15/10/2019 Edge: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE By Steven Pinker

Home About Edge Features Edge Editions Press Edge Search Subscribe

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin,
Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem
somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek
to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that
conclusion.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
by Steven Pinker

Introduction

Once again, Steven Pinker returns to debunking the doctrine of the noble
savage in the following piece based on his lecture at the recent TED
Conference in Monterey, California.

This doctrine, "the idea that humans are peaceable by

nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the
writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an
instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil
or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend
support to the ethic of universal brotherhood")," he writes. "But, now that
social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods,
they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from
causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural
institutions has made us nobler."

Pinker's notable talk, along with his essay, is one more example of how ideas
forthcoming from the empirical and biological study of human beings is
gaining sway over those of the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on
studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological
foundation.

—JB

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of

Psychology at Harvard University. His most recent book is The Blank Slate.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning,

in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire.
According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html 1/5
15/10/2019 Edge: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE By Steven Pinker

queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were
singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be
unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one
example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in
the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history,
and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species'
time on earth.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin,
Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem
somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek
to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that
conclusion.

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional
history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and
gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition,
slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of
government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and
mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and
differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession,
rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the
major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for
most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West,
far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do
occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of
notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and
barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even
dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license
colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of
our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans
are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up
frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset
("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo
sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu
("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But,
now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical
periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far
from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its
cultural institutions has made us nobler.

To be sure, any attempt to document changes in violence must be soaked in

uncertainty. In much of the world, the distant past was a tree falling in the
forest with no one to hear it, and, even for events in the historical record,
statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned
only by smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the
choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral
imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to
be killed or 1 percent in a population of one billion.

Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence
is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades,
and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from
genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and
animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous
one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and
Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the
Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the
millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist
anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—
such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html 2/5
15/10/2019 Edge: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE By Steven Pinker

arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who

die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far
more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny
percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence,
the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who
fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to
anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and
Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death
in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the
twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in
the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths,
not 100 million.

Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also
distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations—namely,
those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains
many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God,
slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes
death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions,
including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one's
parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were
no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of
torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims,
and Chinese.

At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in

warfare spanning medieval and modern times. Several historians have
suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars
across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne
has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more
comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than
were sixteenth-century monks." Social histories of the West provide evidence
of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five
centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying,
disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on.
Meanwhile, for another kind of violence—homicide—the data are abundant
and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of
homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at
some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed,
murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000
Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy

picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth
century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle
deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the
1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the
Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number
of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After

the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based
conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated
settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according
to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of
campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to
make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so
wrong about something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive
illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall
examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living
rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old
age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could
be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society.
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html 3/5
15/10/2019 Edge: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE By Steven Pinker

Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No
one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep
getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The
decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that
tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As
deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of
a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human
history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of
how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.

The other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain
it. A force that pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents,
and scales of social organization mocks our standard tools of causal
explanation. The usual suspects—guns, drugs, the press, American culture—
aren't nearly up to the job. Nor could it possibly be explained by evolution in
the biologist's sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural
selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any
case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for
violence. Social psychologists find that at least 80 percent of people have
fantasized about killing someone they don't like. And modern humans still
take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of
murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games,
and hockey.

What has changed, of course, is people's willingness to act on these

fantasies. The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity
accelerated a "civilizing process" marked by increases in self-control, long-
term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These
are precisely the functions that today's cognitive neuroscientists attribute to
the prefrontal cortex. But this only raises the question of why humans have
increasingly exercised that part of their brains. No one knows why our
behavior has come under the control of the better angels of our nature, but
there are four plausible suggestions.

The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish,
and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the
inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may
be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting
fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-
defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them
preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of
deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its
credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to
cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a
monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that
eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about
preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger
propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in
European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the
centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to
fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed
empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of
contraband.

Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence
of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early
death are everyday features of one's own life, one feels fewer compunctions
about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency
lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general.

A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-

sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they
cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace
dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-
how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html 4/5
15/10/2019 Edge: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE By Steven Pinker

allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower
cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people
become more valuable alive than dead.

Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution,

he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default
they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the
millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and
larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and
even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding
networks of reciprocity, à la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the
inexorable logic of the golden rule: The more one knows and thinks about
other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over
theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in
which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other
people, and the contingent nature of one's own station, more palpable—the
feeling that "there but for fortune go I".

Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is

not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because
people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and
worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our
time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future,
since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-
modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence.

Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the
knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat
it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we
might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the likelihood that states will commit
genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing
something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

[First published in The New Republic, 3.19.07.]

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher

Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
contact: [email protected]
Copyright © 2007 By Edge Foundation, Inc
All Rights Reserved.
|Top|

https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html 5/5