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The Slow Death of Violence
A 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.
Kyle Jordan|8.24.09 @ 9:54AM|#
Ok Radley, now you can go back to posting the depressing articles since you've got the positive one out of the way. :)
|8.24.09 @ 9:59AM|#
Maybe my fascination with tribe/clan style existence, and the
reading I have done on it enlightened me, but it always cracks me
up when I hear someone refer to the Indians as some sort of ideal.
Sure, if you want to be cold, hungry, frequently engage in very
life threatening activities out of necessity, you could reduce your
environmental impact. But for most tribe/clan life was hardship
mixed with a fair amount of raiding and brutality. It was a life
dominated in most situations by the strongest, and inordinately
rough on the weak, even if they managed to survive. But people
still think we'd be better off living like that. Never mind that
they think they could get by without meat, or hunting. Never mind
the closest many of them come to a dead animal is in the grocery
store.
I suspect, it's the same type of almost willful delusion that makes
liberalism/socialism so popular.
|8.24.09 @ 10:00AM|#
Exactly. People love to idolize the Greeks and Romans as some kind of higher breed of man when they were, in fact, very fond of murder and mayhem.
Alabama Getaway|8.24.09 @ 10:00AM|#
"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..."
Not on my block. On Saturday, a woman six houses down took three
bullets from a 44. Damn it was loud. Blood all over the alley.
Alabama Getaway|8.24.09 @ 10:02AM|#
"Worldwide, the number of battle deaths has fallen from 65,000
per conflict per year to less than 2,000 deaths in this
decade"
Darfur?
|8.24.09 @ 10:11AM|#
Alabama--- there's a lot of conflicts that are very obscure,
even if they have stupendous body counts.
There's still plenty of fighting in the Congo, for instance, even
though that war has been "over" for years now.
Basically there's a plenty of chances to move the the average down
with a bunch of small, poorly documented conflicts.
|8.24.09 @ 10:11AM|#
Since 1945 ... can you cherrypick the data any more blatantly? 1945, what happened just before that? WW II, nuclear weapons, firestorms in Japan and Germany. Not long before that, WW I. Also, the mass starvation caused by government policies in Communist China and the former USSR - no obvious wounds, but still inflicted by man - was presumably not counted. We have a long way to go, baby!
Chinny Chin Chin|8.24.09 @ 10:12AM|#
If I were a statist, I would point to the correlation between the increase in state power/size, and the decline in violence. Perhaps, I would argue, the state really can legislate morality.
|8.24.09 @ 10:12AM|#
Also, they use the term battlefield deaths, which probably does not include genocide, death from disease or starvation, etc. Which has historically been where you really start stacking corpses, not the actual stabbing/shooting bits.
|8.24.09 @ 10:14AM|#
My pain level is substantially elevated today, which may be the
reason for my mood in this comment.
I, personally, am not convinced that society is better off since we
slowed down on the culling of the herd.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 10:19AM|#
From the article:
'from the Middle Ages to modern times, we can see a steady
reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence.'
As an example of violence-reduction in the Middle Ages, let us take
a look at the medieval death penalty in England.
English criminal law was very bloody, with all felonies (which
included many kinds of nonviolent stealing) being punishable by
death. Under the influence of the Church, however, the death
penalty became riddled with so many exceptions that mercy came to
be almost the rule. Specifically:
-By taking sanctuary in a church, the criminal could avoid arrest.
He could then 'abjure the realm' by basically getting his death
sentence commuted to exile.
-The criminal could avoid the death penalty by invoking 'benefit of
clergy,' which ended up simply requiring the recital of an
easily-memorized Psalm.
The Church's influence was so merciful toward capital offenders
that Parliament kept passing law-and-order petitions demanding that
the monarchs get tougher on crime and curb the pernicious influence
of sanctuary and benefit of clergy. After Henry VIII renounced the
Pope, the Reformation Parliaments were finally able to eliminate
the Church's merciful influence and allow the English criminal law
to be enforced in all its bloodthirstyness.
T|8.24.09 @ 10:19AM|#
I, personally, am not convinced that society is better off
since we slowed down on the culling of the herd.
Well, we're all against the CPSC around here, so get rid of that
and we should start culling teh st00pid pretty quick.
|8.24.09 @ 10:20AM|#
brotherben,
You are a Darwinian dead end. You would have been culled by nature
a long time ago.
Me too, so you know I'm not just being mean.
Fluffy|8.24.09 @ 10:21AM|#
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.
The key data point in the article is not post-1945.
They're just saying that even including the world wars, we're
already less violent - and that since 1945, we're really, really
less violent.
