Conservatives nowadays are as anti-racist as anyone else, and for good conservative reasons. The American Republican Party has started to realise that if it alienates important groups like minorities and women, it is going to lose more elections.

So gradually, and with many failures, we are becoming less and less violent. What is more, because we tend to forget what the past was like, we are mostly unaware of this enormous, wonderful trend. Pinker shows that we tend to assume that the past was less violent than the present, when in fact it was much more dangerous. And some modern events have been startlingly peaceful. The cold war looked as if it would end in a monstrous conflict which might exterminate humanity. Instead, it ended relatively peacefully. In some countries, indeed, there was no violence at all.

"Yes," I hear the skeptic complaining, "but what about World War Two? It was a modern bloodbath, and the most costly war in history." Pinker makes two points. There is a 'spike' in violence for World War Two, but it is superimposed on a long-term decline in war deaths. Second, if you allow for world population, the Second World War does not look so destructive. Pinker cites work which standardises the destructiveness of wars against the total world population at the time. The Second World War then falls to ninth place in the overall tally of murderous events. What comes top? The Chinese An Lushan Rebellion of the eighth century. Apparently an ambitious general tried to overthrow the T'ang dynasty. After a hideous civil war he was defeated, but Chinese records show that about 36 million people were killed. Scale that up to the world population in the 20th century, and you are looking at over 400 million deaths. Second, incidentally, come the conquests of Genghis Khan, with a scaled up total of 278 million deaths. Seen in this way, the past looks much darker, and the present is much less murderous than we usually suppose.

Processes

Explanation

The Pacification Process

Prehistoric. A five-fold reduction in violence caused by the move from hunter-gatherer societies to settled communities

The Civilising Process

In Europe, this took place between mediaeval times and the 20th century. The development of a centralised state led to a 10 to 50 fold reduction in violence.

The Humanitarian Revolution

In Europe, areound th time of the Enlightenment. Organised movements to stop cruel punishments, slavery, despotism, creulty to animals, etc

The Long Peace

Since World War Two. The two-thirds of a centure in which the great powers appear to have stopped making war on each other

The New Peace (Pinker's own term)

From the (peaceful) end of the Cold War in 1989 to the present. General decline in all forms of violence

The Rights Revolutions

A 'cascade' of movements from the late 1950s to the present day, opposing violence against a whole range of groups and populations

Five Inner Demons (ie processes tending to make us violent)

Aggression comes from several psychological systems which differ in what triggers them. Five of these systems are: Predatory or instrumental violence, Dominance, Revenge, Sadism and Ideology

Four Better Angels (ie processes leading us away from violence)

Humans have some motives which orient them away from violence and towards altruism and co-operation. Empathy, self-control, moral sense, reason

Historical forces favouring peaceable motives and pushing for a decline in violence

Leviathan (ie functioning governments), commerce, feminisation (ie more concern for the welfare and opinions of women) cosmopolitanism, escalator of reason.

Table: the main processes operating to increase or reduce human violence. Note: a good summary of all this appears in pagess xxii to xxv of Pinker's book.

For me, Pinker's book is most impressive because of the way that he collates huge quantities of statistics and then uses current research to explain what is going on. Our understanding of our own behaviour is not perfect, but it does enable Pinker to make sense of what is happening. He argues that there are specific psychological mechanisms which make us violent, and these have to be triggered by our environment. Over time, those triggers are becoming less frequent, and our better nature is more able to emerge.

Assuming that Pinker is right, what might we expect from the future? There are no guarantees, but if the processes continue to operate, then we can predict that world violence will continue to decline. Without changing much as individuals, we will become more aware of, and sympathetic to, the suffering of others. Wars, terrorist outrages and violent crimes will not disappear, but they will slowly become less common, and less accepted. And we mostly won't notice!

In my view, Pinker has understressed the importance of two factors. One is the development of mass electronic media which enable information to be passed around quickly and easily. The other is increased personal mobility as people move from country to country in search of work or refuge. As a result, more and more people in poor, despotic, badly-run countries know that matters can improve. In particular, they know that there are prosperous nations where the population chooses the leaders, and the people are free and not terrorised by the state. In my view, this is part of the explanation for the current Arab struggles for democracy and the campaigns in India against violent sexual assaults. These people know what we have, and want it for themselves.

What has this to do with skepticism? Several things. First, in my sceptical view, Pinker's argument must be checked. With something as important as this, we need to know that he is right. Second, Pinker makes the point that skeptical thought flourishes in the kind of environment which is spreading across the world. In less advanced countries, argument and criticism is not acceptable, and can lead to violence. In fact, open debate is the cornerstone of freedom, and the world is slowly realising this. As it does so, the scope for skepticism as a worldwide movement will increase. More and more people will be open to skeptical arguments.

Just possibly Pinker's book is the first truly great work of the 21st century. It can change our whole vision of history, and suggests a future world which will be better for everyone.