>> Kirsten Wiley: Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley and I am
here today to introduce and welcome Steven Pinker who is visiting us as part of the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Stephen is here today to discuss his book
The Better Angels of Our Nature. Whether you are counting police blotter murders or
genocides, the spanking of children or the treatment of animals, violence has decreased.
Media coverage of the goriest events has forced us to have a greater awareness of
incidents. The conventional wisdom that we are living in an exceptionally violent era is
an illusion. Stephen Pinker is an experimental psychologist in the Johnstone Family
Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has received six honorary doctorates
and was once named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world
today. Please join me in welcoming him to Microsoft. Thank you.
[applause].
>> Steven Pinker: Believe it or not, and I know most people do not, violence has been in
decline for long stretches of time and we may be living in the most peaceful era in our
species’ existence. The decline of violence has not been steady. It has not brought
violence down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to persuade you
that it is a persistent historical development visible on scales from millennia to years,
from wars and genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals. I'm
going to walk you through six major historical declines of violence. In each case try to
identify their immediate causes, that is particular historical events of the era, and then try
to tie them together in terms of their ultimate causes, mainly general historical forces
interacting with human nature.
The first historical decline of violence I call the pacification process. Until 5000 years
ago humans everywhere lived in a state of anarchy without central government. What
was life like in this state of nature? This is a question that thinkers have speculated on for
hundreds of years. Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a state of nature, the life of man
is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. A century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
countered that nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state.
Now both of these gentlemen were talking through their hats. Neither of them had any
idea what life was like in a state of nature. But today we can do better, because there are
two sources of evidence on rates of violence in nonstate societies. The first is forensic
archaeology. You can think of this as CSI Paleolithic [laughter]. Namely, what
proportion of prehistoric skeletons have signs of violent trauma, such as bashed in skulls,
decapitations, arrowheads embedded in bones or mummies found with ropes around their
necks [laughter]. I found 20 estimates and they span quite a range, but the average is
15%; that is 15% of people in these prehistoric societies died of violence. Let's compare
that 15% figure against those from some modern states, such as Europe and the US in the
20th century, including both world wars, about 6/10 of a percentage point. If we throw in
the entire world and we add not only the deaths from war but the deaths from genocides
and man-made famines and disease and hunger in the wake of war, we get the figure up
to about 3%. The world for the year 2005 has a bar that is invisible because it is less than
a pixel high because the rate is about three hundredths of one percent.
The second source of evidence on violence in nonstate societies comes from ethnographic
vital statistics. The wave of government that expanded starting around 5000 years ago
has left a few pockets of the earth still uncolonized, and ethnographers who work in these
countries can tabulate rate of death from various causes, in particular the rate of death by
violence in people who recently lived outside of state control, hunter gatherers and hunter
horticulturalists. I found 27 estimates which again span quite a range, but they average to
about 524 per hundred thousand per year, that is one half of one percent of the population
was killed by violence every year. Let's compare that to some modern figures and this
time I will stack the deck against modern societies by picking some of the most war-torn
ones, such as Germany in the 20th century with a rate of about 160 per 100,000 per year.
Russia in the 20th century, two world wars and a civil war, a rate of about 150. Japan in
the 20th century, a world war that ended with two nuclear strikes has a rate of about 30.
The United States in the 20th century, two world wars and half a dozen other foreign
wars, less than four per hundred thousand per year. The entire world over the course of
the 20th century, throwing in all of the man-made famines and genocides comes out to
about 60 per 100,000 per year, and the world in the year 2005, less than a pixel high at
about a third of a death in war per hundred thousand per year.
So not to put too fine a point on it, but when it comes to life in a state of nature, Hobbes
was right; Rousseau was wrong. What was the immediate cause? Well, it was likely the
rise of in expansion of states themselves, leading to the various paxes or pieces that
history students read about, the paxes Romana, paxes Islamica, paxes Hispanica and so
on. The reason that this drives down rates of violence is that tribal raiding and feuding is
a nuisance to imperial overlords. It is not that they had a benevolent interest in the
welfare of their citizens, but rather just as a farmer has incentive to prevent his cattle
from killing each other because it is a dead loss to him, so the early kings and emperors
had an interest in stamping out all of this raiding and feuding which just settled scores
among the people or shuffles resources among them, but subtracts from the amount of
tribute and taxation and soldiers and slaves available to the overlord.
Two direct comparisons that make the point, one of them from forensic archaeology
compares the number of battered skeletons from an enormous sample of prehistoric
skeletons in the Americas all prior to the arrival of Columbus. The rate of violent trauma
among these skeletons that came from hunter gatherer native American societies was
more than 13%. The rate from people who lived under state control was less than 3%, a
greater than five fold difference. A second direct comparison from ethnographic vital
statistics compares the homicide rate among the Kung San, the so-called bushmen of the
Kalahari desert, before the imposition of state control by the government in Botswana
which is more than 40 per hundred thousand per year. Within a decade of state control it
had fallen to less than 30 per hundred thousand per year.
The second major historical decline of violence can be illustrated in this woodcut
showing a day in the life of the Middle Ages [laughter]. The process by which this
mayhem was brought under control has been called the civilizing process. It turns out
that homicide statistics go back in many parts of Europe literally centuries and historical
criminologists have plotted them over time. This graph runs from the year 1200 to the
year 2000 and plots the homicide rate on a logarithmic scale from a 10th of a homicide
per hundred thousand per year to one, to ten to one hundred and the graph shows that in
several data sets there has been a massive decline in homicide in England so that a
contemporary Englishman has less than 1/35 the chance of been murdered as his
medieval ancestors. This is a phenomenon that was not restricted to England but took
place all over Europe. Here we have similar graphs from Italy, the Netherlands,
Germany and Switzerland and Scandinavia. Here is the average of those five regions
resulting in approximately a 30 fold decline. For comparison's sake I have put the
average for the non-state societies, nearly 524 per hundred thousand per year. This gap is
what I call the pacification process. This subsequent decline I call the civilizing process.
