I’m just back from an extremely enjoyable family vacation in sunny Fuerteventura, which also means that I am swamped by a zillion work-related things that need to be attended to asap. I also want to resume blogging, and have a few posts already lined up in my head (in particular, one on the ‘climate for women’ discussion which has re-emerged), but where do I find time for all this? (One almost regrets going on holiday and forgetting about it all for a while, given the harsh conditions upon return!)
But anyway, today I came across two interesting links, via the New Scientist twitter feed, and thought it might be a good topic to resume blogging. As it turns out, Steven Pinker’s most recent interest is the history of violence, which he takes to be a privileged window for his long-standing interest in human nature (broadly construed). In his new book The Better Angels of our Nature, he claims that there has been a significant decrease in homicides and violent deaths over the centuries: ‘Humans are less violent than ever’. This becomes particularly clear if the death tolls of historical occurrences of horror are estimated on the basis of the human population at the time, and what the proportion would mean in terms of the current human population in the world. This was done by finding the per-capita death rate at the midpoint of the event's range of years, based on population estimates from McEvedy and Jones.
Here is an interactive chart plotting the 20 most gruesome events in human history; WW II, for example, in spite of its very high absolute death toll, comes only in 11th position. These data lead Pinker to conclude that we are now much less violent that we have been in the past, as he argues in the new book. I have not read the book; all I’ve seen so far are these two links from New Scientist, and I’ve not always been positively impressed by Pinker’s earlier work. Nevertheless, this strikes me as an interesting, potentially illuminating way to look at human nature, which deserves further scrutiny (in particular, it connects with John Protevi’s interest in the ‘philosophy of killing’, as he puts it). In any case, it’s a nice thought at the start of a new week (especially just back from a vacation!) that we humans may not be as evil as is often thought, or in any case that we are getting less evil.
UPDATE: Perhaps I should highlight this passage:
Feminisation is another reason for the decline. As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures men are the more violent gender.
This is a well known fact, as there are a number of recorded situations of extreme violence which were effectively countered by female intervention (in some cases, women simply going in the battlefield and standing between their group and the enemy's; this strategy has actually brought a few local wars to an end). Indeed, the Nobel Peace Prize of this year awarded to Leymah Gbowee is the recognition of the crucial role of the womens' movement led by her to end civil war in Lyberia (see also this five-part documentary on women, war and peace recently aired).
I would only like to suggest that the comment to the effect that 'men are the more violent gender' need not be given an essentialist, testosterone-related reading; this known fact may just as well be a historical and cultural product, which also means that it may not be irreversible. In fact, Pinker himself (who tends to be a fan of genetic determinism) outlines that the decline in violence he identifies is much more likely to be a cultural, environmental phenomenon than a genetic one, given its recent occurrence.
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