I think that the data here, if they're accurate,
understate how much less violent we are now. Because
"deaths" is the data point that makes the past look the
best. For a couple of thousand years of European and
Middle Eastern history, if your tribe or statelet lost the battle
and you had the luck to survive, you were likely to be cast into
chattel slavery. If your city lost a siege and you lived, you were
likely to have all your property taken or destroyed and, if you
were female, to be gang-raped. We really undercount the horrific
violence of the past if we only count deaths.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 10:24AM|#
Pinker omits to notice that the bloodthirsty passages in the Old
Testament were not the final word as far as the Jewish and
Christian traditions are concerned. As my Medieval example showed,
the Christian Church blunted the edges of the Old Testament's
bloodthirstiness with its teachings of a New Covenant via Christ
(who specifically moved beyond the bloodthirstiness of the Old
Testament law).
Also, in Judaism, the rabbis, from a very early date, imposed such
strict rules of evidence as to make it all but impossible to
convict anyone of a capital crime under the Old Testament law.
Indeed, the only way the rabbis were able to allow for an
*enforceable* death penalty was by allowing the king to impose a
utilitarian, extra-Biblical form of justice.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 10:30AM|#
Not to mention that the Church was sometimes able to curb the
murderous tendencies of the Germanic peoples with concepts like the
'Peace of God' - that is, bans on warfare during designated
periods.
And that St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, excommunicated the Emperor
Theodosius for massacring a few thousand people in a rebellious
area - which by pagan Roman standards would be considered fairly
modest.
kinnath|8.24.09 @ 10:34AM|#
I blame video games and violent movies.
These are a response to the safety of modern life.
Xeones|8.24.09 @ 10:35AM|#
Psst, brotherben and Sweet'n'Low: when civilization collapses, i'll protect your weak asses. There may be some chattel slavery involved, though.
|8.24.09 @ 10:35AM|#
I wonder if we're more prosperous because we get along better or if we get along better because we're prosperous.
kinnath|8.24.09 @ 10:38AM|#
I wonder if we're more prosperous because we get along
better or if we get along better because we're
prosperous.
Yes
T|8.24.09 @ 10:39AM|#
I wonder if we're more prosperous because we get along
better or if we get along better because we're
prosperous.
Both. Once you reach a certain level of food stability, you don't
have to worry about whacking out the next door neighbor so you can
feed the kids. Then it's an upward spiral.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 10:39AM|#
Nick,
As I have pointed out before, the Spanish Inquisition has become
very predictable, especially in Internet discussions.
|8.24.09 @ 10:42AM|#
the Spanish Inquisition has become very predictable,
especially in Internet discussions.
What an odd and hilarious complaint on your part.
|8.24.09 @ 10:45AM|#
There may be some chattel slavery involved,
though.
As soon as you turn your back, I will take your pancreas and sell
the rest for pig food and fuck toys.
I'm a breed that will turn on any master.
T|8.24.09 @ 10:45AM|#
What an odd and hilarious complaint on your part.
Cardinal Ximinez will no doubt be crushed to hear the Inquisition
has become predictable.
Rich|8.24.09 @ 10:49AM|#
Because "deaths" is the data point that makes the past look
the best.
Fluffy, as usual, makes a great point.
This is similar to the data-picking that ignores *shootings* per se
when reporting murder rates.
Many things confound the "less violent" asserion: judicial systems,
population density, (dare I say it) health care, ....
Adolf Hitler|8.24.09 @ 10:50AM|#
Even time I post here to defend my policy views, everyone is all
with the "Yeah, but what about the Holocaust?" and the "Hey, what
about the invasion of Poland?"
It's all very unfair and predictable.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 10:51AM|#
SugarFree,
I was simply suggesting that invocations of the Spanish Inquisition
are the very opposite of unexpected.
Alas, the most influential secularist ideologues of the past
century didn't give the Spanish Inquisition its props, apparently
because their crimes weren't enough to compensate for
Christianity's overall merciful nature.
Consider, for example, Leon Trotsky, who said that We must rid
ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the
sanctity of human life.
True to his principles, Trotsky and his secularist ilk killed so
many people that by comparison, the worse excesses of the Spanish
Inquisition look like a Sunday picnic.
|8.24.09 @ 10:52AM|#
A lot of that killing way back then probably wouldn't have happened if they'd had universal healthcare.
Adolf Hitler|8.24.09 @ 10:54AM|#
True to his principles, Trotsky and his secularist ilk
killed so many people that by comparison, the worse excesses of the
Spanish Inquisition look like a Sunday picnic.
The data in this article prove my relative innocence!
You Christians were killing each other at much higher rates back
when I wasn't around!
In fact, one reason I was so popular was because I argued
against the weak and bloodless democracies, who had turned
their back on the wisdom of the Middle Ages and who knew nothing of
how true kultur is served by the love of battles. Those
damn democracies and their liberal cosmopolitanism!
Elemenope|8.24.09 @ 10:55AM|#
I'm a breed that will turn on any master.