I got the term from a classic book by the sociologist Norbert Elias which he argued that
during the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity there was a consolidation of
Central states and kingdoms out of the patchwork of duchies and principalities and
baronies that had polka-dotted the content. As a result criminal justice was nationalized
and the warlord activity of the medieval Knights and the constant feuding and brigandage
gave way to the King’s justice. Also during this transition there was a growing
infrastructure of commerce, instruments of finance such as money and enforceable
contracts that could be recognized within the borders of the newly consolidated states,
and technologies of transportation, better roads and carts and of timekeeping, which
lubricated trade and shifted the incentive structure from zero-sum plunder to positive sum
trade, a point that I will return to later in the talk.
The psychological result was that people started to cultivate self-control and empathy as
opposed to burnishing their reputation for toughness and willingness to retaliate with
violence. The third major transition can be illustrated by some of the techniques that the
first kingdoms used to enforce order within their borders, extreme corporal punishment
such as breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, clawing, sawing in half and
impalement through the rectum. But in a process historians have called the humanitarian
revolution these forms of cruel punishment were eliminated. This is a timeline showing
when 16 major countries eliminated cruel punishments. The abolitions were concentrated
in the second half of the 18th century, including our own famous prohibition of cruel and
usual punishment in the eighth amendment of the US Constitution.
Also abolished during this era was the profligate application of the death penalty for
nonlethal crimes. In 18th century England the death penalty was used for 222 offenses
including poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren, being in the company of
Gypsies and strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7 to 14 years of age. These
penalties were not just on the law books but were put into practice exuberantly in the age
of Samuel Johnson for example, an eight-year-old girl was hanged for stealing a
petticoat. Similarly by 1861 the number of capital crimes in England had been reduced to
four. Likewise in 17th and 18th century America the death penalty was used for theft,
sodomy, bestiality, adultery, witchcraft, concealing birth, burglary, slave revolt,
counterfeiting and horse theft. This graph shows the percentage of American executions
for crimes other than murder from 1650 to 2000. In the colonial and early federal period
the majority of executions were for non-lethal crimes. In the past decade the only crime
other than murder that has been punished by death is conspiracy to commit murder.
The death penalty itself has been withering away in every western democracy except our
own. The red timeline shows that there was a wave of abolitions of the death penalty.
This is the number of countries that have capital punishment. These were mainly
concentrated in the 20th century. However, well before capital punishment was struck
from the books, European countries had lost their taste for applying it, and the blue line
shows the number of European countries that actually carried out executions. An average
of 50 years elapsed between the formal abolition of capital punishment and the last time
that it was used in practice in a given country.
The United States is notoriously an outlier in this trend, or I should say that 34 of the 50
states are outliers, because it has been abolished even in the United States in 16 out of the
50. But even there the death penalty in the US is a shadow of its former self and this
graph shows the number of American executions per capita from 1625 to the present. So
you can see that for all of its notoriety, the death penalty in fact is seldom applied in this
country. There are approximately 45 executions per year in a country that has 17,000
homicides. Also abolished during the humanitarian revolution were witch hunts,
religious persecution, like burning heretics at the stake, dueling, blood sports, debtors’
prisons and most famously slavery. This graph is a timeline of abolition of slavery
among 70 or so major countries. You can see that in the 16th century slavery was pretty
much legal all over the world, but in a process that began to take off in the second half of
the 18th century, country after country abolished it. The wave finally hit the last corner
of the globe in 1980 when Mauritania became the last country to abolish legal slavery.
What were the immediate causes of the humanitarian revolution? One guess is affluence.
One might surmise that as people's lives became longer and more pleasant, they put a
higher value on their own lives and by extension the lives of others. The problem is that
the timing doesn't work out for that hypothesis. Here we have a graph that plots per
capita income in England from 1200 to 2000, and you can see that the affluence really
only began to take off with the industrial revolution of the 19th century and an 18th
century Englishman lived barely better than his medieval ancestors. Yet the momentum
for all of these humanitarian reforms was concentrated in the 18th century. A better
hypothesis is that printing and literacy had something to do with it. Book publishing was
the only technology that showed a substantial increase in productivity prior to the
Industrial Revolution. This graph shows that between 1500 and 1700 there was a greater
than 20 fold increase in the economic efficiency of printing books. These gains were put
into practice so that in the 18th century there was an exponential increase in the number
of books published per decade. And not surprisingly, there were more people available to
consume these books. Literacy in England first exceeded the 50% point in the 18th
century. So for the first time the majority of Englishmen were literate.
Why should literacy matter? Well the era is also called the Enlightenment because
knowledge began to replace superstition and ignorance and if you have an influential
sector of the population that is disabused of notions such as that Jews poison wells,
heretics go to hell, witches caused crop failures, children are possessed by the devil,
Africans are brutish and so on, it will undermine many rationales for violence. As
Voltaire said during this era "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities." But also, literacy is one of several technologies of cosmopolitanism,
the mixing of ideas and people. And it is plausible that the reading of fiction, history and
journalism could accustom people to inhabiting other people's minds to imagining what
the world is like from their point of view, which could increase empathy and decrease
cruelty. Perhaps if you have grown up habitually considering what it is like to be other
people, you take less pleasure in watching them sawn in half.
The fourth major decline of violence has been called the Long Peace and it speaks to the
frequently made assertion that the 20th century was the most violent in history.
However, almost no one who makes that claim ever cites any numbers from any century
other than the 20th, so it is a trend that is conjured out of one data point. Sometimes the
20th is compared unfavorably to the 19th century and it is true that the 19th century in
Europe saw two stretches that were relatively free of war, but if you stand back and you
look at the century as a whole, and the world as a whole, you find that it was anything but
peaceable. The 19th century included the Napoleonic wars in Europe with 4 million
deaths. In China the most destructive civil war in history, the Taiping rebellion with 20
million deaths, the most destructive war in American history, the Civil War with 650,000
deaths. The conquest of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa with one to two million deaths.
