Steven Pinker, the history of violence, and the misuse of 'anarchy'

i skimmed through blank slate and it made my eyes roll. pretty much "capitalism is human nature!" bullshit. his new book looks like an interesting idea but i don't think i can stomach more of his writing :/

The few reviews I read summed the book up as violence is decreasing (if you exclude all those wars). :D :roll:

I remember reading Blank Slate and being irked by that story of him being an anarchist. I mean, clearly dude had no understanding of anarchism. If you think removing the cops suddenly but keeping the capitalist structure of society is "anarchy" clearly you have no understanding of the relevant theory. He is a fairly reactionary thinker but I remember thinking parts of Blank Slate were interesting. I will be interested to read your review of Better Angels. His Hobbesian politics are truly absurd and need to be criticized ruthlessly. I also don't know what the fact that hunter-gatherers (pre-state peoples) killed each other at high rates has to do with the need for the state in current society. One could argue that the primitive state of the economy made such violent conflict inevitable and that the cooperative/social economic structure that we rely on today (notwithstanding capitalist exploitation) facilitates peaceful cooperation without the state.

Imho the worst thing about the Blank Slate was how infuriatingly unscientific it is, considering it's purporting to be the REAL SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE vs WISHFUL THINKING. Massive reliance on anecdotes, appeal to popular prejudices etc. Which is annoying, because I do think hard social constructivism and lefty politics does often neglect science and evolution, and so some critique of 'blank slate' style utopianism is needed. But Pinker isn't it. Steven Rose's '21st century brain' seemed much better in terms of the evolutionary basis for social construction of our 'nature' via neural plasticity and so on; rejecting the nature-nurture dichotomy altogether.

On the history of violence thing - yeah you're right it's about how you define it. As a % of the population, wars may well kill less people than in previous centuries as war has become increasingly mechanised and less labour intensive in large parts of the world. On the other hand, until the 19th century industrial scale murder wasn't even possible, let alone real, and iirc civilian casualties have increased over the course of the 20th century as the nature of wars have changed. And that's only on the narrowest definitions of violence - what about endemic rape, domestic violence, denial of medication (e.g. HIV) and so on. Almost certainly he's distorting or cherry-picking stats to make a Whiggish argument, as you suspect.

I don't know where his evidence comes from about violent death rates in prehistoric society but I would have thought that such societies, without idealizing them, needed to cooperate just to survive. The idea that there was continual warfare in prehistory has long been a component of bourgeois ideology.

Capitalism on the other hand, a system based on rivalry, competition, dog eat dog and a century and a bit of wholesale imperialist war has, whatever figures Pinker comes up with, demonstrated its utter barbarity and slaughter.

And this rational, improving picture that Pinker paints of capitalism - with all its "problems" of course, is somewhat tainted by the fact China, the US, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia, France, North Korea and Britain are all spending hundreds of billions of dollars (the US alone $700 billion) on upgrading their nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

This is the guy who was a "teenage anarchist" until he witnessed some people doing some BAD STUFF during a police strike, after which he concluded law and order capitalism is the only way for humanity. I think it's safe to say logic is not his forte, regardless of his prowess in evolutionary biology.

Don't know anything abou the book or the guy but I'm curious about the confident comments about violence not decreasing. Do you have any *real* basis for this or is it just ideological blinkers being put on?

I know very little about this but have heard that the level of violence in society has been reduced massively. The fact that there are people walking the streets that have *never* been the victims of violence is a new thing. This is not necessarily about wars but rather domestic abuse, child abuse state violence etc. I'd be curious to know if anyones got any proof that this incorrect.

Cooked

Don't know anything abou the book or the guy but I'm curious about the confident comments about violence not decreasing. Do you have any *real* basis for this or is it just ideological blinkers being put on?

I know very little about this but have heard that the level of violence in society has been reduced massively. The fact that there are people walking the streets that have *never* been the victims of violence is a new thing. This is not necessarily about wars but rather domestic abuse, child abuse state violence etc. I'd be curious to know if anyones got any proof that this incorrect.

what's your timescale? most of the arguments in this vein (democratic peace theory is the main one i'm familiar with) don't really stand up, and history is generally far too messy to exhibit linear world-historical trends. many human societies are pretty violent, but the onus is on the claimant to prove we live in the most peaceful of all. e.g. rapes in the US rose steadily in the second part of the 20th Century, but rape wasn't even considered violence for most of that, but a property offence against the father/husband (source). today in the UK 1 in 4 women have experienced rape or attempted rape (source). might have been higher in the past, but i struggle to believe that's a world-historical low.

