Contrary to the popular belief, the world has not only become less violent in every conceivable respect, but the change is beyond the hopes of any humanist who lived 300 years ago. Homicide rates dropped 100-fold since the Middle Ages (premodern societies were even worse), and all other types of violent crime show strong correlations. Wars between great powers have been declining both in frequency and intensity, and by today they all but disappeared (with huge outliers in the form of world wars and without guarantees that they never come back). Taboos against abominations like nuclear or biological weapons are so ingrained in the human psyche that only rogue states use them - secretly and usually against their own people.
War, genocide, homicide, infanticide, rape, slavery, torture, child abuse, religious persecution, homophobe, misogynist or racist violence, terrorism, ... In almost 500 hundred large pages Pinker examines every kind of violence humans have visited upon each other for millennia. No stone left unturned as he quotes sources extensively and widely, presents statistics, detects and refutes correlations and causal relationships, dissects some entangled phenomena or synthesizes others. But the immense flood of information is carried on a sweeping narrative with the trademark style of Pinker. Witty, eloquent, and clear as daylight. Learning about, let's say, how the New York homicide rates bulged between the 60s and 80s, and following a surge around 1990 unexpectedly collapsed and are in decline ever since, sounds like a subject interesting only to criminal sociologist, and only between 9 to 5. Yet the reader finds himself burning through the pages and feeling like the Great Detective who can discern both the minuscule, subtle details and unbury the great underlying patterns at the same time. With Pinker's books in general, you will put it down with the feeling that after years of confused ignorance, you suddenly understand something fundamental about the world.
The data-driven approach to history is not for the faint-hearted (caveat: the reader is expected to put on her smart hat. Gaining at least a basic familiarity with Poisson and power-law distributions is a prerequisite to understanding the statistical analysis of the collected data on wars and all kinds of deadly quarrels), but yields some surprising and unorthodox/inconvenient results. Many conventional wisdoms are challenged or downright eviscerated by the data. Dispelled are the myths of the Noble Savage (premodern societies tended to be rather murderous), of the supreme lethality of modern weaponry (machetes in Rwanda killed as surely as machine guns), of the unsurpassable bloodbaths of the 20th century (the Mongol Conquests' death toll 40 million in the 13th century - proportionally to the world's population then, 5 times as high as that of the Second World War) or of the cycles and impersonal great forces of history.
The last example is one of the most interesting conclusions in the book. The desire for a coherent historical narrative is not easy to reconcile with the statistics. That the most destructive wars in human history were not inevitably caused by explainable tectonic movements of history, but possibly by a series of banal bad luck and could have been avoided if the dice rolled somewhat differently, is not easy to accept.
The first 500 pages lay out the facts and the author's interpretation of them, while in the second part Pinker explains the neuroscience of human violence, then explores moral psychology to present his theory for the huge changes. In a nutshell, our moral progress is the result of the superposition of a handful of different processes. These are the emergence of states, commerce, increase in morals and intelligence, the belief in individual dignity, and the ever-expanding circles of empathy.
Each of them is examined at length, but the most interesting of the above is the one concerning morals and intelligence. According to this, morality in the last couple of centuries increased much like, and probably with, IQ. According to the Flynn-effect, with the reasons only guessed, the average IQ increased an average 3 points per decade since World War One, when tests started being applied en masse; which would mean an average man in 1920 would be considered intellectually slightly retarded by today's standards (with an IQ of 70). Similarly, says Pinker, the populace a century ago could be considered morally retarded. Older people that time still could remember slave auctions held in churches. They treated ethnic minorities and homosexuals quite abysmally, and "spare the rod and spoil the child" was the general advice. Nine out of ten, "the only good Indians are the dead Indians" - said Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive politician of his age. Woodrow Wilson, the leading architect of the League of Nations, was a KKK-supporter. "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion" - so said Churchill and he was, in his own words, "strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes". Not just the general morals and political leaders fail to bear scrutiny. On the eve of World War One, many famous poets, philosophers, and thinkers (Eliot, Flaubert, Yeats, Shaw) expressed a deep yearning for the ennobling and purifying flames of war - probably assuming they don't get to be the ones in the trenches. They also held the masses in contempt that bordered on the genocidal.
It's a book that doesn't lend itself to summary easily. Almost every page contains a catchy phrase or a surprising insight that would deserve mentioning. On the other hand, despite being a massive tome, both deep and wide, it's an almost intoxicating read, structured, original, daring, clearly argued and captivating till the very end.
No comments:
Post a Comment