In Paraguay the most destructive interstate war as a proportion of the population was the
war of the Triple Alliance which may have killed 60% of the population of Paraguay.
Then there were frequent slave raiding wars in Africa and imperial wars in Africa, Asia
and the South Pacific whose death tolls we can't even begin to estimate.
Secondly though it is true that the second world war was the deadliest event in human
history as far as the absolute numbers, it is not so clear that it was the worst event in
terms of the percentage of the population that was killed. After all, the world contained
all whole lot more people in the middle of the 20th century than it ever had before. I
have taken a list of the hundred worst things that people have ever done to one another
that we know of from a man who calls himself an atrocitologist, [laughter] Matthew
White. He has a forthcoming book called The Great Big Book of Horrible Things. I took
his list of the hundred worst things and simply scaled them by the population of the world
at the time and plotted them on a logarithmic access from the year 500 B.C.E. to 2000 CE
and as you can see scale by population, World War II only comes in at ninth place in
World War I doesn't even make the top ten.
Moreover, all of the really bad atrocities were pretty evenly sprinkled over 2500 years of
human history. There is a downward funneling of the data points as you get to the most
recent 500 years, but presumably that doesn't mean that in ancient times they only
committed massive atrocities, and more recently we have committed massive, medium
sized and small atrocities. A simpler explanation is that as you get to the past 500 years
the historical record becomes more complete. In earlier times the small stuff was lost to
history. Well let's now zoom in on the last 500 years for which we do have better
historical records. Political scientist Jack Levy has plotted trends in great power war.
These are the wars that involved the 800 pound gorillas of the day; that is the countries
that, the small number of countries that project military force beyond their own borders.
The wars that they get involved in account for a majority of all of the deaths of all wars
combined in any given era. This graph shows the percentage of years the great powers
fought each other from 1500 to 2000 and it shows that several centuries ago the great
powers were pretty much always at war with each other; that was just what great powers
did. But over the centuries they have been involved in war less and less of the time.
Now they are hardly ever at war.
This graph shows the duration of wars involving a great power, which also shows a
substantial decline. History used to have things like the 30 years war, the 80 years war,
100 years war. The 20th century had the Six-Day War [laughter]. Here we see the
frequency of wars involving a great power. How often would a new war begin and bear
to the trend is definitely downward over the centuries. But there is one trend that went in
the opposite direction, that got worse over most of this interval and that is once a war
began how quickly could it kill people? That is what is the number of battle deaths per
nation year and that trend went up through most of this period until 1950 where it
abruptly made a U-turn and we are now living in a unique period in which the frequency
of big wars has declined, the duration of the wars has declined and the number of deaths
per year of great wars has declined. If you throw all of these variables together, you get a
total aggregate rate of death that zigzags up and down, but the period that we are living in
has a record low rate of deaths in great power wars.
If we zoom in on the past century, those are just four data points, but let's spread them
out, you see that there were two horrific spikes of death in war corresponding to the two
world wars, but that rather than displaying an escalating trend, it was more of a last gasp,
and over the last two thirds of a century we have been living through a period with a
relatively low rate of death in warfare. This period has been called the long peace. Since
1946 there has been a historically unprecedented decline in interstate war, that is wars
with a government on each side. There were no wars in particular between the two
biggest gorillas, the US and the Soviet Union, contrary by the way to all expert
predictions that a third world war was inevitable. No nuclear weapon has been used since
Nagasaki; that is 66 years and counting, again, contradicting all expert predictions that
nuclear war was only a matter of time. There have been no great power wars since 1953
when the Korean War ended, no wars between Western European countries, which may
seem too banal to mention. Well, of course, no one expects France and Germany to go to
war [laughter]. Needless to say this is a historically unusual situation. In fact Western
European countries would start two new wars a year for 600 years. In 1945 that went to
zero.
And there have been no wars between developed countries, that is the 45 countries with
the highest GDP per capita have not gone to war since 1945. Again an historically
unusual state of affairs; we tend to think of wars nowadays as things that happen in those
remote primitive poor parts of the world, but it used to be the rich countries that were
constantly at war. And two rich countries with two sophisticated armies can do a lot of
damage.
But what about the rest of the world? The rest of the world as well has been affected by
these processes in a phenomenon I call The New Peace. Since 1946, as I mentioned,
there have been fewer interstate wars. Unfortunately there have been more civil wars as
newly independent states with inept governments were challenged by insurgent
movements, both sides stoked, financed and armed by the Cold War superpowers.
However, I am going to show you that since 1991, the end of the Cold War, even the
number of civil wars declined. This is a stacked layer graph in which the thickness of
each line represents the number of wars, where a war for the purposes of this graph
consists of any armed conflict that kills as few as 25 people a year. This graph just adds
them up. One category of war, the colonial war, has simply vanished off the face of the
earth as the European empires relinquished their colonies. This layer shows the number
of interstate wars and you can see that it is a phenomenon that is petering out. However,
these two layers which represent the number of purely internal civil wars and
internationalized civil wars where a foreign country butts in to help a government fight
off the rebels, both of them showed a steady increase. However, as of 1991 that trend has
reversed itself and now civil wars have begun to decrease.
