A History of Violence
On Edge's most recent edition, Stephen Pinker provokes the reader to consider that our standards for violent behaviour have risen (or dropped :) because of modernity and its cultural institutions: that is, we, as humans, are less violent now than we ever were. On the face of it, this doesn't seem to merit special consideration except when it's corollary is introduced, and when contextualized in the light of Pinker's The Blank Slate: the idea of the noble savage (that people are born good and corrupted by society) is wrong, and that people don't need to be completely born free of selfish motives to progress morally, only that other sentiments and drives be present as well.
"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. 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 full article is available here.
Comments
As the rate of violent crime in New York City declined over the last decade or so, until it became one of the safer large cities in the United States, perceptions of its dangerousness rose (at least at first). This seems to have been for some of the same reasons Pinker adduces.
Human beings don't seem to be very good at distinguishing situations when their impressions are to be trusted and when they ought not to be.
With respect to Pinker's larger point -- I believe Ambrose Bierce said that "a saint is a sinner, revised and edited." That's probably true of all of us, to one degree or another.
Our standards have risen, sure, but that's not always a good thing if it escalates to some form of cultural imperialism. This is a big statement, and I am not claiming that violence is a part of any one culture; quite the contrary, as Pinker has been arguing for a while. But Liberal Guilt takes hold and I can't help but imagine Pinker shaking his head accusing me of conflating "everyone's basic human right to be treated well" with "a nervous, clinical, small-minded, and solipsistic world view".