by Stanley
As civilization evolves our modes of living change; social practices that were once acceptable, like harsh corporal punishment of children, are no longer tolerated. And things that are ordinary to us, like having teenagers, would have horrified our forefathers. No doubt in the future ‘same sex marriage’, which causes so much heated debate now will, in the course of time, be quite unremarkable.
We are marginally different from what people were like fifty years ago. And if we read a Victorian novel, their drastically controlled manners and their censored emotional life is quite foreign to us. Taking only a slightly longer view, we are unimaginably different from what people were like in the Middle Ages; if you could be suddenly transported into that time the shock would blow you away – the disgusting smell if nothing else. We not only live in a different world, we are different people. One of the biggest differences is the amount of lethal damage we afflict on each other.
A good question is to ask is: Am I more likely die by the hands of another man now than say 100, or a thousand or ten thousand years ago? What would be my relative chances of scraping though life without being knocked off in one way or another? We have to look at the historical and archeological records to find out; and the evidence is that the probability of death by violence has been diminishing dramatically over time; my chances, and yours, of getting through life without being strangled, shot, executed, hung, blown-up, stabbed, killed in battle, mutilated, buried alive, raped, decapitated, lynched, assassinated or burned at the stake, are better now than at any other time in human history.
Even in our two recent world wars (including all the combatants) there was only a quarter the violent death rate as in the earliest hunter-gatherers societies; and the same is true of those groups that exist today, despite all our romantic imaginings about ‘indigenous cultures’. If we crunch the actual numbers, it turns out that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. In proportion to population, death by violence has been diminishing over historical time.
This thesis is hard to swallow because we watch the nightly news and pass on the pessimistic memes of current opinion. But no one has ever actually counted or crunched the statistics or done the thorough historical research. If death by violence in the last world war had been the same order of magnitude as it was in Neolithic times, the figures in our most recent wars would have numbered in the billions, not millions. In the West at least, by all standards of measurements there is an observable evolution, a civilizing process that has distinctly speeded up since the 17th century; and this goes for all the areas of human violence: homicide, capital punishment, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, slavery, human sacrifice and superstitious killing.
Steven Pinker’s monumental new book, just published, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is a long overdue recognition of our better nature. It turns out that violence is not a single instinct, but a strategic response to circumstances. And the fact is, our cultural and social circumstances have changed out of all recognition over time and we have changed in synchrony with it. The interactive network of modern society could not exist with the mindset that existed in feudal times, prior to the emergence of the nation state. In most of Europe it was the nation state governed by the King that brought an end to the factions of squabbling feudal warlords.
This pacification process didn’t require a set of new genes because sympathy and empathy are also part of our evolutionary heritage, though on a smaller, family scale. The emergence of the nation state favoured these cooperative evolutionary adaptations. The gradual expansion of commerce and the interactive social networks we call trade, both within and among nations, made these inherited characteristics more dominant, since trade and commerce are functionally based on trust. And as our society got more complex, we depended more and more on each other. As my trading partner you are worth more to me alive than dead, however much we disagree.
Pinker shows, with an enormous amount of historical and archeological research, that violence has been on a variable but steady decline. He shows this, not by taking absolute numbers, but by calculations proportionate to the size of populations. This is obviously the only way to calculate because the greater the population, the greater total number of deaths by violence. Remember there are six billion of us today. The only measure is not the absolute numbers, but the proportion that die by violence.
There is a ‘New Age’ view that the ‘good old days’, where we lived in harmony with nature, was somehow better. But I’m afraid Thomas Hobbs had it right: life in a hunter-gatherer tribe was indeed ‘nasty, mean, brutish and short, quite unlike Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’; a theory that would have us believe that civilisation made us worse.
In biblical times and even in Greek Classical times whole cities, every enemy man woman and child, would be put to the sword as a matter of course; and this behaviour was given divine sanction. Normal life then was a constant fear of attack, rape, pillage and plunder. And it all goes down the sink-hole of fictionalized history on the TV screen – we don’t really believe it.
