Violence, War and an Improving World - Part I: The Pinker Effect

A while ago I offered up an in-depth exploration of the mythic system of modern science fiction, as illustrated in James Cameron's epic film Avatar, exposing how a very healthy reflex (cultural self-criticism) all-too often sours into something much less wholesome -- a mythology that western civilization is not improvable.  That our society's inherent vileness merits only self-loathing and despair.

Ironically, some of the most sincere voices in film and fiction, who push messages of progress, are instead undermining it by encouraging cynical gloom. Take my esteemed colleague in the craft of creating worlds, Charles Stross, whose popular blog is often on target when it comes to listing phenomena that push against any hope for continuing our Western Democratic Scientific Enlightenment. The failure modes that he lists are daunting and mostly very real... and tell only half the story...  

The other half -- how we got the freedom and other goodies that are in peril, in the first place -- almost never comes up, nor the many, many countervailing forces that we might use - as our ancestors used them - to keep the Enlightenment Experiment going.

Why this obsession with downer news? Well, for one thing, dire warnings are more useful than polyanna-pangloss-happy ravings! If I must choose - zero-sum - between extremes, then please do have the cynics come sit next to me! 

But zero-sum is deeply stupid and self-defeating. As is stylish cynicism, over the long run. Diagnosing a disease is most effective when it is accompanied by a confident determination to take action. And that, in turn, requires some sense of the body's strengths, as well as its weaknesses.

In this new series, I plan to show how this same syndrome  pervades academia and popular punditry. The overall result has been a shattering of confidence in our ability to improve, giving comfort to those who see no reason to improve, at all.

== The worst sin: admitting good news == 

Among the most important books of our era is Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) which presents voluminous statistical and other evidence to show that the cynical catechisms of both left and right are specious. 

The crux: there is enough good news in human affairs to merit some cautious optimism. As overall per-capita rates of violence plummet, worldwide (though not in hellish trouble spots)… as poverty declines and ever-larger fractions of the world’s children bring school books back to homes with electricity, clean water and plentiful food… and as ever increasing numbers of girls feel empowered over their own lives… the real question boils down to: 

“Why is such good news anathema — even rage-inducing — among zealots at all ends of the political spectrum?”

To be clear, Pinker and his supporters have never said “there has been some progress — therefore let’s all relax.” 

But that is what so many hear. And that perception is, in its own right, deeply sick.

The fear on the left is that any admission of real progress will sap the intensity of our passion to save the world. The dread on the right is even more intense -- that Pinker’s statistics will show past liberal and progressive efforts were, in large measure, responsible for this tentatively good news. 

Now please, look over those two sentences again. Don't skim. They are blatantly true, and reveal stunning psychoses spanning our so-called political “spectrum.” In fact, both sides are functionally insane. Especially liberals, for not seeing the simple sales-pitch they could start using:

“You see? Progressivism works! We’re halfway there! Of course, if we don’t double down and fix the rest, all of our hard-won gains will be lost and we’ll all die! But Pinker’s statistics show it’s possible! So yay Pinker. And let’s embrace optimism. Step up, with confidence, spurn the gloomists and naysayers, and double down on progress!”

That is what a few pragmatist liberals (the only sane political bloc left in the U.S.) do say! But at the far-left (very different from “liberals”) -- even the possibility of an agenda based on confidence and optimism is utterly anathema. And thus, they play into the hands of the even-more-sick right.

== Attacking Pinker ==

Pinker’s statistics are hard to refute, so how do the paladins of pessimism respond? In this article by John Gray from The Guardian - Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war -  Mr. Gray argues with deceitful tricks and outright lies. 

He starts by pointing out that Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Voltaire — while demanding freedom for the common man, and definitions of citizenship an order of magnitude more inclusive than before — also muttered some statements that seem racist or bigoted or sexist, to modern ears. How monstrously vile…

... by which I mean vile of Gray. In judging sages of the past, the rule must be “did they try hard to push our horizons of inclusion wider than the assumptions under which they had been raised?” If they fought to enlarge tolerance and opportunity beyond what men and women of their times took for granted, then yes, they were heroes of “enlightenment” and not hypocrites, as manipulative cynics like Mr. Gray would have you believe.  

But let’s elaborate on that point, since it seems difficult for many to grasp. Should Abraham Lincoln be “outed” for sharing some racial stereotypes of his own upbringing and era? Sure, look at them in cold light. But also take the word of Frederick Douglass who observed such inconsistencies up close, in the most dramatic case where an imperfect hero ultimately delivered the goods, however deep his imperfections:

“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” 

                   -Frederick Douglass 

Am I too harsh on Mr. Gray, for his assertion that enlightenment thinkers should have made leaps to perfection, instead of pushing humanity and humanism forward by incremental stages? (Increments far greater than all the cynics, like Mr. Gray, have ever accomplished, combined?) 

