|
The Decline of Violence and its Causes 
|
Please note that the time in the brochure for this event is incorrect. The correct time is 12.30-13.30 as noted above. Professor Pinker is only able to visit Bristol at lunchtime.
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, is the author of many major books on language and cognition. He now addresses human violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. In this lecture, which accompanies the publication of his book, Pinker believes that, contrary to popular belief, violence has declined and that humankind has become progressively less violent, over millenia and decades. Can this be true, though? The images of global conflict we see daily on our screens suggest this is an almost obscene claim to be making. Extraordinarily, however, Pinker shows violence within and between societies – both murder and warfare – has actually declined from prehistory to today. Debunking both the idea of the ‘noble savage’ and an over-simplistic Hobbesian notion of a ‘nasty, brutish and short’ life, Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people. He ranges over everything from art to religion, international trade to individual table manners, and shows how life has changed across the centuries and around the world – not simply through the huge benefits of organised government, but also because of the extraordinary power of progressive ideas. Why has this come about? And what does it tell us about ourselves? It takes one of the world’s greatest psychologists to have the ambition and the breadth of understanding to appreciate and explain this story, to show us our very natures.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as The New York Times, Time and Slate, and is the author of six books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought.
Responses
Comments
If you would like to subscribe to our RSS Comments feed, please click on the orange XML logo below (click here to read more about our RSS feeds).
** Should you wish to retract a comment, or if you experience technical difficulties, please email us at: ideas@gwebusinesswest.co.uk. We reserve the right to delete posts containing offensive language or content.
October 6th, 2011 at 5:02 am
[...] Source: http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/?p=1658 [...]
November 6th, 2011 at 9:29 pm
Steven Pinker was in town to tell a packed Great Hall that we have to admit it’s getting better – it’s getting better all the time. It seems that not only has violence been in decline for long stretches of time, but we are currently living in the most peaceable era in human existence.
Reinforcing his argument with a veritable blizzard of graphs and statistics, Pinker explored a number of different developments that have culminated in this positive outcome.
For example, the rise of states has seen a huge drop in the number of deaths attributable to violence. The subsequent state “monopoly of violence” and the allied expansion of regulated trade have played a civilizing role, as has what Pinker called the “Humanitarian Revolution” – the abolition of institutions and practices such as slavery and religious persecution. Pinker credits this revolution to the influence of the Enlightenment, which he sees as being a key factor in the replacing of superstition and ignorance with knowledge and cosmopolitanism.
Furthermore, a decline in the duration, frequency and “deadliness” of inter-state wars has, since the end of the Cold War, been matched by a similar reduction in the case of civil wars.
Finally, Pinker cited the “Rights Revolution” – the targeted elimination of violence against vulnerable sections of the population such as women, children, and ethnic minorities.
Pinker thinks that it is unlikely these advances have come about through a change in human nature. Instead he points to the aforementioned factors of state formation and “gentle commerce”, an “expanding circle” of empathy that has come to embrace The Other, and an “Escalator of Reason” that is fuelled by literacy, education and public discourse.
Indeed, at the heart of Pinker’s theories is a sprited and refreshing defence of the Enlightenment. It has become fashionable to champion the argument that the Enlightenment was a “poisoned apple” which spawned, directly or indirectly, many of the worst horrors of later centuries.
Pinker is having none of it, and ended his talk with a plea for the rehabilitation of Enlightenment values that I for one am more than willing to applaud. It would be foolish to pretend that either the Enlightenment or its leading figures were perfect, and Enlightenment ideals have been distorted on too many occasions. However, as Amartya Sen says in his book “The Idea of Justice”, “…the remedy for bad reasoning lies in better reasoning”, not in making the Enlightenment a cheap scapegoat for our past and present mistakes and thereby giving encouragement to regressives of all stripes.
Pinker’s arguments were persuasive, but I couldn’t help thinking that they could inadvertently play into the hands of the anti-Enlightenment crowd themselves. For example I can see right-wing politicians all over the US seeing Pinker’s statistics concerning declining violence there as a positive vindication of penal policies which embrace both the death penalty and the incarceration of disproportionate numbers of African-Americans. Fanciful? Perhaps. Perhaps not.