Later, in the Middle Ages, life was violent too. The myth of the heroic and gentlemanly knights of old is a fairy tale. The Barons were more like Mafiosi gangsters running incredible protection rackets – not unlike the bad old days in mob controlled Chicago, where the city was divided up into areas, each controlled by a mobster. The emergence of the central state where the King ruled over the Barons, although repressive, was an improvement and certainly less lethal.
It’s true there has been a long history of glorification formal war, as Hillman shows us, but war has lost the glamour it once had. In 1914 young men eagerly flocked to the colours, today they are more likely to burn their draft cards. War has become distinctly distasteful; and between nation states it is recognisably a zero-sum game – no one wins. ‘The kind of patriotism that enabled the people of Europe to endure two world wars now appears as archaic as the feudal loyalties that it had displaced’[1]
Today, the only popular reflection of the glorification of war is what we call ‘sporting events’. But these are surely an improvement on the games of blood that were played out in the Roman Coliseum.
Human nature has certain fixed characteristics, and yet it is malleable. It can be conditioned by circumstances and upbringing. Sure, we are wired for aggression, but also part of our biological inheritance is the capacity for love, cooperation, care and empathy. How these are all balanced is determined by the quality of the society in which we live and with which our human nature is inextricably interwoven.
What have certainly changed dramatically are the values with which we regard violence and cruelty. A stark illustration of this is the way today we regard the brutality of the God of Old Testament. Taken as a reflection of the standards of justice and moral behaviour – as it obviously was at the time – we simply ignore that part of the Bible. Yet we know full well that Christianity has gone hand in hand with torture and persecution beyond description. So much have our standards changed that Christians today more or less disown the Old Testament – like it’s not really important. But the violent sadism of early Christianity speaks clearly enough through its central symbol: the cross – an instrument of torture; and where we cannibalistically eat Christ’s body and drink his blood. We prefer to think that all this is merely symbolic (incidentally, the Vatican does not) because our moral feelings have changed.
Today we deplore capital punishment and the long waiting lists on death row in the backward states of the US. But we forget that not so long ago death sentences in England were meted out after a trial of only a few minutes; and the methods of execution were ghastly. You could be hung, your body taken down before you finally strangled, stretched on the rack, after which you would be castrated, disemboweled and your four limbs torn from your body and burned while you watched, if you were still conscious; and your crime – saying a rude word about the King. The spectators watching these public entertainments would have enjoyed the show. In 1660 Samuel Pepys records in his diary of how he and his party were at a public hanging-drawing-and-quartering in Charing Cross Road, after which they all went to a tavern for a feast of oysters.
But still the attachment to pessimism about the human saga persists. It’s almost as though we dare not think that human society and our social feelings have improved – let alone speak of progress. Have our humanitarian sensibilities progressed at all over time? It is a crucial question, for resting upon how we answer it depends whether we regard any effort to improve human wellbeing as a waste of time.
In this regard, Steven Pinker has done us a signal service in debunking the fashionable shadows of misanthropy. It is quite amazing how the critical reviews of Pinker’s book are polarized. One critic wrote ‘I have not read the book, but I entirely disagree with its hypothesis’. Well done!
We must remember that we always judge the misdeeds of present with the sensibilities of the present age. If we use those same sensibilities when we look at the past we can only be appalled at unimaginable extremities of everyday cruelty and violence, and amazed too that, at the time, it didn’t occur to anybody to think it was wrong.
In the last analysis it is not a question of optimism or pessimism, but of facts. And it is a fact that over time, at least in the matter of violence, war and homicide, there has been an improvement in the quality of the human pageant. No guarantee that it will continue – history is full of unexpected turns, but the historical facts remain. And as Pinker says, perhaps it is time we looked at what we have been doing right, instead of all the things we have done wrong.
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