No, if anything I am being gentle, especially after Gray's loathsome trickery was quintupled — when he tried to fob off onto the Enlightenment all blame for Hitler and Stalin!

“You would never know, from reading Pinker, that Nazi “scientific racism” was based in theories whose intellectual pedigree goes back to Enlightenment thinkers such as the prominent Victorian psychologist and eugenicist Francis Galton. Such links between Enlightenment thinking and 20th-century barbarism are, for Pinker, merely aberrations, distortions of a pristine teaching that is innocent of any crime: the atrocities that have been carried out in its name come from misinterpreting the true gospel, or its corruption by alien influences. The childish simplicity of this way of thinking is reminiscent of Christians who ask how a religion of love could possibly be involved in the Inquisition. In each case it is pointless to argue the point, since what is at stake is an article of faith.”

Grrrr.  The number of calumnies in just those sentences is beyond count. And that wasn’t even the whole paragraph! 

Anyone who correlates Nazism and Stalinism - two fiercely repressive state religions and pyramidal-authoritarian despotisms - with anything other than a pair of frontal assaults by romanticism against the tolerant diversity of enlightenment empiricism, is either a supreme delusion-artist or an outright propagandist. The fact that actual scientists fled both the Nazi and the Communist hells as fact as they could, lending all their fiber to strengthening the democratic west, just might suggest that Germany and the USSR were using the term “scientific” as an incantation, far removed from the real thing. The very thing that their befuddled modern analogues -- romantics like Mr. Gray -- also confuse. 

Indeed, it was western science that utterly demolished the rationalizations used by those despotisms for their insane thuggery, as well as engendering the fecund creativity that allowed free citizenries to surge forward, leaving both fanatical religions in a cloud of dust.

In Nazism, Stalinism and subsequent ‘isms' we see howls of rage aimed directly at enlightenment. Those who currently denounce democratic decadence — ranging from ISIS to the rising plutocratic oligarchy's court apologists like Gray and Leo Strauss and Francis Fukayama — all rationalize that the experiment in citizen sovereignty is doomed to collapse from inherent contradictions, despite it having achieved — in two centuries — far more than all other social systems across all continents and 6000 years.  Combined.

 Hitler and Stalin openly declared contempt for our experiment and eagerness to end it, using methods rooted in the feudal satrapies that dominated human affairs across those 60 centuries. Trying to pin them on our enlightenment is an act of legerdemain so staggeringly dishonest as to win Mr. Gray a place in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

== Other calumnies ==

Likewise, Gray's notion that Enlightenment’s defenders deny the efficacy of the atom bomb at deterring war. Um? Of course deterrence played a role! But if this window of relative peace is to become permanent, we had better use it to make peace a habit. And despite your snarking, Mr. Gray, just talk to the millions of young people graduating from the world’s universities, every year, to see that altruism and empathy are spreading!  And that nearly all of your assertions are diametrically opposite to true.

Oh, but he goes on, and makes one actual, true statement: “If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars.”  

Yep!  Enlightenment is not a light switch.This is no fairy tale.  Justice and happy endings aren't guaranteed.  Martin Luther King Jr. did not promise the path would be linear, but an "arc" that will sweep toward justice only if most (not all) of us pull on it, like gravity.  

 Let me avow something that might (at first glance, please the mad Straussian neocons out there and upset goody-goody lefties, by admitting that some older, rougher tools were needed, in order to get us to these (tentatively) better days. Particularly a “pax” imperium — Pax Americana. And, like all such empires, PA made some awful, thuggish mistakes. Fewer than any other “pax” across 6000 years! PA presents history with a vastly better ratio of good deeds to bad, and Mr. Gray does not dare meet my offer of a wager over that. He knows I would own his house. 

But yes, we have stuff to atone-for.

Nevertheless, the defense umbrella of Pax Americana allowed half of Europe (and later all of it), much of Asia, and nearly all of the Western Hemisphere to spend the last 70 years allocating far, far lower fractions of their national wealth to armies and defense than any other peoples, across all of time. 

Please read again that last sentence and let it sink in. Across all of time, nations generally devoted half of their national wealth to war or defense, almost anywhere you look. Half. 

What was the average under Pax Americana? Two percent of GDP — that is how much the NATO countries are currently arguing over. A pittance that would be hilarious, if folks from any other era showed up to offer comment. 

The exception? The USA, which for a human lifespan has carried the more “normal” defense burden, protecting trade and general peace. And thereby empowered other nations to prosper. These aren’t just assertions. Refute them, if you can! (In the form, of a wager please: put real money on it.) You cannot.

Oh, but then, after dipping into a half-truth, Mr. Gray dives right back into full-lies. “While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive.” 

