Declining violence

From The Decline of Violence by Ronald Bailey. An interview discussing Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature. It is interesting that Pinker's book is garnering such interest and comment now when Steven Le Blanc's Constant Battles: Why We Fight, made the same argument seven years ago. One difference is that Pinker has invested much more effort in analytical rigor. Perhaps another is just the respective popularity and status of the individuals and institutions. Pinker has written a series of well received books and is a member of the Harvard faculty. Or, as is often the case with ideas and the books that convey them, perhaps it is simple serendipity.

This interview pulls out some of the key ideas which match much of the work I have been doing, trying to pair the trends that have been happening at an historical and national level in terms of success and corresponding behaviors and tropes at the individual and family level. While I cannot yet allocate a relative weighting to the following concepts, it does appear to me that, at both the national and individual level, much of the remarkable achievements of the past five hundred years (all fueled by increased productivity) are attributable to core elements of classical liberalism/The Enlightenment, many of which in the past twenty or thrity years, our academics and chattering classes have turned their backs on, to the detriment of society at large.

The elements that I suspect are inseparably part of classical liberalism/Enlightenment (and the consequent increase in productivity, longevity, health, etc.) would include:

Agency
Freedom
Natural Rights
Pluralism
Rule of Law
Consent of the Governed
Property Rights
Competition
Trade
Trust
Empiricism
Logic
Scientific Method
Checks and Balances
Connectivity
Specialization

Some excerpts from the interview.

reason: Why has violence declined? I think most people would be astonished to hear that.

Steven Pinker: First of all, I have to convince people that there’s a fact that needs to be explained—namely, that violence has declined. And it has, as I demonstrate with 100 graphs and data sets. The reasons, I think, are multiple. One of them is the spread of government, the outsourcing of revenge to a more or less disinterested third party. That tends to ramp down your rates of vendetta and blood feud for all the reasons that we’re familiar with from The Sopranos and The Godfather. If you’ve got a disinterested third party, they’re more likely to nip that cycle in the bud. Not necessarily because they have any benevolent interest in the welfare of their subject peoples, especially in the early governments. Their motive was closer to the motive of a farmer who doesn’t want his livestock killing each other. Namely, it’s a deadweight loss to him.

But even without this benevolent interest, you find that with the first states in the transition from hunting and gathering to settled ways of life, violence goes down, and in the consolidation of kingdoms during the transition from medieval times to modernity, rates of homicide go way down.

reason: What else?

Pinker: A second one is the growth of commerce; opportunities for positive-sum exchange, as opposed to zero-sum plunder. When it’s cheaper to buy something than to steal it, that changes the incentives, and you get each side valuing the other more alive than dead—the theory of gentle commerce [that comes] from the Enlightenment.

[snip]

Pinker: The first states seemed to have in their wake a massive reduction of death in tribal raiding and feuding, basically because it’s a nuisance to the overlords. So you have things like the Pax Romana, the Pax Islamica, the Pax Sinica, in China, where the emperors would much rather have the peasants alive to stock their tax rolls and armies, and be slaves or serfs. So they had a selfish interest in preventing too much internecine feuding among their subject peoples and basically kept them from each other’s throats. Not that it was a life that we would consider particularly pleasant. You’re substituting a lot of violence among tribes and villages and clans for a lesser amount—but still a brutal form of violence—from the state against its citizens.

The next transition, after you have the government preventing people from committing violence against each other, you now have the problem of preventing the government from committing violence against its own peoples. And that was, basically, the advent of democracy and the various reforms of the Enlightenment.

reason: The next reduction in violence occurred as a result of what you call the civilizing process.

Pinker: It’s a term that I borrowed from the German sociologist Norbert Elias, in his book by that name, where he figured out—even in the absence of quantitative data —that Europe had become a less violent place in the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. We now know that he was right, now that historical criminologists have gathered the quantitative data. But he had noticed it just from narrative accounts of what daily life was like. Just people cutting off each other’s noses, stabbing each other over the dinner table in response to an insult—there seems to be less now than there was then. He had an immediate explanation and an ultimate explanation. The immediate explanation was a psychological change. Namely that people exercise more self-control and more empathy. They counted to 10 and swallowed their pride rather than lashing out with a dagger when they’d been insulted. They tried to get inside the heads of other people in general, to figure out what they wanted.

