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John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war

76 points by benbreen 12y ago

hammerzeit 12y ago
While this doesn't invalidate his arguments in and of itself, but it's worth noting that John Gray's core philosophy seems to be diametrically opposed to even the idea of Pinker being right. Gray's philosophy, at least at the coarse level I understand it, seems to be predicated on the idea that humans are incapable of improving on ethical or moral dimensions beyond their inherent nature [0]. His truck with Pinker is not ultimately about whether it's currently true or not that we are becoming less violent, but whether or not it is ever true. Gray is approaching this from an a priori, non-empirical perspective, rather than attempting to meet empirical evidence with empirical evidence. I'm not sure if he's ultimately right or not, but I don't find abstract rebuttals to empirical arguments to be particularly compelling. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28philosopher%29#Political_and_philosophical_thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28philosopher%29#Pol...
detcader 12y ago
And how many Iraqis were killed by UN sactions at the behest of the U.S., the U.K., and Israel? People like Pinker are rewarded for a reason. > When Denis J. Halliday tendered his resignation from his posts after 13 months on the job (September 1997 - October 1998) as UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq where he managed the Oil-for-Food Programme, and with a 34-year career at the United Nations, then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan turned to another experienced international civil servant, Hans C. von Sponeck, to carry on the UN mission. Sponeck had joined the UN Development Program in 1968. He had worked in Ghana, Turkey, Botswana, Pakistan, and India, and had become the Director of the UNDP European Office in Geneva -- an assignment that he had confessed to the General-Secretary he found "boring." Following his new assignment in October 1998, Sponeck arrived in Baghdad on November 8, 1998. He did not last much longer than Denis Halliday. Sponeck resigned from his positions on February 10, 2000. Like Halliday, who had said that, "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that," Sponeck decided that he could not remain associated with the punishing policies against the Iraqi people that he judged were genocidal in nature -- policies that had only one goal, regime change. In the years ahead, both of them worked tirelessly to stop the inevitable march to madness, the March 2003 invasion of this ravaged and mutilated country. http://gicj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97&Itemid=59 http://gicj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97...
dash2 12y ago
There are lots of good reasons to worry about the ability of standard statistical tools to predict the future in the non-linear world of the social sciences. This article fails to hit its target, though. John Gray mentions other kinds of violence - incarceration, civilian casualties. But he offers no evidence that these are going to be so negatively correlated with casualties in war as to overturn Steven Pinker's thesis. He also talks about proxy wars, but these are included in the war statistics, no? An actual attack on Pinker's evidence would require getting your hands dirty in the numbers. Instead we get handwavy complaints about the murkiness of official statistics and the opacity of numbers. It's true they are murky, but they are less murky than intuition and anecdotes.
- lbarrow 12y ago
  The author links to a much better critique of Pinker by Nassim Taleb. The basic idea is that Pinker uses data about very thin-tailed processes, like street crime, to make inferences about very fat-tailed processes, like casualties in war.
  - a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
    Some have successfully picked apart Pinker's numbers even with regard to street crime. Murder rates have fallen because of amazingly improved trauma care, not a decline in assault and battery. Beatings and stabbings that were lethal 50 years ago are now routinely survived.
    - leroy_masochist 12y ago
      That's an important point. For a more detailed discussion of it, I recommend Dave Grossman's On Killing. He makes a convincing argument that the long-term downward trend in the U.S. murder rate is a function of faster trips to the hospital (due to better first responder protocols), and better care once in hospital. An examination of the combined total of reported aggravated assaults and murders, according to Grossman, implies that we're getting more violent over time.
jim_greco 12y ago
The best part about Pinker's book is he actually uses data to backup his thesis. Gray is just rambling and appealing to emotion.
- foobarqux 12y ago
  Except Pinker's data is problematic, cherry picked in a way to support his thesis. For example casualties in the Afghanistan war were not counted because it was labelled as a civil war. He also defines "less violent" as relative to the size of the world population which is at least debatable.
  - michaelchisari 12y ago
    I agree with using a percentage of the world population, though. If you look at it in terms of what percentage of people are acting non-violently towards each other, 90% of the population being peaceful versus 99.98% seems to show a clear positive movement. It not only shows that, as a whole, we are more capable of being non-violent, it also provides more opportunities for people to move away from violent situations into peaceful ones. I'm open to criticism of Pinker, but I don't think this article proves that Pinker's position is totally flawed.