Dang. Just dang. Um, has he watched even one historical documentary, ever, of any kind? Notice that Gray does not even try to back this up.  He armwaves assertions. He is the Fox News of cynicism.

Is his screed without value? In fact, Mr. Gray raised many cavils and modern problems.  We do live in a world still wracked with awful conflicts. The USA can hardly preach a pure morality tale while we have the world’s highest incarceration rates. And the oligarchic putsch that has deliberately re-ignited the American Civil War — destroying politics as a means of negotiated problem solving — is an act of treason that threatens to eviscerate the nation’s heart, its ability to deal with a future of onrushing change.  These and a myriad other vexing challenges merit our determined attention and passionately militant response!

Only please dig this, Mr. Gray.  It is not your relentlessly deliberate cheating and lying that I find despicable, but your intensely evident aim to denounce and undermine our belief that problems can be solved. By denying that any of our past efforts ever have solved any.

It is the jibbering insanity of today’s Far-Left, which makes that extremum (not moderate liberals) almost 10% as crazy as today’s Entire-Right.

Yes, that crazy.

==


Continue to Part II: Is Conflict Necessary for Human Advancement?

The State of Nature: Part Two

Trends in Violence, PART TWO:

The State of Nature... Are the Noble and Brutish Images Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Last time we pondered an issue that Stephen Pinker raised recently at THE EDGE, where he critiqued the widely and passionately-held belief that less technological native peoples tended to be more noble-minded and nonviolent than citizens of modern, western, industrial society. Certainly, that impression has been enhanced as our gore-drenched televisions bring us views of 20th and 21st Century machine enhanced mayhem.

But Pinker argues - backed by substantial evidence - that these myths are mostly illusory. That civilization, wealth, industry, law and education have made modern humans demonstrably calmer, more generous and less prone to violence, despite Hollywood cliches to the contrary.

I’ll leave it to Pinker to convince the reader with facts. My own role is to step back and offer some unusual perspectives. A few angles that may not have been fully considered, as this debate rages.


A FRATERNAL PHILOSOPHICAL SPAT

Does civilization take us closer to an ideal culture, by inculcating respect for law and calmer methods of accountability? Or does it take us farther away, by demolishing the democratic tendencies of so-called “primitive” societies?

This is actually quite an old puzzler. Indeed, one may be tempted to pose this issue in terms of two long-ago social thinkers, Hobbes and Rousseau. The former prescribed strict hierarchies and rules, in order to curb man’s reflexively brutish tendencies. In contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau preached that complex nation states corrupt the inherent goodness which all humans once displayed, in the state of nature.

Though often presented as polar opposites, ironically, both of these views have been used to justify for rather nasty versions of oppression. They are, in fact, very close cousins, sharing many underlying assumptions and agendas. Both of them serve a pernicious, though all-too common, habit of romantic oversimplification. But more on that, later.

As we saw, earlier, modern anthropology has shed some light on this ancient argument. For example, it has long been known that native tribes ran a gamut fully as broad as the spectrum of modern cultures, with many of them now apparently as violent - on a per-capita basis - as the denizens of any urban gangland.

This does not mean we should stop trying to learn from different tribes, eras and ways. The essential lesson of tolerance and diversity is not that all ways are morally equal, or that “not-us” is routinely better than “us.” A far saner and more supportable justification for diversity is that we all benefit -- both ethically and pragmatically -- every time we learn fresh perspectives.

One needn’t be fetishistic about tolerance in order to deeply appreciate and promote the process I’ve called “otherness” -- (which is one of the wellsprings of science fiction, by the way).

Nevertheless, it is becoming clear that hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and traditionalist farmers had no mythical patent on moral-superiority, by sole virtue of being less complicated. While communalism does seem to work, on occasion, in some small tribes, it should be no surprise that close inspection always reveals plenty of human follies, imperfections and tragedies.

Yet, if Rousseau was off-base in depicting tribal life as totally innocent, does he still have a point about the corrupting influence of modern society? A fine and ironic parable for this point of view can be found in the comic film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, which depicts the results when a single useful modern tool lands among previously uncovetous bushmen, creating jealousy and strife where there had been none.

Eden, disrupted by the arrival of satanic technology. A theme that appears to be very popular (with variations) on both the far-left and the far-right.


THE PAST WAS ROUGH

In speaking up for the calming and civilizing effects of modernity, Steven Pinker cites some studies. I’ve seen others taken from ancient, medieval and pre-modern annals. Certainly, those who study the past most-closely nurse few Rousseauean fantasies. Just try standing in a trench at an archaeological dig and tracing with your finger layer after layer of chocolate-black soot from each occasion that a settlement was sacked and burned. Or sift through old-time diaries and other annals that portray how often the average male - in almost any society - found himself levied for duty as a soldier. (In very few eras did a non-slave avoid having to take up arms, often, in the course of a normal, forty-year life span.)