The crucial question though is which wars kill more people, many civil wars of recent
decades or the fewer interstate wars of earlier decades? This graph shows first of all in
the blue bars the number of people killed per year of war for interstate wars between
countries and you see that that has plummeted. Here we have the internationalized civil
wars and the pure civil wars showing that a typical Civil War of recent decades kills a
fraction of the number of people as the interstate wars of the earlier decades. It shouldn't
be a surprise then what happens when we combine these two statistics, that is number of
wars, number of people killed per year of war and simply tally up the total number of war
deaths. Again from 1946 to 2009 these are the number of deaths from colonial wars,
which have petered out to zero. The number of deaths from interstate wars is a jagged
trajectory with peaks that include the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Iran Iraq war
have gone down to virtually zero. And here we have the pure civil wars and the
internationalized civil wars and you can see that even though they increased in number,
they did not make up for the total decline in war in terms of the human damage done and
the trajectory overall has been bumpy but downward.
Here we are in the first decade of the 21st century and this thin laminate shows that the
rate of death in wars of all kinds is at an all-time low, so the dream of the 1960s folk
singers is starting to come true. The world is almost putting an end to war.
Well what about genocide? It is often said that more people died in the 20th century
from genocide than from war. Indeed the 20th century has been called the age of
genocide. Once again though, this claim is never based on any comparison of decades
other than the 20th and it is likely to be false. Every historian of genocide has made this
point.
I will quote to you from Fred Chalk at Kurt Jonassohn’s The History of Genocide where
on page one they announce "genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and
during all periods in history. We know that in ancient times empires have disappeared
and that cities were destroyed, but we do not know what happened to the bulk of the
populations involved in these events. Their fate was simply too unimportant. When they
were mentioned at all, they were usually lumped together with the herds of oxen, sheep,
and other livestock. Looking at the available evidence from antiquity, one might develop
a hypothesis that most wars at that time were genocidal in character."
What are some examples? Let me just make one additional point which is really that the
so-called age of genocide is the age at which people started to care about genocide as is
evidenced by the fact that for the first time in history we have a word for the phenomenon
coined only in 1944. Here are some examples. Depending on how seriously you take
biblical history, you find a genocide every few pages commanded by God the Amalekites
Amorites, Canaanites, Hivites, Hittites, Jebusites, Midianites and so on. Now I don't
believe that these events actually took place and archaeology does not support these
narratives, but it does record a common practice of the empires of the day as well as an
attitude, mainly there is nothing particularly wrong with genocide as long as it doesn't
happen to you. More historically plausible are the massacres by the Athenians and
Melos, by the Romans in Carthage, the Mongol invasions, the Crusades, the European
wars of religion and the colonization of the Americas, Africa and Australia.
Now for the 20th century, we can at least roughly look at some trends, and address the
question of whether the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda mean that the world has learned
nothing from the Holocaust and that nothing has changed. This graph shows that that is
very far from true. There was a horrific episode of mass murder in the middle decades of
the 20th century, but since then the trajectory has been bumpy but unmistakably
downward and the recent spikes from Cambodia and Rwanda don't come close to
matching the levels of the earlier decades in that century.
What were the immediate causes of the Long Peace and the New Peace? Three
hypotheses were advanced a couple of centuries ago by Immanuel Kant in his essay
Perpetual Peace in which he argued that democracy, trade and an international
community would lower levels of tension between nations. More recently Bruce Russett
and John O'Neal have tested Kant’s theory and have shown in a large data set that all
three of his pacifying forces have increased in the second half of the 20th century and all
are statistical predictors of peace.
Here we have from 1945 to present the number of democracies in the world and the
number of autocracies and you can see that as of 1990 for the first time the number of
democracies surpassed the number of autocracies. This is not something that we should
take for granted. In 1975 at a low point for democracy relative to autocracy, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan wrote an essay in which he said that democracy was going to go the
way of monarchy, namely its moment had come and gone and that there was no future to
it. Fortunately he proved to be wrong.
International trade plotted here between 1890 and 2000 has shown a huge increase since
the end of World War II. Membership in intergovernmental organizations has increased
steadily since 1890 but it showed a jump and a continuing increase after 1945. And a
second kind of international community namely peacekeepers, a kind of international
police force, has increased during the postwar period. Most dramatically the number of
peacekeepers, that is the number of soldiers with blue helmets who get themselves in
between warring forces has skyrocketed and a number of statistical studies have shown
that peacekeepers don't always keep the peace, but statistically they keep the peace far
more often than when the two sides are left to fight it out to the bitter end.
The final historical decline of violence I will present I call the rights revolutions, the
targeting of violence on smaller scales directed against vulnerable sectors of the
population, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals. The
civil rights movement helped put an end to lynching which used to occur in the 19th
century at a rate of about 150 a year. That declined to zero by the 1950s. Hate crime
murders of blacks have been recorded by the FBI since the 1990s. They were never very
plentiful to begin with about five a year. Even that has gone down to one a year.
Nonlethal hate crimes against blacks such as intimidation and assault have been in
decline since they were first measured 15 years ago. The kind of racist attitudes that have
encouraged an atmosphere of menace towards racial minorities has decreased. This
graph shows the results of opinion polls conducted at various points in time showing that
when white Americans are asked do you agree with the statement black and white
students should go to separate schools, the percentage agreeing has plummeted. Likewise
would you move away if a black family moved in next door. Both of these opinions have
fallen into the zone of crank opinion and the questions are no longer included in national
surveys.
It is a worldwide phenomenon. This graph shows the number of countries that have
discriminatory laws on their books, various apartheid or Jim Crow laws, and that has
been in steady decline. The blue line shows the number of countries that bend over
backwards in the opposite direction and have policies that favor disadvantaged ethnic
minorities by what we call affirmative action. And recently the number of countries that
discriminate in favor of their disadvantaged minorities exceeds the number that
discriminates against them.
The women's rights movement has helped to drive down the rate of rape by 80% since it
was first measured in the early 1970s. It has had a similar success in reducing the rate of
domestic violence since the early 1990s, both against wives and girlfriends and against
husbands and boyfriends, though more dramatically for women. The ultimate form of
domestic violence is uxoricide, the murder of wife, or mariticide, the murder of a
husband; both of them have been in decline since 1975. The drop has been more
dramatic for mariticide showing that the feminist movement has been very, very good for
husbands [laughter]. The children's rights movement has seen a steady decline in the
number of American states that allow corporal punishment in schools such as paddling.