  - niels_olson 12y ago
    > cherry picked in a way to support his thesis. 1000 pages is a lot of cherry picking. And let's face it, at least his thesis is declared and we can interpret his data selection in that light. Gray offers no quantitative evidence. As far as I can tell, he's trying to cow the reader with a lot of "I read way more political philosophy than any a' y'all." Taleb offers a statistically oriented critique, but again offers no data, and apparently no proof-reading. If anything, the evidence we have from Gray and Taleb is N=2: 2 ostensibly smart fellows found enough grist in Pinker's work to write a publishable response without gathering any data themselves. That alone suggests Pinker's thesis has merit.
    - foobarqux 12y ago
      Pinker's data being flawed doesn't make Gray's critique good. If you want a good critique read Herman and Petersen's. My own view is that the thesis is not important. What is really at issue is the subtext that we should not be too worried about western violence because we are doing better than ever before and that violence is decreasing "naturally", neither of which is true or follows from the claim that violence has been historically in decline.
lbarrow 12y ago
This article is a bit over the top and has a lot of non-sequitors, but the statistical critique of Pinker's book by Nassim Taleb the author linked to is excellent: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tek-cyb-org 12y ago
Ask the arab and muslim world how non violent democracy is.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  Ask the Ferguson protestors.
- danbruc 12y ago
  This. We portray the USA as a good peaceful nation while it was at war 218 out of 239 years of its history since 1776. On the other hand we portray Iran as an evil danger to mankind while they did not attack any country since 1795 but were invaded several times. Okay, there is IS having people with backward religious believes, attacking innocent countries, torturing and executing people, terrorizing their own people, producing propaganda and deliberately lying to get support for or justify unjust actions...uppps, sorry, that was the USA, too, sometimes I confuse them.
  - knowaveragejoe 12y ago
    > Okay, there is IS having people with backward religious believes, attacking innocent countries, torturing and executing people, terrorizing their own people, producing propaganda and deliberately lying to get support for or justify unjust actions...uppps, sorry, that was the USA, too, sometimes I confuse them. Arguments could be made for this in the case of the US, but it's pretty cut and dry as to IS.
    - danbruc 12y ago
      With more time you could probably make this statement a lot smoother, I admittedly wanted to force it into shape quickly. Notwithstanding what I wrote, comparing the USA and IS involves a lot of apples and oranges and I don't want to imply otherwise. Still there are disturbing parallels.
    - Litost 12y ago
      If you watch pt1 and pt2 of this series, and take them at face value, you'd arguably be hard pushed to see a huge difference in them either? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqwboEpZe88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqwboEpZe88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDeT2tD97s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDeT2tD97s
tim333 12y ago
>Lacking any deeper faith and incapable of living with doubt, it is only natural that believers in reason should turn to the sorcery of numbers. How else can they find meaning in their lives? - strikes me as a bit of a straw man argument. As a believer in reason myself I see it as rather uncorrelated with living with doubt. People up on reason can often handle probabilities and uncertainties - it's more the religious who have a problem with doubt. Looking at Pinker's numerous statistics it seems highly probable the world has been getting more peaceful. Gray's arguments implying doing the stats is dubious when you can nit pick some of the details seem rather weak.
pnathan 12y ago
If someone is chanting about how war is a relic of the past, how humanity has ascended past all that, then one should look to their powder: that is the exact attitude displayed in the 1900-1913 era, just prior to the most horrific cataclysm of violence yet to date. And it was also popular in the 20s and 30s, as a sop to the wounds of the Great War.
- mikeash 12y ago
  When was the last time the planet went 70 years without a major war? Maybe it won't last, but it seems like something has changed.
  - pnathan 12y ago
    Well, the US and the USSR pointed nukes at each other... But maybe reframe the cold war (korea, vietnam, contras, etc), as engagements in a long war (which harmonizes with at least some of the mentalities going on in that period). I think then the thesis of "no war" vanishes.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      The Cold War wasn't so much "no war" as it was nearly constant, ongoing, small-scale war. Terrible for those involved, but overall considerably more peaceful than the norm. It didn't really change after the Cold War ended, either. The war landscape from the 1990s through today looks much the same.
  - jccalhoun 12y ago
    Besides World War I and II what other major wars have we had? We any of the european conflicts more or less major than more recent wars in other parts of the worlld?