Diabetics? Yeah, we don't trust you people at all.
|8.24.09 @ 10:56AM|#
As I have pointed out before, the Spanish Inquisition has
become very predictable, especially in Internet
discussions.
Are you saying it is the Godwin for Catholicism?
Seriously, though, I was right there with you on the mercy thing
from the Church, but like all political events, it can revert back
to asshattery at any given moment. Some popes and priests are very
good and some suck (no pun intended.) Like the rest of humanity
throughout the ages, the ones who "get it" have a harder time
pressing for immediate betterment of society because they lack the
use of force, obviously. Fortunately, the pen is mightier than the
sword because the words last longer than the bloodshed.
Let's just hope Krugman doesn't outlast Jefferson.
|8.24.09 @ 10:57AM|#
"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."
You could have written the same statement in 1905 and just
substituted 1815 for 1945. We have had sixty years without a world
war. Surely that is a good thing. But it hardly says anything about
the future or man's propensity towards violence.
|8.24.09 @ 11:01AM|#
Hmm, I guess violence is just something we all have to deal with
at one point or another.
Jessi
www.web-tools.us.tc
|8.24.09 @ 11:05AM|#
Diabetics? Yeah, we don't trust you people at
all.
You shouldn't. Especially you that have tasty pancreases.
Delicious.
I am not Adolf Hitler. You wouldn't believe how many times a day I
have to tell people that.
|8.24.09 @ 11:07AM|#
"I am not Adolf Hitler. You wouldn't believe how many times a
day I have to tell people that."
A lot of people who suffer from having one testicle have that
problem.
Xeones|8.24.09 @ 11:08AM|#
I'm a breed that will turn on any master.
I forgot to mention the amputations, obviously. Your role, Sug,
will be Warty-bait, a task for which limbs are unnecessary and
perhaps counterproductive.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 11:16AM|#
'You Christians were killing each other at much higher rates
back when I wasn't around!'
Oh, Adolf, you don't give yourself enough credit. The amount of
killing you were able to fit into 12 short years dwarfs anything
the Church did in the previous 2,000 years.
You're just bitter because Pope Pius XI denounced your regime in
his 1937 encyclical
Mit Brennender Sorge.
Adolf Hitler|8.24.09 @ 11:30AM|#
How can you say the Church denounced me? I wasn't even
excommunicated! I still haven't been excommunicated!
Pius and I had an arrangement. I understood his wrist-slapping was
done with a wink and a nod.
Join the Catholic Church. You can be just like me.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 12:09PM|#
'Adolf,'
Here's how I can tell that you're not the real Hitler (setting
aside any question about Internet access in Hell):
As discussed by
Rabbi David Dalin, Pius XII saved numerous Jews from Hitler's
Final Solution. As estimated by Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide,
the Pope saved between 700,000 and 860,000 Jews from 'certain
death' at your hands.
The National Socialist regime knew perfectly well who its enemies
were, and Pius XII was among those enemies. National Socialist
propaganda denounced Pope Pius as a Jew-lover.
A 1936 cartoon
in the National Socialist magazine Der Sturmer (published by
Julius Streicher who was later hanged at Nuremberg) compared
Catholic nuns to prostitutes and compared the Church's priests to
(Jewish) pimps.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 12:11PM|#
And if you were actually Hitler, then you would know that you were automatically excommunicated as early as 1932 - not that this would matter to you, since after growing up, you never sought to receive communion.
Kyle Jordan|8.24.09 @ 12:14PM|#
"...and sell the rest for pig food and fuck toys."
Goddamn that was funny.
Adolf Hitler|8.24.09 @ 12:17PM|#
As I pointed out after the Vatican signed its accord with
me:
"I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish
question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for
fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it
recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism
the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the
time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was
implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the
representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the
Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service
by pushing them out of schools and public functions."
The Vatican instructed the negotiators it sent to treat with me in
1933 to "Let the Jews fend for themselves."
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 12:20PM|#
Link expired, try
this link instead.
The caption reads: 'She [a nun] belongs to the Church; she [a
prostitute] belongs to Satan. Both are lost to the German
race.'
Adolf Hitler|8.24.09 @ 12:21PM|#
Also, I told the Vatican in 1933 that I intended to break the
Versailles treaty and restore universal conscription in Germany.
The Vatican agreed to keep this secret for me, as long as I
promised that I would exempt priests from the draft.
They didn't care what I did, as long as I let them collect church
taxes from German Catholics!
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 12:22PM|#
I've heard of appeals to authority, but appealing to the
authority of Adolf Hitler is certainly a new departure.
You cite Adolf Hitler, I cite a rabbi (David Dalin) and an Israeli
diplomat (Pinchas Lapide). Decide for yourself who is a more
credible source.
Adolf Hitler|8.24.09 @ 12:33PM|#
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
Ah, but the Vatican staff write everything down, and save every
toll booth receipt.
Their diplomatic instructions were recorded and are well
documented.
