guardian | For
an influential group of advanced thinkers, violence is a type of
backwardness. In the most modern parts of the world, these thinkers tell
us, war has practically disappeared. The world’s great powers are
neither internally divided nor inclined to go to war with one another,
and with the spread of democracy, the increase of wealth and the
diffusion of enlightened values these states preside over an era of
improvement the like of which has never been known. For those who lived
through it, the last century may have seemed peculiarly violent, but
that, it is argued, is mere subjective experience and not much more than
anecdote. Scientifically assessed, the number of those killed in
violent conflicts was steadily dropping. The numbers are still falling,
and there is reason to think they will fall further. A shift is under
way, not strictly inevitable but enormously powerful. After millennia of
slaughter, humankind is entering the Long Peace.
This has proved to be a popular message. The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity
(2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than
a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and
statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary
orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a
matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more
altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day,
Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument
consists in showing that the past was more violent than we tend to
imagine. Tribal peoples that have been praised by anthropologists for
their peaceful ways, such as the Kalahari !Kung and the Arctic Inuit, in
fact have rates of death by violence not unlike those of contemporary
Detroit; while the risk of violent death in Europe is a fraction of
what it was five centuries ago. Not only have violent deaths declined in
number. Barbaric practices such as human sacrifice and execution by
torture have been abolished, while cruelty towards women, children and
animals is, Pinker claims, in steady decline. This “civilising process” –
a term Pinker borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias – has come
about largely as a result of the increasing power of the state, which in
the most advanced countries has secured a near-monopoly of force. Other
causes of the decline in violence include the invention of printing,
the empowerment of women, enhanced powers of reasoning and expanding
capacities for empathy in modern populations, and the growing influence
of Enlightenment ideals.
