While I agree that the world has less violence now than it did during WW2 or most of the 19th century, I think he’s doing some cherrypicking of war death estimates. His estimates for 1990s war deaths seem really low. Is he factoring in genocides like Rwanda and the Congo, or the religious violence that plagued India during that time? Because I think those should count in the tally. I get the idea that the 1990s were comparably violent to the 1980s if you include these things. Africa if anything was worse in the '90s, the situation there has only improved in the past 10 years.
Some with the Middle East, former Soviet Bloc, India, etc where things were in complete chaos after the fall of Communism and nationalists, tycoons, and warlord zealots were plundering what was formerly the commons.
Another thing that I would criticize is that it’s overly simplistic to focus on battle deaths. What about the gendercide in China and India? I know it’s mostly abortion, but millions of girls have been killed, abandoned or neglected in the 35 years that it’s been an issue.
What about the rise in human trafficking? I’m pretty sure that’s a bigger issue now than it was in the 1980s, though I could be wrong. Are these just minor aberrations from a greater trend towards world peace, or is Pinker just wrong?
I’m not sure about worldwide numbers, but it’s a well known fact that the 1970’s in the US was the most crime ridden era ever, and thus by definition today is less violent.
I should note here that pinker is not a sociologist, he’s a linguist, so anything he says should be taken with a giant poop ball of salt.
Also, if you could link the article, that would be great…my assumption here is that pinker’s numbers are biased based on the total world population. The Black death, for example, wiped out like 1/3 of the western population at the time.
Sigh. I guess pinker is technically right. No americans were ever killed in such large numbers in such a time period as the Civil War, more people were killed internationally by WWII than any other war ever, flawed communist agricultural strategies caused the deaths of millions in Russia and China, etc.
Infanticide was an extremely widespread practice in many non-Western cultures (as well as in pre-Christian Greece and Rome).
Yes and killings of black people for racial reasons are a bigger issue now than it was a century ago although there were undoubtedly far more racially motivated murders of black people in 1915.
I reread the OP again, and yes, pinker is right. As long as there is nothing like WW2 or the Black Death happening today, there’s less violence than before.
Also, if polio were violence, there is also less polio than before.
I haven’t read his book, but I have read reviews and extracts, and I think he is comparing today (as in recent times) to the more distant past. War then often involved the destruction of entire cities as a warning to others to not resist.
But is he not interested in the long term big picture? I mean I thought a lot of this was comparing stone age times to complex societies? Just give me the page references, I would appreciate it.
IDK if this was a point raised by Pinker or not, but look at anthropological/archaeological data for injuries to hunter gatherer peoples. It was a fairly violent lifestyle. I think he mentions this but I am not sure.
As to his overall ideas, I am more interested in is day to day life more violent, I think events like WWII or the Civil War skew the picture. Of course in the past you had people/events like Genghis Khan and the Visigoths and Roman Legions wiping out whole cities so I’m not sure how you accurately get an idea of “day to day violence”.
I’d also mention that Pinker is taking the long view. Certainly there have been times that were more violent than, say, the previous decade. E.g. more people probably died due to violence from 1935-1945 than the previous 15 years. The long trend, though, is more peaceful.
There was a section in Jared Diamond’s book The World Until Yesterday that asserts that the percentage of a population that dies in warfare every year drops with every advance in weaponry the population adopts. The largest drop is when the population goes from “no firearms” to “any kind of firearms”, IIRC.
So if Pinker is taking the long view and if Diamond’s sources are correct, then yes, advancing technology supposedly leads to fewer deaths in war, ergo fewer deaths by violence.
Pinker’s thesis is not just that the world is less violent today than it was, say, fifty years ago. It’s that there’s been a long-term trend toward less violence over centuries and millenia. He says that the violence that shocks the world today (e.g. that committed by ISIS or the genocide in Rwanda) used to be commonplace. Even everyday interpersonal violence used to be more common. Criminal justice systems are less violent than they used to be. That’s what he says, anyway.
Pinker has a chart in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature on the deadliest events in history (an event being something like a war, a politically-caused famine or a despotic government, not a natural disaster or epidemic). When ranked by absolute numbers of deaths, World War II comes out on top. When ranked by the percentage of the world’s population that was killed, World War II is ninth. According to him, the event with the greatest proportion of the world’s population killed was the An Lushan Revolt in 8th century China, with 36 million deaths, or about a sixth of the world’s population at the time (Pinker does admit that these figures are controversial).
Pinker’s book is long and complex. I’m by no means an expert on the subject of violence over the course of history. I read the book when it came out, and I thought he made a compelling argument. I could be convinced he’s wrong, but I’d like it to be by someone who’s read the book and addresses the whole thing, not just bits and pieces of it.
AFAIK it ignores the apocalyptic potential of nuclear war, in many instances avoided due to luck. There’s an alternate universe somewhere where everyone in the Northern Hemisphere got a really good tan.
It always struck me as odd that industrial scale genocide, bombing, and NBC weapons would be seen as less violent than ancient societies just because they kill a smaller percentage of the whole, yet a much larger amount in total.
In the long term, weapons will get even worse with nano machines, advanced genetically modified bio-weapons, or the ability to direct asteroids. A war between Mars and Earth could end with one shot.