The Decline in Global Violence [bumped]

This is something I've been pointing out for a long time, but nobody seems to take it seriously. Here's Stephen Pinker makes the point -- contrary to what you would think from viewing news accounts, we are living in a relatively violence-free time in the world's history. What is more, human societies have been becoming less violent for a long time.



UPDATE:

Historian Timothy Snyder published a critical response to the main arguments put forth by Pinker in this piece for Foreign Affairs magazine. His criticism essentially boils down to three points.

1) Turf defense: Pinker is a psychologist and not an historian. Consequently his view of history, as presented in the book, is simplistic. Moreover, he uncritically accepts somewhat questionable information about past societies and his data are therefore problematic. I should point out that, even though he rightly considers Pinker's methodology to be flawed, Snyder does think that his general conclusions regarding the decline of violence are correct.

2) Ideological conflict: Pinker, a mild libertarian, is in Snyder's view unreasonably wary of the role of the state. Snyder, a confirmed statist, points out that while Pinker rightly credits the ancient state with lowering the general level of violence, he ignores all the good things that the modern state does for its citizens. Among these are mass education and public health programs that produce the benefits of better lives and a general civilizing effect. The state is therefore to be credited for training people into non-violent patterns of thought that Pinker naively credits to enlightenment thinkers.

3) This brings us to Snyder's third criticism -- that Pinker has a simplistic understanding of historical processes. He rightly notes that Pinker applies a long discredited approach to intellectual history, one that assumes that ideas trickle down naturally from the great thinkers who formulate them and ignores the mediating and often contradictory effects of the institutions and mechanisms by which ideas are spread throughout society. Moreover Pinker, by emphasizing the world of ideas, neglects to note the materialistic explanations for historical change. Snyder then advances what to my mind is an even more simplistic Marxist/Malthusuan/materialist position -- that conflict can be attributed to the scarcity of resources and that the decline in violence noted by Pinker results from technological changes that have in our time produced a temporary abundance of resources.

This is a fascinating and important debate. I expect to be following its twists and turns for some time to come, and of course will be blogging about it.

Tom Sowell on Race and Inequality

Tom Sowell tells an uncomfortable truth about race and inequality in America:

The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.
But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.

The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others.

There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.

In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.

Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."

All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.

This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped.

And regarding the role of our national leaders and opinion makers he writes:

[T]here has been -- for decades -- a steady drumbeat of media and political hype about differences in income, education and other outcomes, blaming these differences on oppression against those with fewer achievements or lesser prosperity.

Moreover, there has been a growing tolerance of lawlessness and a growing intolerance toward the idea that people who are lagging need to take steps to raise themselves up, instead of trying to pull others down.

All this exalts those who talk such lofty talk. But others pay the price -- and ultimately that includes even those who take the road toward barbarism.

Well said!

Read the rest of his commentary here and here.