    - gosub 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
johngossman 12y ago
Basically Gray's argument comes down to: human nature hasn't changed. This may be true, but considering the irrefutable real advances in agriculture, medicine, literacy, communication, education and transportation reflected in such things as life-expectancy, infant mortality and various standard-of-living measures, it is certainly debatable.
- sowhatquestion 12y ago
  Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine. People assume that because (for example) the human tendency towards selfishness hasn't changed, that "human nature" is a reliable constant. But as philosophers have been pointing out at least since Hegel, it's human nature to create technologies--and I mean technologies in the broadest sense: language, tools, artistic works, social and political institutions--that thoroughly reshape and redirect the influence of innate nature. You don't have to go all the way to strong social constructivism in order to understand this, but people treat it as an either/or!
TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
"Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past." - Steven Pinker. From John Gray's: Pinker dismisses the role of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the use of other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas has not prevented war in the past; but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive. The First and Second World Wars were so shockingly destructive as to make Europe realise that, perhaps, there are better ways of going about things. Like trade. No serious military historian doubts that fear of their use has been a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Well, between two Great Powers -- the former USSR and the USA. Does anyone really think the only thing preventing China, the USA, and Russia from engaging in all-out war is the threat of nuclear annihilation? Everyone stands more to gain from trade. Moreover deaths of non-combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of non‑combatants, whereas around half of the more than 50 million casualties of the second world war and over 90% of the millions who have perished in the violence that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category. That's disingenuous. Historically whole villages and towns, even cities, were routinely laid to waste. Gray's article is sufficiently hand-wavey and cherry-picky to not even bother with. From Taleb's critique: Loss of the Island Effect: My point now is the loss of island effect, from interconnectedness. The number one danger is a biological agent that can travel on British Air and reach the entire planet. And it can be built in a high school lab, or, even, a garage. That sounds a bit sensationalist. A biological agent that has the potential to be the number one danger can be built in a high school lab, or, even, a garage. Well, ok, sure, given a sufficiently equipped high school lab or garage -now we might as well call it a Biological Weapons Facility- but built by whom? Surely not high school students or me. Generating a sufficiently virulent biological agent isn't trivial, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Maybe at some point in the future I'll be able to '3D print' a biological agent with all the right traits. Let's hope that never happens. Taleb's statement above trivialises biological weapons, and spreads FUD. Nuclear Potential: As I explain in Antifragile, risk management is about fragility, not naive interpretation of past data. If Fannie Mae is sitting on a barrel of dynamite I would not use past statistical data for my current analysis. Risks are in the fragility.(Sensitivity to counterfactuals is more important than past history, something Greenspan missed in his famous congressional testimony). Pinker in 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' does repeatedly point out that we can't assume anything about the future based on the past but that there does appear to be a trajectory. Whether Pinker is wrong about that trajectory is beside the point here because Taleb is taking issue with naive interpretation of past data, yet Pinker wrote in the same book "Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past." Pinker conflates nonscalable Mediocristan (death from encounters with simple weapons) with scalable Extremistan (death from heavy shells and nuclear weapons). The two have markedly distinct statistical properties. Yet he uses statistics of one to make inferences about the other. And the book does not realize the core difference between scalable/nonscalable (although he tried to define powerlaws). He claims that crime has dropped, which does not mean anything concerning casualties from violent conflict. I'm half way through reading 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' and that certainly isn't something I'd say about the book. Pinker admits that simple weapons and nuclear weapons are different, but that he focus on death rates in war over time. Pinker treats civilian <> civilian deaths separately as 'murders', so surely Taleb isn't conflating murder and simple-weapon-war-deaths. Another way to see the conflation, Pinker works with a times series process without dealing with the notion of temporal homogeneity. Ancestral man had no nuclear weapons, so it is downright foolish to assume the statistics of conflicts in the 14th century can apply to the 21st. A mean person with a stick is categorically different from a mean person with a nuclear weapon, so the emphasis should be on the weapon and not exclusively on the psychological makeup of the person. Should it? Why? Saying it should doesn't make it so, and doesn't convince. If we place the emphasis entirely on weapons potential this is most certainly game over. Yet global nuclear (and biological weapons) capacity has decreased since the height of the Cold War, and we're still here. This is one point of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' -- that despite our ability we eradicate ourselves we've chosen -so far- not to, and Pinker acknowledges this means nothing about predicting the future. Now, I can't speak much for that part of the world I know little about, geographically & culturally, and also mathematics isn't something I've studied a lot, so I'll take it as given that Tabel's paper 'On the Super-Additivity and Estimation Biases of Quantile Contributions' is correct, and that Pinker's time series data is shaky. So good, I've learned something from Taleb, and I think it's important to read criticisms. Tabel's paper doesn't contain the words child, women, race, religion, rights, animals. Edit: copy paste mistake resulted in only half my comment, corrected within 1 minute of posting.
