Good news for all who have watched too much TV: Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature claims that violence has declined drastically across history! Pinker is right when he critiques the media-influenced belief that we are living in increasingly violent times. He correctly argues that there is reason to question this assumption. However, while correct in this narrow sense, Pinker's thesis is violently wrong in a larger context. Pinker runs into two broad categories of errors: Conceptual/ contextual and numerical.
Take Pinker's point that “beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17th century and cresting with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th... people began to sympathise with more of their fellow humans.” Pinker argues that this was one of those trends that contributed to a decline in violence.
At first, there seems to be a germ of truth in it, from a Eurocentric perspective. From other perspectives (for instance, that of Jainism or Buddhism) one can argue that Enlightenment “sympathy” was very narrow: It seldom extended to “savages” or animals.
Simply sympathy
However, there are bigger problems of conceptualisation here (and elsewhere in the book). “Sympathy” is not something simply extended; it is determined by the (changing) categories of identification. The very etymology of “kindness” — involving your “kind” — is a clue. The Enlightenment expansion of European “sympathy” was predicated on the construction of the category of rational “human being” — to which the sympathiser belonged.
Throughout the era, Europeans were callously cruel to animals (because they were not human and “life” was not a major identification category) and to many non-Europeans (because, for many, these were not sufficiently “human”). Even the Enlightenment construction of the category “human” was not sufficient in itself: As Jews and Gypsies often discovered. What happened was that some people — Nazis, for instance, but also European colonisers earlier on — found it convenient and profitable to either refuse “humanity” to some peoples, or to inflect “humanity” in certain ways (Semitic/Aryan, for instance) that enabled them to withhold sympathy from some groups.
Pinker's thesis also suffers from excessive faith in numbers. For instance, he translates rates of homicide into violence data. But a one per cent homicide rate does not mean one per cent violence: It means anywhere between two to 99 per cent violence, as the victim might be killed by one or all 99 of the others. Violence is too complex a matter to be left to numbers.
Pinker writes: “According to the most recent edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2,448,017 Americans died in 2005. It was one of the country's worst years of war deaths in decades, with the armed forces embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together the two wars killed 945 Americans, amounting to 0.0004 of American deaths that year.” But can one talk of “American” rates of war-violence without factoring in Iraqi and Afghanistani rates of war-violence too?
Discrepancy
Let us recall an obvious fact: The discrepancy in impact of violence because of increasing discrepancy in the ratio of technological power. In Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation, Samir Amin lists “monopolies over weapons of mass destruction” among the five monopolies that maintain the “present world system.” The great Swedish historian, Sven Lindqvist, notes that while the Battle of Omdurman (1898) was depicted in the European media as involving fierce near-combat with “fanatics” in Sudan, “no Sudanese got closer than three hundred yards from the British position.” Significantly, the 10,000 “fanatics” who were killed by gunfire in this and similar battles still got closer to the “enemy” than many of those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The ability to kill from a distance is an aspect of the decline in violence that Pinker traces; but it involves new methodologies of violence.
In Pinker's defence, it has to be said that he proceeds to talk of global rates of violence: “And in the world as a whole, the Human Security Report Project counted 17,400 deaths that year that were directly caused by political violence (war, terrorism, genocide, and killings by warlords and militias), for a rate of 0.0003.” But note the extreme physical nature of the violence. Pinker tries to account for this by calling it “a conservative estimate” and multiplying it by a “generous” 20 to include “deaths by famine and disease”: “It would still not reach the one per cent mark,” he states.
So perhaps there has been a decline in violence? I am happy to concede this conclusion for some kinds of physical violence. Pinker “proves” such a decline by focussing on one extreme result of violence: Death. But only a small percentage of all violence ends in death. Actually, one should expect a decline in the number of violent deaths. This would be a consequence of the greater capacity of the state (or other bodies) to both police violence and concentrate its own retaliatory and “preventive” violence (the two obviously go together); of the specialisation of violence; of better medical services: people who would die of a bullet wound just 20 years ago can be saved today, given good hospital facilities. But violence does not cause just deaths. Pinker's “generous” multiplication by 20 is not really generous — in a world in which, according to UN statistics, 840 million people are malnourished or six million children under the age of five die every year as a consequence of malnutrition.
As Judith Butler puts it in Precarious Life , “To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other.” Obviously, in societies where capital is what empowers, and states are committed to creating “wealth” by aiding capital, it is often not necessary or even desirable to opt for physical violence. Your boss needs to fire you, not to beat you up. The state needs to move those “tribals” out, so that their ancestral lands can be “developed.” Actually, it is you who — on being fired or “relocated” — might want to beat someone up, and would be rightly restrained by the police from doing so.
Pinker's book will be popular; it can be used to overlook or justify the violence of the status quo.
