Measuring violence to see our better selves

The nonstop parade of killers, crooks and con artists on the nightly news is enough to leave anyone with a dim view of human nature and pining for the good old days.

But what if the good old days weren't so good after all?

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard and best-selling author of "The Blank Slate," has mustered a mountain of data that tracks violence through the centuries.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined" (Viking) is the result, an 800-page argument that examines violence from major wars to infanticide, genocide to child abuse, and murder to bullying. His optimistic conclusion: Life isn't the way it used to be. It's much, much better and still trending toward improvement. Pinker calls the phenomenon the "most important thing that has ever happened in human history."

Pinker, who spoke and exchanged e-mail with Inquirer staff writer Sam Wood earlier this month, appears at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 20, at the Central Library, 1901 Vine Street. Tickets are $15.

Question: Some might think you're out of your mind. On the surface, the history of the 20th Century appears to be a cavalcade of carnage: the World Wars; genocide in Germany, China, Rwanda, and Darfur, not to mention men crashing 747s into tall buildings. With all that, how could it be wrong to think of the history of the past century as one long bloodbath?

Pinker: There's no question there was a lot of bloodshed in the 20th Century. But there was plenty of bloodshed in previous centuries, too. Saying that "X is big" is not the same as saying "X is bigger than Y." And while the Second World War was the deadliest event in human history, in terms of number of lives lost it's not so clear that it was the deadliest event in terms of percentage of the world population.

In the book I show a graph of the history's worst atrocities scaled by the world population at the time, It shows that World War II comes in 9th place, and World War I doesn't even make the Top 10.

Finally, a century has 100 years not just 50, and the second half of the twentieth century saw a historically unprecedented move away from war between great powers and war between developed countries.

Q: So why are we so pessimistic about human nature? Why does the fear of violence permeate our culture.

Pinker: If your impressions are driven by the news, there are always enough violent events to fill the headlines. The camera crews go to wherever the remaining violence is.

With jet aircraft and helicopters journalists can be sent to every godforsaken corner of the world, places that no one cared about in the past. Their reports have created an illusion of more violence because we know more about the violence that does take place. In the past, a lot of violence was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.

But the millions and millions of people who die in their sleep in Bolivia, Tanzania, and Poland, and hundreds of other countries at peace don't have crews filming their deaths. ... We get a biased sample, particularly when because news media follow the guideline of "if it bleeds it leads."

Q: Why is it biased?

Pinker: The mind uses a trick called the "availability bias" to estimate probability: the easier it is to recall an event from memory, the more likely we think it is. The mind doesn't do what mathematicians say it should do, and divide the number of events by the number of opportunities for the event to take place. Instead, we just recall some recent examples of things blowing up, and conclude that the world is more dangerous than ever.

Another reason we think violence has increased is that we care more about violence these days. We concern ourselves with victims and kinds of violence that formerly didn't matter.

Take the recent campaign against bullying - a cause that the President of the United States took up in a speech. Two decades ago this would have been seen as wimpy and softheaded. People would have said "Boys will be boys; Bullying is a part of childhood; How else are kids going to learn how to be tough?"

But now we put ourselves in the shoes of the bullied child and think about his suffering. And people might even think that bullying has increased, because they now care about it! It's one of many examples in which we confuse how low our behavior can sink with how high our standards have risen.

Q: How is the decline in violence measured? Total number of deaths? Proportionally?

Pinker: It only makes sense to measure it as a proportion of the population. Otherwise, as population increases, you'd falsely conclude that the world is getting more violent, even if most people were getting less violent, simply because more people are getting killed. But of course as the population grows, more people are not getting killed, too, and more people are around to enjoy life.

Q: Can the number of deaths serve as a proxy for other forms of violence?

Pinker: Not always, but often. The different forms of violent crime tend to go up and down in tandem, When there are more homicides, there tend to be more assaults and rapes and violent robberies.

Q: Why has the rate of violence fallen?

Pinker: There have been several forces. The first was the appearance of government: the development of institutions of third-party dispute resolution, such as a the court system, police and a judiciary.

It's hard to accomplish anything else if you have to worry about being kidnapped or raped or murdered. The first states brought down rates of raiding and feuding and vendetta by punishing aggressors, not so much to protect the people, but as to benefit the rulers, for whom vendettas and blood feuds are simply a nuisance.

The second force is was the development of an infrastructure of commerce and trade, which made it cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and made other people worth more alive than dead.

Third was the expansion of literacy, travel, and other forces of cosmopolitanism. They break down barriers between people and get people in the habit of understanding others' point of view. When that happens, it's much harder to demonize people and makes cruelty less appealing.