And the secret annex to the treaty related to conscription has been
released and verified by the Vatican itself!
The Vatican is not ashamed of its embrace of me! They know better
than to set much score by the ephemeral passions of the modern
press. They know that all the bad press I have received will blow
over some day!
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 12:36PM|#
The worst Pope Pius's critics have been able to say against him
is that 'the
Pope, like so many others in positions of power and influence,
could have done more to save the Jews.'
According to this 'critical' Web page, Pius XII 'merely'
-intervened 'act behind the scenes' to prevent proposed murderous
actions against Jews
-made public broadcasts declaring that 'The horror and inexcusable
excesses committed on a helpless and a homeless people have been
established by the unimpeachable testimony of eye-witnesses' and
that 'hundreds of thousands [of people] . . . through no fault of
their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been
condemned to death or progressive extinction.'
-Sought in May 1940 to alert the Allied powers to a German
operation against then-neutral Holland.
-As the web page fails to acknowledge] alerted the British to an
anti-Nazi plot, passing the info on to British intelligence.
T|8.24.09 @ 12:44PM|#
As the web page fails to acknowledge
You know what else they fail to acknowledge? The hats. Popes get
great haberdashery. You don't see any other world leaders with such
an excellent selection of headgear, although the default beanie is
a little lame.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 12:47PM|#
Adolf,
Like your namesake, you are willing to disregard the truth on
behalf of your crusade against the Church.
The very article to which you provide a link gives the lie to your
efforts to cite Hitler as a credible source. After the Hitler quote
which you cite, the article cites a source who points out the
obvious: '[O]n this occasion, as always, Hitler was concealing his
true intentions.' Like, duuh.
And you seem to assume that the Versailles Treaty is so
self-evidently righteous that the Catholic Church's neutrality on
the issue (and its willingness to arrange for protection of its
priests in the event that Hitler violated the treaty) is
self-evident proof of the National Socialist proclivities of the
Church. Under that type of 'reasoning,' then John Maynard Keynes
was also a Nazi, since he criticized the Versailles Treaty as soon
as it was concluded (long before Hitler came to power). The
democratic Weimar regime, which Hitler denounced and overthrew, was
also National Socialist according to your logic, because Germany's
democratic Weimar governments evaded the treaty as much as they
could.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 12:53PM|#
And the very article to which you link acknowledges that the
National Socialist regime violated the Concordat, prompting
protests by the Church, including the encyclical to which I've
already linked.
Some excerpts from that encyclical (which, remember, is a year
before the Munich Accords and Neville Chamberlain's 'peace in our
time' remark):
'7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God,
the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be
preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not
he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred
word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever
identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by
either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the
world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever
follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of
substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God,
denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from
end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii.
1). Neither is he a believer in God.
'8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a
particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any
other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary
and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises
these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an
idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world
planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God
and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.
'9. Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as
in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless
label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of
human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they
refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God,
supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of
Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator
of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the
history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival
God by His side.'
wayne|8.24.09 @ 1:04PM|#
They're just saying that even including the world wars,
we're already less violent - and that since 1945, we're really,
really less violent.
Agreed. The implication of the article is that the reduction in
violence is a good thing for mankind. Selective pressures are what
made mankind. Reduction in selective pressures certainly dirties up
the gene pool. It is not clear that this emerging civility is a
good thing in the long run.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 1:11PM|#
wayne,
I guess the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life
doesn't appeal to you, either.
Mad Max|8.24.09 @ 1:40PM|#
wayne,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to equate 'civility' with
'not killing people.'
Zeb|8.24.09 @ 3:12PM|#
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to equate 'civility' with
'not killing people.'"
Well, not killing people is usually an important part of
civility.
But I don't think that the sanctity of anything is necessary for
people to see that killing each other is not really a good idea,
generally speaking.
EscapedWestOfTheBigMuddy|8.24.09 @ 3:23PM|#
Because "deaths" is the data point that makes the past look the best.
Not to cast aspersions on your point, Fluffy, but deaths are almost
always the only statistic available. It is not like they
generally had substantial infrastructure for maintaining and
processing detailed demographic data.
Just feeding folks, building and maintaining their tools, and
defending the borders pretty near saturated the labor supply in
most places through most of history.
|8.24.09 @ 5:32PM|#
You know what else they fail to acknowledge? The hats. Popes
get great haberdashery.
Nice shoes, too.
Shame about the dresses, though. But hey, c'est la vie,
non?
Medic001|8.24.09 @ 8:37PM|#
"I blame video games and violent movies."Coyote
ya..and thats like blaming spoons for fat people.
anonymous|8.24.09 @ 9:48PM|#
"ya..and thats like blaming spoons for fat people."
Is your sarcasm detector busted? You should have it checked out,
it's dangerous on the intertubes without one.
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