Every public opinion poll has shown declining approval of the practice of spanking or
smacking children. Rates of child abuse, both physical and sexual abuse have declined
since they were first measured in 1990. And the victimization of children in school from
fights and nonfatal crimes have been in decline since they were first measured.
The gay rights movement has seen an increase in the number of states that have removed
homosexuality as a punishable crime from their law books both worldwide, and among
the 50 American states. The number is now at 100% following a Supreme Court ruling
in 2004. In every public opinion poll anti-gay attitudes have been in the decline, such as
whether homosexuality is morally wrong, should be criminalized or whether gay people
should be denied equal opportunity. And hate crime intimidation against homosexuals
has been in decline since they were first measured.
The animal rights movement has seen a decrease in the popularity of hunting, an increase
in the number of vegetarians both in the UK and in the US and a decrease in the number
of motion pictures in which animals were harmed [laughter].
The question now is why has violence declined on so many scales of time and
magnitude? One possibility is that human nature itself has changed and that somehow
our taste for violence has been bred, literally bred out of this. While I think this is
unlikely, we still see little boys play fighting in all human cultures. We see grown-up
little boys and little girls taking enormous enjoyment in spending substantial disposable
income to consume vicarious violence, such as in murder mysteries, Greek tragedies,
Shakespearean dramas [laughter] video games, hockey and movies starring a certain exgovernor of California [laughter]. And many people are prone to homicidal fantasies. If
you ask people have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like, for
example, a romantic rival or someone who has humiliated you in public. The results are
that about 15% of women and a third of men frequently fantasize about killing [laughter]
people they don't like. More than 60% of women and three quarters of men at least
occasionally fantasize about killing people that they don't like, and the rest of them are
lying. [laughter].
A more likely possibility is that human nature is extraordinarily complex and comprises
both inclinations that can erupt in violence and inclinations that counteract them, what
Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, and that historical circumstances
have increasingly favored our peaceable inclinations. What are some of our inclinations
toward violence? Well, they include raw exploitation, the use of violence to eliminate a
human being that happens to be an obstacle on the path to what you want, such as in rape,
plunder, conquest and the elimination of rivals. The urge for dominance whether it be the
desire of individuals to climb the pecking order and become alpha male, or a similar
motive at the level of your group, the desire for your group, whether it be ethnic, racial,
national or religious to enjoy supremacy over other groups. A very large category of
moralistic violence, that is revenge, where you feel not only that you are permitted to
commit violence in retaliation for some harm done to you, but that you might even feel
obligated to do it, resulting in vendettas, rough justice, and cruel punishments.
And then ideologies, belief systems that can proliferate throughout a society such as
militant religions, nationalism, fascism, Nazi-ism and communism can license vast
outlays of violence because of a utopian cost-benefit analysis. Imagine a belief system
that holds out the promise of a world that will be infinitely good forever, a utopia. Well,
how much violence would you be entitled to perpetrate in order to bring about that
perfect world? Well, as much as you want and you are still ahead of the game. The
benefits outweigh the costs.
Moreover, imagine that there are people who learn about your scheme for an infinitely
perfect world and just don't get with the program and oppose you in your grand utopian
dreams. How evil are they? Well, they are arbitrarily evil. They are the only thing
standing in the way of an infinitely good world and hence they deserve arbitrarily severe
punishment, which is why some of the worst atrocities in human history have been
committed in pursuit of a utopian ideology.
Well what we have on the other side to counteract these inclinations? What are the better
angels of our nature? They are self-control, the ability to anticipate the consequences of
behavior and inhibit violent impulses. Empathy, the capacity to feel others' pain, the
moral sense which can actually push in both directions because there are some moral
intuitions such as tribalism, authority and Puritanism that can increase violence, but a
sense of fairness can decrease it. And then there is reason, cognitive processes that allow
us to engage in objective detached analysis. The crucial question now is which historical
developments bring out our better angels and stay our hands before they can actually
cause bloodshed?
One possibility is that Hobbs got it right when he called for a leviathan, a state and
judicial system with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence because, first of all, the
leviathan can eliminate the incentives for exploitative attack by punishing aggressors and
canceling out their anticipated gain. Since it is not just you that is deterred by the
leviathan, but your enemies, that means you can relax and you no longer have to maintain
a belligerent stance of deterrence and vengeance. The outsourcing your dispute
resolution to a third-party can circumvent the self-serving biases by which everyone
always believes that they are on the side of the angels and their adversaries are
treacherous and evil and permanently malevolent.
A cycle of self deception that can stoke cycles of revenge as each side believes that there
is still a score to be settled, that their own act of violence is a legitimate retaliation to a
provocation and the other guy’s active violence was raw aggression out of the blue.
Some historical evidence for the effective leviathan come from the pacifying and
civilizing effects of states that I mentioned at the outset of the talk. The fact that you can
watch that movie run in reverse when government retreats and vacates a zone of anarchy,
such as the American wild west where the cliché in the cowboy movies was that the
nearest sheriff is 200 miles away, so you have to defend yourself with your gun and a
reputation for being willing to use it. In failed states, in collapsed empires and in mafias
and street gangs who deal in contraband and can't avail themselves of the dispute
resolution apparatus of the state, it is not as if they can press a lawsuit when they feel that
they have been cheated in a business deal or call 911 when they feel threatened, and so
they have to defend their interests with the credible threat and occasional use of violence.
Another bit of evidence for the effectiveness of the leviathan is the fact that international
peacekeepers are statistically effective, the closest that we have to an international
leviathan.
