Pinker's History of Violence

The below link is to an essay by Steven Pinker of Harvard's Department of Psychology. The essay is an interesting read; however, I have issues with its substance. In short, violence certainly existed in the past and it exists today; however, I would argue that while times and forms of it have changed relative to everything in its amounts, we are looking at a zero-sum. In short, we are neither better nor worse than respective eras in human history.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

For me, it is too challenging to take Pinker’s leap from brutal primitive violence to better publicized violence occurring between nation-states or ethnic groups being lesser in aggregate. I agree that there was probably not a more peaceful form of our species; however, I disagree with his argument for our current supposition that we are now more violent, predicated on the violence that is better publicized. I think it is safe to say that indeed Enlightenment thought and the nation-state of the Modern era provide us with more security against individual on individual violence in society, and that mixed in aggregate makes us individually holistically safer than millennia ago; however, I think humanity’s nature for general violence is just as strong – we are flush. Pinker isn’t right that our current place in time provides us with less violence, rather we are consistent; violence across the centuries has continued between humans; it is just amorphous.

By amorphous, one can cite numerous examples ranging from biblical times through to Iraq. Certainly, one can go through the past twenty years highlighting tribal violence, like what we might see in Rwanda, or they can take it up though to more Modern forms with what is occurring to date in Iraq. Through all of that, we can cite violence of forms everywhere between. What I did not detect from Pinker’s essay was more substantive reference to intra-social person-on-person violence. While there might be fewer murders per capita now than in antiquity*, I would wager there exist just as many robberies or personal assaults person-to-person per capita as there did in the past. Now, however, these assaults can take formation in different fashions (e.g. hold-ups or muggings). In short, I don’t think Pinker is saying here anything truly substantive relative to his thesis; not so much as he is simply trying to reassure us that we were just as violent in the past as we are today; that and there is hope and result with existing nation states. Currently things certainly are more public and visible, so we are more cognizant; however, just because the form of our violence is different, doesn’t mean that at its roots it is any different in spirit or substance than what it was when a rock or axe was our weapon.

*Pinker's argument's shortcoming is that he does not provide substantive statistics to support his case; rather he poorly cites the work of an anthropologist or two. In these rather poor citations he does not provide for hard statistics. One can't necessarily expect that "monks" or whoever from thousands of years ago kept reasonable statistics; however, to make any real argument requires apples to apples; otherwise, he predicates his entire argument on the supposition of other academics or himself.