[snip]

The intermediate link was that in order to get ahead during this transition, you no longer had to be the baddest knight in the land. You had to basically take a trip to the king’s court and kiss up to his various minions and bureaucrats. That required inhibiting various impulses—not blowing your nose into your hand and then shaking someone else’s hand, or not gnawing on a bone and putting it back into the serving dish—that weren’t appropriate to the king’s court. So there was a whole set of manners involving self-control that we call courtesy, from the word for court. According to Elias, this habit of self-control—and also empathy, because in an economy based on commerce, you’ve got to keep the customer satisfied, you’ve got to anticipate demand of your clients and customers—[meant that] people exercised what psychologists call today “theory of mind,” an ability to get into other people’s heads. The whole causal chain is government and commerce, [which lead] to self-control and empathy, [which lead] to less impulsive violence.

[snip]

reason: What accounts for what you call the “humanitarian revolution” in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Pinker: My best guess was that it was because of literacy. The first industry to show advances in productivity prior to the Industrial Revolution was bookmaking. Paper got cheaper. Printing is cheaper than handwriting, both because it’s faster and because you can squeeze more text on a given amount of paper. Bookbinding, distribution, all of that increased in the 17th century. There were also ships that could move people around as well as ideas. The first post office.

So you have the republic of letters. You have pamphlets going viral. You have many more books being published. You have higher literacy, so more people can read them. Once you don’t live in a pokey little village, where all of your ideas come from the priest or from the elders, you’re exposed to a whole world of ideas. And you’re allowed to talk about them; you’re not burned at the stake for talking about them. You can get together in pubs and coffeehouses and salons, and hash things out. The discussion’s going to go in some directions rather than others. It’s unlikely that everyone’s going to be persuaded, “Hey, the kings rule by divine right. Isn’t that obviously true?” It’s more likely that a bunch of minds exchanging ideas will maybe see a wee problem in that doctrine.

[snip]

I argue that both the technologies of exchange of ideas and the political infrastructure, namely the freedom of speech—not getting burned or broken or disemboweled if you come up with a heretical idea—will, just in the nature of social relations, push in certain directions, and they’re going to be humanitarian directions. Because humanitarian treatment is just a better way for people to live together than constant war or exploitation.

reason: Moving to this century, you claim we are now in the midst of the Long Peace and the New Peace. What is the Long Peace, and what is the New Peace?

Pinker: Long Peace is a term that I took from the historian John Gaddis, referring narrowly to the absence of war, direct war, between the U.S. and the USSR, confounding all predictions in the late ’80s when he coined the phrase. He and a number of military historians, even in the ’80s, said, “Hey, something very weird is going on. The U.S. and the USSR aren’t going to war. Everyone said they would. How come they haven’t?” And more generally, people noticed, “Hey, what about Western Europe, France and Germany? They’ve gone an awful long time without fighting a war. This is kind of historically unusual.”

There were predictions even then in the late ’80s that something had changed historically, that the use of war, as Clausewitz put it, as continuation of policy by other means, had really changed. War had been taken off the table as a live option. The absence of war involving developed countries, say the 40 or 45 richest countries, and between the great powers, was unusual even in the ’80s. And here we are 25 years after that, and our luck has held out.

The New Peace is another phenomenon that very few people are aware of. Namely, there are war nerds who meticulously tabulate the number of battle deaths year by year in each of a number of categories of armed conflict: civil wars, interstate wars, colonial wars, and so on. They have been stunned, in plotting their data, to notice there’s been a big decline in wars in the rest of the world, starting around the end of the Cold War. All of those nasty little civil wars in Africa, South Asia, and Central and Latin America kind of fizzled out, and no one’s even noticed. More important, the number of people killed has plunged. This past decade, even with all of the wars that we read about, has had the lowest rate of battle deaths of any decade since they started keeping score in 1946. That’s the phenomenon I call the New Peace—that the Long Peace is starting to spread to the rest of the world.

What’s also [interesting is] a finding that I came across after the book had come out, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan—nonviolent vs. violent resistance movements. If you want to topple your government, what works better: mass protests in the street or arming guerrillas? The answer is you can’t tell if you just think of anecdotes, because there are some on each side that work and don’t work. So they tabulated numbers, and they found that about 75 percent of nonviolent resistance movements work, and about 25 percent of violent resistance movements work. Unless you do the counting, you’d never know that there was this massive difference.

[snip]

Pinker: This is a heretical idea coming out of, of all places, Scandinavia. There are war nerds who run regressions trying to predict what leads to escalation, military tensions, or de-escalation. There was a lot of statistical support for an idea called the Democratic Peace. The extreme form is that no two democracies have ever waged war on one another. There’s a new movement to try to argue it’s actually the capitalism, more than the democracy, that’s doing the work in this correlation. And there seem to be data that capitalist countries are less likely to go to war with each other. They’re less likely to go to war, period, including against noncapitalist countries, [and are] less likely to have civil wars, and less likely to have genocides.

reason: In other words, “Make money, not war.”