A second hypothesis is the idea of gentle commerce, according to which plunder is a
zero-sum gain when one party's gain is another one’s loss. Whereas trade is a positive
sum gain, one in which both sides can come out ahead and everybody wins. Over the
centuries as improving technology allows the trade of goods and ideas over longer
distances, among larger groups of people and at lower cost, more and more of the rest of
the world becomes more valuable alive than dead. Much has been written for example
about the rivalry between the United States and China, the fact that China might surpass
the United States in economic output. Nonetheless, I consider it unlikely that this rivalry
will eventuate in war between the two countries. Among other things they make too
much of our stuff and we owe them too much money [laughter]. Some historical
evidence comes from statistical analyses that suggest that countries with open economies
and greater reliance on international trade get embroiled in fewer wars, are party to fewer
civil wars and post fewer genocides.
A third hypothesis has been caused the expanding circle. The term comes from Peter
Singer but the idea goes back to Charles Darwin, that evolution bequeathed us with a
sense of empathy. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very small circle of
friends and families and cute warm fuzzy little things [laughter]. But that over the course
of history, you can see the circle of empathy expand to embrace the village, the clan, the
tribe, the nation, other races, both sexes, children and eventually other species. This just
begs the question of what expanded the circle, and the move towards greater
cosmopolitanism that I mentioned earlier is a plausible exogenous cause. It is possible
that the consumption of history, literature, media and journalism has gotten people into
the habit of imagining what it is like to be other people, likewise the mixing of people
through travel. And laboratory studies have shown that if you get a person to adopt the
perspective of a real or fictitious other person by listening to their stories or reading their
words, you become more sympathetic not only to that individual but to the category of
people that that individual represents.
Some historical evidence includes at least the sequence in which the humanitarian
reforms of the 17th and 18th century were preceded by the Republic of Letters, the great
expansion and exchange of ideas through writing. The fact that the long peace and rights
revolutions in the 20th century occurred in the electronic global village and though it is
too early to tell it seems plausible that if the color revolutions and Arab spring succeed,
they will have been fostered by the internet and social media.
Finally there is the escalator of reason, the possibility that the growth of literacy,
education and public discourse encourage people to think more abstractly and more
universally. That in turn got them to rise above their parochial vantage point. It makes it
harder to privilege your own interests over others. It replaces a morality based on
tribalism, authority and Puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules.
It allows people to step back and recognize the futility of cycles of violence and
increasingly to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.
Some historical evidence includes the fact that abstract reasoning abilities as measured by
IQ tests increased over the course of the 20th century, the so-called Flynn effect
illustrated in this graph showing that IQ has increased by three percentage points a
decade throughout the 20th century. Other studies have shown that people in societies
with higher levels of education and intelligence commit fewer violent crimes holding all
else equal, cooperate more in experimental gains, have more classically liberal attitudes
such as opposition to racism and sexism, and 10 years down the line are more receptive
to democracy.
The final question is if these various forces have pushed to make the world a more
peaceful place, why have so many of them pushed all in the same direction? And I think
best guess is that violence is what game theorists call a social dilemma, namely it is
always tempting to an aggressor to exploit a victim, but it is ruinous to the victim. If in
the long term you are likely to be either on the aggressor side or on the victim side,
everyone is better off if everyone simultaneously agrees to avoid violence. The human
dilemma is how to get the other guy to refrain from violence at the same time that you do
because if you unilaterally turn your swords into plowshares, you might be unpleasantly
surprised to be at the receiving end of another side that still has kept its swords as swords.
So the problem is, how do you get both sides to abjure violence at the same time. One
can imagine that over the course of history human experience and human ingenuity have
gradually chipped away at this problem, just as we have gradually dealt with other
scourges of nature like pestilence and hunger. In fact all four of the forces that I
mentioned have increased the material, emotional or cognitive incentives of all parties to
avoid violence at the same time. Whatever the explanation turns out to be for the decline
of violence, I think it has profound implications. For one thing it calls for a reorientation
of our efforts towards violence reduction from a moralistic mindset to an empirical
mindset. That is instead of asking why is there war, perhaps we would be better off
asking why is there peace. Instead of what are we doing wrong, we might ask what have
we been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would seem to
me to be important to try to figure out exactly what it is.
Also I think the decline of violence calls for a reassessment of modernity, of the currents
that have worked for centuries to erode family, tribe, tradition and religion in favor of
individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason and science. Everyone acknowledges that
modernity has lengthened our lives, made them more healthy, reduced ignorance and
superstition, expanded the range of our experiences, but there have always been forces of
nostalgia and romanticism that question the price, whether we are actually worse off
because of terrorism, genocide, world wars and nuclear weapons. However, if despite
impressions, the long-term trend, though halting and incomplete, is that violence of all
kinds is decreasing, I believe that calls for a rehabilitation of the concepts of modernity
and progress and is a cause for gratitude for the institutions of civilization and
enlightenment that have made them possible. Thank you very much.
[applause].
>> Steven Pinker: Yes?
>>: When mentioning genocide, you mentioned Mongols. So many years ago I was
puzzled how such a small nation took over the world and from whatever literature I read,
my impression was it was not genocide. Quite the opposite. They were accepting so
many people who were discriminating in their own society joined one goal.
>> Steven Pinker: No. I think there was--they basically had a policy of using the threat
of genocide as a weapon to get the cities at the time to capitulate. If the cities capitulated
they were absorbed. The ones who didn't, in order to make the threat credible were then
massacred down to the last woman and child. So what you say is right for the ones that
lay down and said okay we are yours, but not for the others. So the death tolls were
enormously high, as were, at least for the men. For women the fate was usually rape
instead of death. And that has left a genetic signature, in the fact, that in the former
territories of the Mongol empires 1/8 of the men have a Y-chromosome that most likely
belonged to Genghis Khan, so an eight of Asian men in the territories of the Mongol
Empire have Genghis Khan's Y-chromosome because the vast number of women that he
and his sons impregnated in their conquests. Yes?