But let’s hear from Pinker’s essay on The Edge:

”To be sure, any attempt to document changes in violence must be soaked in uncertainty. In much of the world, the distant past was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, and, even for events in the historical record, statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned only by smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 percent in a population of one billion.

“Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.”

I want to snip-in a few of the facts and studies that Pinker shares.

”The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

“On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

“Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.”

Naturally, this kind of talk sparks outrage from nostalgists of all kids. From right wing fundamentalists who dislike being told that the world is being made better by the hand of Man, and by left wing romantics who hate it ... well... for the exact same reason.


Next time: Why has violence (apparently) waned?

or return to Part 1 of this series


Note: Science fiction author - and fellow "Killer Bee" - Greg Bear will apparently be the guest on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, on the Comedy Network, Thursday night. Sparked by recent publicity attracted to SIGMA, the think tank of science-endowed sci fi writers that Greg & I helped to establish, some years ago. Knowing Greg, this ought to be fun.

Some Good News... for a change...

The Progressive Policy Institute... an arm of the DLC .... is source of a number of factoids that I’ve presented here from time to time. Research that - while generally a bit “liberal” in its underlying goal sets - tends to be very pro- vigorous markets, trade and all sorts of other good things that conservatives ought to like.

Here’s the PPI talking about something that I have long maintained, that the world has been getting safer... or it was. WHich simply puts the lie to doom-crying cynics of both right and left.

==The World Has Become More Peaceful==

The Numbers:

Average annual deaths in wars, 1946-1990: 160,000
Average annual deaths in wars, 1991-2002: 90,000

What They Mean:

Despite the headlines and video, a visitor from earlier decades might find the 21st-century world surprisingly peaceful in this holiday season. The "Human Security Center" at the University of British Columbia, uses grants from five high-minded governments (Britain, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland) to survey the world at war. Its report, one of the first systematic attempts to compare the frequency and violence of warfare over the past two centuries, finds surprisingly good news.

* Wars are less frequent; the decade since 1990 has had the fewest international and civil wars since the 1830s.

* Great-power wars are especially rare. No European war has pitted great powers against one another since 1945; none seem conceivable today. While some East Asian flash-points are still live, the Pacific's great powers too have refrained from direct clashes since the Soviet-Chinese border battle in 1969.


Brin note: My generation was "scheduled" to die by the multi-millions in a conventional WWIII. Instead, "all" we had was Vietnam. Traumatic... and it makes one suspicious why someone would want to revisit that experience on America. But small potatoes by comparison. Do we owe it all to the MAD policy of Saint Bomb? Who woulda thunk that such an insane notion would have actually worked?

* Wars are less bloody. Precision weapons make infantry charges and tank battles outdated and reduce civilian casualties. In the 1950s and 1960s, 200,000 people a year were being killed in wars; since 1990 the total has averaged 90,000.

Count backward to illustrate how unusual this is. Between 1000 A.D. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace among great powers was the 51-year stretch between the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Europe's present peaceful stretch hit 60 last spring and shows no signs of strain. I would add that the Clintonian Balkans Intervention went a long way toward completing the job, ending war and blatant tyranny in Europe - even at the “mini” level of the Balkans - for the first time in 4,000 years.

East Asia's calm seems a bit shakier, but is still longer than any comparable period since the second half of the 18th century.

The report suggests several possible (and not mutually exclusive) reasons for this. Some are political; decolonization and the end of the Cold War mean there are fewer nationalistic or ideological reasons to fight, and the spread of democracy may produce less belligerent governments. Another is military -- today's great powers are not only less bellicose but much stronger than they were in the past, with armies, air forces, and navies strong enough to deter any potential aggressor. A third reason is a possible greater respect for international law. Economic issues too may be in play, with trade and cross-border investment strengthening mutual interests and reducing reasons for conflict. According to the report: "The most effective path to prosperity in modern economies is through increasing productivity and international trade, not through seizing land and raw materials. In addition, the existence of an open global trading regime means it is nearly always cheaper to buy res ources from overseas than to use force to acquire them."

Further Reading:

The Human Security Report

PPI's National Security Project:
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ka.cfm?knlgAreaID=124

An exhaustive list of international and civil wars between 1816 and 2002. (Examples: Brazil vs. Naval Royalists, 1894; the Two Sicilies vs. Liberals, 1820-21; Yemen Arab Republic vs. Yahya Family, 1948; Bulgaria vs. Agrarian League, 1923; Nomonhan, 193):
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~kgledits/papers/
gleditsch2004ii_corrected.pdf


Finally, there’s this hopeful item. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/opinion/18sun2.html

Hopeful in part because Diebold seems to be unraveling before our eyes... but also because the source is the utter-sellout New York Times... maybe finding some guts at last.