The Myth of Violence

Linguist Stephen Pinker has published his book "The better angels of our nature - Why violence has declined," in which he provides evidence that suggests that proportionally less people are dying violent deaths now than any time in past, including the 10,000, 1,000 and 100 year scales, and that more die due to homicide than war. See his further discussion of this finding in this TED Talk.

I have no objection to his central thesis -- that relative violence has declined -- but he seems to be saying that this has been DESPITE a basically violent, greedy human nature, because social arrangements (Hobbe’s Leviathan) have prevented it. For example, he cites a few modern-day, hunter-gatherer societies as evidence that in primitive times such societies were extremely violent, ignoring many others who could be cited as evidence of the opposite, as well as the fact that most of today's hunter-gatherer bands are under extreme duress due to the pressures of the prevailing economic and political system.

I would argue, rather, that it is not human nature that promotes violence, greed and other deplorable characteristics in man, but rather a lack of adequate socio-political arrangements that does. Or, to be more precise, it is harmful socio-political arrangements that promote violence, conflict and greed, such as the partisan political system that promotes power conflicts, the current brand of capitalism that promotes greed, consumerism and ecological irrationality, and the national security system that promotes insecurity, violence and war, and so forth.

These systems generate what are known as 'social dilemmas', wherein if everyone does exactly as is expected of them according to the logic of the prevalent system, the failures built into the very way the system itself works make it break down and eventually collapse, as we are seeing all around us now. These systems are not undergoing the radical changes required to prevent these social dilemmas, because the way they 'work' is to reward those who have already benefited the most from the system, so they have little incentive to alter the status quo.

The 'human nature' card, rather, has been played for the past few centuries in the West as a way of justifying and legitimizing the status quo in the wake of its major failings, including the horrors of the Conquest, the abuses of European colonial rule, the excesses of modern-day capitalism, the social bankruptcy of party politics, the voraciousness of the industrial-military complex, or the terrors of two World Wars. And a cursory review of the matter shows that this card is still being played masterfully through the media, mostly under the guise of ‘science’.

I do not see us fixing these structures proactively due to a sudden epiphany, but rather tentatively in response to successive small to medium size breakdowns, and only more radically in the wake of more large-scale collapses (e.g., USSR). This is the more painful route to change, but unfortunately the one that we seem to be taking. However, as Steven Pinker says, it has gotten us a long way so far, and there is no reason to believe it will not continue to change the socio-political-economic landscape in new and exciting ways in the near future!