>>: What was the effect of interdicting variables such as the advancement of medical
arts in decreasing the statistic of deaths across the wars?
>> Steven Pinker: I think not that big across the wars, mainly because until the 20th
century, most doctors were quacks and probably killed as many people as they saved.
There probably have been some reductions such as deaths in warfare in recent decades
with the advances in emergency medicine and some of the more recent homicide decline,
although at least some of it is due to medical advances. The reason that I think it is not
that significant a factor quantitatively is first of all that the events that resulted in truly
massive death tolls, could not have been mitigated by advances in medicine such
Hiroshima. The Hamburg and Dresden, siege of Leningrad and Stalingrad where you
just couldn't get the doctors out there and a lot of the deaths were from starvation and
they were so intentional that the doctors would not have been allowed there even if they
could've saved their lives.
Also, it is interesting that the effect that medicine has had in a sense is a reflection of the
greater value that we place on life, namely that governments increasingly have been
willing to devote resources away from battlefield technology to bring soldiers back alive
and that itself, the very recent advances have themselves been part of this evaluation of
human life. Yes?
>>: My question is as you look at the historical record, is there a point when you go back
that it becomes possible to tell what the statistics were, like can you track in Western
Europe or something like that perhaps you can track in Africa or Asia, at what point did
that happen in your data that you discovered that?
>> Steven Pinker: There isn't one dividing line between unreliable and reliable, but there
are different kinds of reliability for different parts of the world for different kinds of
violence for different periods which I try to deal with in the book. The earliest periods,
basically rooted in the ethnographic vital statistics and forensic archaeology, neither of
which is perfect, but both convincingly show that even if we don't know how violent it
was, it was very violent and the chance of an individual dying of violence were far, far
higher than they are today.
I think the homicide records in Europe aren't bad. They go back as that graph showed to
about 1200, depending on the area. Homicide unlike other forms of violence is more
accountable just because a dead body doesn't have to, people don't have to haggle over
definitions as they might for assault or rape, or a missing person. And people have
always been interested in death. If someone among you has been walking the earth and
now is a corpse, people tend to write that down, and so those records tend to be more
reliable. And different forms of violent crime, not perfectly but on average tend to rise
and fall together, that is rape, assault and robbery. Deaths in various wars and atrocities
of the earlier centuries are indeed highly conjectural and the figures that I presented from
most of them from Matthew White are based on the best kind of numerical estimation
that he could justify, which basically consists of assembling as exhaustive a list of
estimates as you can from earlier historians, take the geometric mean between the highest
credible estimate and the lowest credible estimate and usually that gets you into the
ballpark of what the correct figure must've been. With sanity checks for how many
people could have been killed per day, how large the population was to rule out the
clearly fanciful and apocryphal estimates. So the answer is we really don't know with
precision for earlier centuries, but the atrocitologists have done the best they could with
at least to an order of magnitude estimate. Yes?
>>: To what extent [inaudible] Nobel Peace Prize enter into your case?
>> Steven Pinker: The Nobel Peace Prize, yeah. I don't know if it is the Nobel Peace
Prize itself, but the kind of attitudes that resulted in Nobel funding the Nobel Peace Prize
were part of a movement that originated in the late 19th century, the whole pacifist
movement that included Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain and a small
number of others. They were originally considered to be cranks and dreamers and kind
of wimpy, effeminate utopians, and in fact, the dominant ideology at the time of Nobel
was kind of a romantic militarism, that war was a good thing because it made a society
manly and self-sacrificing and encouraged solidarity and selflessness in loyalty and all
these good things. Then World War I was a turning point. After the carnage of World
War I you could no longer credibly say that war was a positive force in human affairs as
every literary critic, artist, novelist, politician and scientist believed before then. So the
Nobel alternative that peace ought to be encouraged cherished and so on I think took over
the elite opinion of the West after World War I. Unfortunately it did not persuade a small
number of individuals like Mussolini and Hitler and Tojo and one could even see World
War II as the last gasp of romantic militarism. But that the momentum that Nobel and
others began has basically taken over elite opinion since then. So I think in the realm of
ideas, and I do believe that ideas matter in affecting the course of history, I think Nobel
was influential. Yes?
>>: I was wondering if you see any reason to believe that these trends will reverse or if
maybe now one may argue that now is a good time and as say natural resources dwindle,
these trends will reverse or something like that. Any thoughts on that?
>> Steven Pinker: Yes, it is possible that some might. Although I don't think that it is
inevitable. Though I think that some trends are probably irreversible. I don't see chattel
slavery making a comeback. I don't think that we are going to go back to burning
heretics at the stake. Probably violence against women and corporal punishment of
children I suspect will continue to go downward, but civil wars would be very hard to
predict. They have gone up from the ‘60s to the 1990s. The reason that I think it is not,
although I wouldn't predict that they are going to stay at the current low level or diminish
further, they might. They might not. And the reason that I don't think that it will
definitely reverse is because the connection between resource conflict and war is actually
quite tenuous. A number of studies that have correlated resource stress at time one with
Civil War at time two have found almost zero correlation. Partly because a lot of civil
wars, a lot of wars in general are not fought over competition for vital resources, but over
revenge, ideology, bringing about Marxism, bringing about Islamic theocracy, bringing
about perfect justice, making conquests and so on. And on the other side so many wars
aren't triggered by resource conflict and many resource conflicts don't lead to war.
To get a war you need somebody to organize a militia or army and kind of press the war
button, and that depends on someone wanting the war to take place and just resource
shortages won't necessarily do that. Just to give you an example, the American dust bowl
of the 1930s led to a lot of human misery and a lot of migration, but it did not result in an
American civil war. When we did have a Civil War, it was not all about resources, at
least not directly. So my best guess is maybe, but maybe not. Let's see who has had their
hand up for a long period of time? Yes?