If he's talking about international relations (e.g. war), then 'anarchy' is a technical term from realist theory referring to the fact that internally states are hierarchical, but the international order is 'non-hierarchical' insofar as there's no sovereign power above states.* If he's referring to 'failed states' like Somalia, that might be an extension of that, i.e. 'anarchy' just means the absence of sovereign power. It's still a bit suspect if someone has some understanding of anarchist political philosophy, then uses the term uncritically to mean 'everything that isn't a sovereign state' though.

* obv there's problems with this, i'm not a realist!

George Monbiot does exactly the same thing, as it happens, in his 'Age of Consent'. It's a kind of unintended compliment, in that they don't actually have a critique. If someone wanted to write a review article of Pinkers new book alongside Graebers, that would be interesting (Graeber argues states and markets co-ermerge through violence, so covers similar ground, but also shows how violence was avoided in many non-market, non-state societies through e.g. ritualising tensions).

Quite a scathing review in Foreign Affairs. Tbh I still think they give him too much credit, e.g. assuming that hunter gatherer societies were the most violent ever. The review also points out that he simply ignores the two world wars as 'unfortunate anomalies' so that his argument of ever-increasing peace isn't challenged by the pesky problem of 100 million corpses.

Foreign Affairs

THE WORLD WARS

A similar intervention Pinker makes in his own experiment is to dismiss the two world wars and the episodes of mass killing that took place in the first half of the twentieth century. Pinker describes these horrors powerfully and eloquently but claims they are irrelevant to his argument. He is right that historians often impose too much coherence on that time period, wanting all the violence to somehow make sense. But Pinker errs toward the other extreme, portraying the two world wars as "horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical distribution," and the major episodes of mass murder as resulting from "a few contingent ideas and events." In other words, it was bad luck to have two big conflicts so close to each other, and more bad luck that they were associated with especially bad ideas.

I haven't read the book, but the Foreign Affairs review suggests he only looks at states as pacifiers of internal civil violence (following Hobbes' thought experiments, but taking them as historical fact), but doesn't really analyse the role of states in external violence/war. Which would be a pretty huge oversight (even the liberal peace theorists acknowledge liberal states tend to make war on non-liberal ones).

He made the same argument in Blank Slate, and did factor in both World Wars I believe.

Herman & Chomsky have published a book in reply to Steven Pinkers:

http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.12/PDFs/0812.PinkerCrit.pdf

http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-volence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson-1

Herman & Peterson

in Pinker’s view there has been a “Long Peace” since the end of the Second World War

Wait a minute... so he (1) ignores WWI and WWII as anomalies (according to Foreign Affairs); (2) ignores all the wars since WWII as a "long peace"; (3) declares the 20th century more peaceful than any before it. Cool methodology bro.

Edit: apparently he also explicity references the democratic peace theory. Except he distorts it to claim democracies are generally peaceful, when influential proponents of the theory (e.g. Michael Doyle) concede that while democracies are seemingly more peaceful towards each other they're prone to liberal imperialism against non-democracies. And apparently Pinker also doesn't include the Iraq war as violence, because it was disarming Iraq for peace. Just ouright imperial apologetics then.

Some of Pinkers work is fairly straightforward. For instance, he examined violence among hunter gatherers and early neolithic tribes. A great deal of the evidence he relies on is archaeological e.g. skeletal remains, bone fragments, and other pieces of evidence from excavations, along with standard statistical methodology. The conclusions from his work were that early, pre-state human tribes had much higher levels of violence than we do today (in the western world at least). In particular, he looked at homicide rates (for example, between a quarter and one third of all male deaths among hunter gatherers were attributed to homicide). As far as his use of the term anarchy, I suppose he uses it the same way that everyone else (who's not steeped in anarchist philosophy) uses it, and when you're writing a book, you write in the lexicon of your expected audience. But I do agree, he shouldn't exclude modern warfare from his definition of violence (that's absurd). But I've read other papers, which do factor in modern warfare, and the homicide rate among hunter gatherers is still several thousand times higher than it is today. I guess it does create a kink in the wheel for anarchist theory, assuming you base anarchist theory on a particular view of human nature (which IMO is a very bad idea, since there's so much we have yet to learn on this subject). Anyway, at very minimum, his work (and the work of many others) shows that pre-state societies were very prone to violence, and so apparently we're not the super egalitarian species many imagine us to be (sorry Rousseau). For me the importance of this question isn't to bolster the idea of the nation state as the only organism that can reign in the human propensity for violence, it's important because it shows that humans often resort to violence whether or not we live under a nation state. That Pinker draws certain conclusions from his research (in many cases not his research, but the research of others that he included in his writings) is immaterial. I read the data for myself and draw my own conclusions (or avoid drawing conclusions if unwarranted); and I try not to allow my own affinity for radical theory to bias my interpretation of this sort of research.