The fourth is the expansion of reason - education, literacy, open public discourse, and science. Knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance and cumulatively debunked a lot of hogwash and screwball superstitions. People figured out that crop failures aren't caused by witches, that wells aren't poisoned by Jews, and that children aren't possessed by the devil.

The exercise of reason also encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

A final pacifying force is the empowerment of women. This encourages a shift in cultural values from the macho pursuit of glory and grandeur and honor to more family-friendly values of peace and prosperity.

Also, when women control their own reproductive decisions, they're less likely to pump out the large number of babies that produce dangerous youth bulges in societies where young men can't easily find brides and jobs.

Q: How do we know how violent the past was?

Pinker: It depends on the period. Of course, the farther back you go, the poorer the records are.

The earliest information comes from forensic archaeology, a kind of "CSI: Paleolithic." Archaeologists examine prehistoric remains for bashed- in skulls, decapitated skeletons, and arrowheads embedded in bones. They have found that in prehistoric boneyards, deaths due to violent trauma could be as high as 60 percent, and averaged around 15 percent.

Another picture of life before states and governments comes from ethnographic vital statistics from recently studied hunter-gatherers, tribal groups, and other non-state societies. They also reveal very high rates of violent death, an average of 15 percent among hunter-gatherers and 25 percent among hunter-horticulturalists and pastoralists.

For more recent periods, at least in Europe, homicide records go back hundreds of years. And one finds that in every country in which these records exist, the homicide rate has plummeted. An Englishman living now has about a 30-fold less chance of being murdered than his ancestors in the middle ages.

With wars in the distant past one has to rely on careful estimation and educated guess work. Some "atrocitologists" who have done that include Rudolph Rummel with in his book Death by Government, and Matthew White in his forthcoming The Great Big Book of Horrible Things document humanities' worst atrocities. And it's no surprise, the biggest wars have done the worst damage. But for more recent periods - since 1815, and even more so since 1946 - there are meticulous data sets with careful records of deaths in wars.

Q: Despite the apparent decline of violence, there are still many American cities with high homicide rates: Camden, Gary, New Orleans, Detroit. And outside of the U.S. in Rio, Johannesberg ...

Pinker: That's completely irrelevant. Of course violence has not gone down to zero. The book is not subtitled "Why violence has ended," it's "Why violence has declined."

Listing the most violent places on earth is simply reaffirming that there are still some violent places on earth.

Q: What is about those places, the Detroits and the Camdens in the US, for example, that makes for violent cultures?

In the book, there's a graph plotting the homicide rates in Philadelphia for blacks and whites. Until 1850, the rates were about the same. Then it diverges. Why did that happen?

Pinker: That's right; the black-white gap has not always been with us, though the north-south gap, both for whites and for blacks, has been with us since colonial times.

The immediate explanation for why you have high rate of violence is that the violence-prone populations have what social scientists call a "culture of honor." They follow an imperative to respond violently to any insult or sign of disrespect. It leads to feuds and vendettas where each side feels obligated to retaliate against an affront by the other, stoking cycles of violence.

Honor cultures tend to arise in zones of anarchy and in economies with illegal or easily stealable assets. The American South and West, unlike the Northeast, were zones of anarchy until relatively recently, by historical standards. The cliché in the old Westerns was that the nearest sheriff was 90 miles away, so you were in charge of defending yourself. In the mountainous South, Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket were icons of the ideal of flaunting one's pugnacity.

Until recently, American inner cities have been like the Wild West and the mountainous South in the sense that the police didn't do much to enforce the law, and in fact were seen as preying on the population rather than protecting it. So people rely on what criminologists call "self-help" justice. This has nothing to do with Oprah or Women Who Love Too Much, but is another name for vigilante justice. Areas in which the only way to enforce the peace is through self-help justice tend to be extremely violent.

When African Americans moved en masse into northern cities such as Philadelphia, they tended to be segregated into neighborhoods that the police did not properly police, and the anarchy fostered a culture of honor.

Also, since most of the African Americans who recently moved into northern cities came from the South, they may have brought the southern culture of honor with them.

Cultures of honor and self-help justice can persist even when the state exerts its authority and anarchy, technically speaking, disappears. People who have long relied on violence to protect themselves are wary of handing over power to the state.

Q: Will we stop caring if we become convinced violence is overestimated?

Pinker: I think that the exact opposite is the case.

What encourages intelligent activism is the realization that some things do work.

Let's figure out what they are.