>>: I am wondering if just counting deaths is an inaccurate assessment of violence,
especially in the second half of the 20th century where larger civilian populations would
have been the potential victims of death. The Battle of Britain where a large civilian
population was actually subject to violence but may have survived due to better defenses
or better medical care et cetera.
>> Steven Pinker: Well, ultimately I think what we care about is the number of people
who are killed, or injured or raped and so on and they tend to at least the level of crime,
they tend to go up and down together, so using deaths as a reasonable proxy for other
kinds of violence, that would also be true in times of wartime for injuries, for example,
compared to deaths, things that kill people when they are successful will injure them
when they are unsuccessful. Granted, it depends as well on the power of your defensive
arrangements, but what happens in war often is that the arms race will result in a better
defense motivates the other side if they are motivated to prevail in the first place, to beef
up their offense and vice versa. In general, over most of the course of the last 500 years,
even though you would expect offensive and defensive technologies to increase in
tandem, it seems to be that until 1950, more people ended up dead, probably because of
advances in defense spawned further advances in offense, and also probably because a
larger percentage of the population was mobilized into professional armies and so you
could shovel more soldiers into the war machine per unit of time. Yes?
>>: A follow-up to that though is why do we have this attitude that the 20th century is so
violent and it is so violent now? If it weren't for the fact that there is some sort of a latent
fear that is spreading through people even if we are not subject to the actual
consequences directly?
>> Steven Pinker: That's a good question. I think part of it is we care more about
violence than we used to, so a lot of the genocides of the 19th century just didn't count as
genocide, and so they were just Indians, for example. Or who cares what happens in the
heart of Africa? Now we do care. Some of it is very vivid images of horror such as the
nuclear attacks, such as Auschwitz that are really burned into our memory in ways that
more indirect bloodless accounts of violence in earlier centuries did not. And some of it
comes from the increased efficiency in our newsgathering and reporting. We can send a
helicopter and camera crew to any godforsaken hellhole and beam back images in real
time of the carnage that takes place, and so it feels that much more immediate. And we
know from cognitive psychology that people's estimates of risk depend on how easily
they can recall vivid examples from memory, and so as the examples become more
immediate, your sense of danger also increases.
Also there is a, and this relates back to the first point of how much we care about
violence, not only do we care about violence that we know about, but we have also
expanded our definition of violence to account for more and more kinds of victims and as
we care more about them, there is a lot more violence that we start to notice. Just a
couple of examples, capital punishment, if some vicious serial murderer is given a lethal
injection in Texas, he might have nuns holding a candlelight vigil to protest that violence
and many of us would consider it violence. Seventy-five years ago that wouldn't have
counted as violence. It would have been justice. Likewise, the most recent example is
the targeting of bullying, which no less than the president of the United States gave a
speech on how terrible bullying was and how it had to be stamped out. Twenty-five
years ago bullying was called childhood. You know, boys will be boys; it's part of
growing up, how are kids going to learn resilience unless they get picked on by the thug
on the playground? But we no longer tolerate it. And as a result, we are more and more
sensitive to violence, part of the process that I think drove violence down. Yes?
>>: So now given that violence is less of a problem, going forward what do you think is
the most accurate future problem that we are facing?
>> Steven Pinker: Well there is a problem of the worst end of a range of scenarios from
climate change. That could bring about a lot of unpleasantness. Disease and hunger,
partly as a result of population growth could be major problems. It is actually a good
question and it is one that isn't asked in my experience very often, partly because
violence looms so large in our array of subjective threats, that we don't realize that it is
actually not an epic problem in the sense that the vast majority of people are in no danger
of dying violently across the world. If you are born into the world in the last few
decades, you are almost certainly going to die of peaceful causes, so it is an excellent
question.
>> Kirsten Wiley: Let’s just do one more because there are people that want to get some
books signed and he can answer questions then.
>> Steven Pinker: Who has had her hand up longest? [laughter]. Okay.
>>: Yeah. So you talk a little bit about the role of the media in violence and being a guy
that works for Xbox, the boy box, [laughter], I am really curious to know where the role
of violence in videogames, the ability to wield a chainsaw and hack people to death and
[inaudible] so we are all sort of perspectives on violence in our society.
>> Steven Pinker: I think my opinion will help you sleep at night. [laughter]. I tend to
think that violent video games are a red herring, even though it is a frequently asked
question. For one thing the soaring popularity of gaming has occurred in exactly the
decades when violent crime in real life has plummeted. I don't think there's a causal
relation; I guess there could be if you are sitting behind a screen that means there are a lot
of things that you are not doing [laughter] that could be much worse.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Steven Pinker: Yeah, exactly. I suspect that they are more independent and realistic
histories of violent entertainment show that previous decades and centuries were just as
bad if not worse in terms of how much pleasure people take in imagining people getting
blown up, cut up, bleeding to death and so on. There was a wonderful book by Harold
Schechter called Violent Pastimes on the history of violent entertainment, where he gives
examples of like Shakespeare, Homer, often by the way which were produced with lots of
special effects like actors would have a kittens bladder full of blood beneath their vest
and then in the fight scene it would be punctured and there would be a big splash of blood
on stage. The audiences loved it. In the 19th century there were the so-called penny
dreadfuls, the violence soaked popular novels, pulp fiction comic books, the Westerns
that a lot of us grew up with as kids had lots of gunplay and lots of genocide of native
peoples. So I tend to think that it is one of the great constants, and Grimm's fairy tales is
another example, so it is not a new phenomenon, and I think there is not good evidence
for a causal relationship. I was part of an amicus brief in the California case that was
successfully a law ironically, signed into effect by Governor Schwarzenegger [laughter]
that would have--one of history's great ironies, that would've put severe restrictions on
violent video games and I think it was thrown out. And I think there was very little
scientific evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship.
>> Kirsten Wiley: Thank you very much.
[applause].