alricb 12y ago
Auguste Comte, little-known? Le Bon, maybe, but Comte? The best explanation I've seen for the lower homicide rate in the developed world is that it's mainly due to a more powerful state with better policing, leading to fewer people dying in fight-homicides. Back in the more "tribal" days of Europe, people's safety depended on their belonging to some sort of group (extended family, today we might call them gangs), because usually the "police" was one guy per village or neighborhood who could do little to stop a cycle of vengeance except by trying to get the involved groups to negotiate. It was also fairly easy to escape punishment by getting away from the area were the murder had been committed. This meant that fights over minute matters could easily escalate into deaths, and that murder begat murder. (the classic fight-homicide escalates from an argument over which Pink Floyd album is the best; tempers flare up, the protagonists punch each other, the loser of the fistfight comes back with a handgun)
_greim_ 12y ago
A common way to get riled up about your favorite cause is to point to the state of the world and say "See? Look how bad things are." Pinker's argument will thus fall into the cross-hairs of almost anyone with a political agenda.
- foobarqux 12y ago
  It's the reverse: Pinker's book serves as a justification to ignore or diminish the significance of (western) violence.
golemotron 12y ago
I think Pinker is right about violence and war but reductions in those are probably offset by social aggression and surveillance as Gray mentions when he talks about the panopticon and incarceration rates. We are biological creatures and we should expect that when interests collide there will be aggression. When violence is hampered, it turns into other forms of aggression.
jqm 12y ago
Eh... let resources get scarce and social systems start breaking down. Then we will see if increasing non-violence and altruism is really a trend.
comice 12y ago
Gray seems to approach his criticism of Pinker from pretty much the same pro-establishment viewpoint, and struggles to make clear the problems. This 2012 article by by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson demolishes Pinker's book far better and with fewer words: http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/12/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-decline-of-violence/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/12/steven-pinker-on-the-alleg... I doubt the Guardian will be rushing to publish it though. Gray is much safer.
- tim333 12y ago
  Had a look. Meh. Moans about pinker not going on about the 1%'s economic violence against the 99%, ignores the facts that you're vastly less likely to die in war than was previously the case.

76 points by benbreen 12y ago

While this doesn't invalidate his arguments in and of itself, but it's worth noting that John Gray's core philosophy seems to be diametrically opposed to even the idea of Pinker being right. Gray's philosophy, at least at the coarse level I understand it, seems to be predicated on the idea that humans are incapable of improving on ethical or moral dimensions beyond their inherent nature [0]. His truck with Pinker is not ultimately about whether it's currently true or not that we are becoming less violent, but whether or not it is ever true. Gray is approaching this from an a priori, non-empirical perspective, rather than attempting to meet empirical evidence with empirical evidence. I'm not sure if he's ultimately right or not, but I don't find abstract rebuttals to empirical arguments to be particularly compelling. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28philosopher%29#Political_and_philosophical_thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28philosopher%29#Pol...

detcader 12y ago

And how many Iraqis were killed by UN sactions at the behest of the U.S., the U.K., and Israel? People like Pinker are rewarded for a reason. > When Denis J. Halliday tendered his resignation from his posts after 13 months on the job (September 1997 - October 1998) as UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq where he managed the Oil-for-Food Programme, and with a 34-year career at the United Nations, then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan turned to another experienced international civil servant, Hans C. von Sponeck, to carry on the UN mission. Sponeck had joined the UN Development Program in 1968. He had worked in Ghana, Turkey, Botswana, Pakistan, and India, and had become the Director of the UNDP European Office in Geneva -- an assignment that he had confessed to the General-Secretary he found "boring." Following his new assignment in October 1998, Sponeck arrived in Baghdad on November 8, 1998. He did not last much longer than Denis Halliday. Sponeck resigned from his positions on February 10, 2000. Like Halliday, who had said that, "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that," Sponeck decided that he could not remain associated with the punishing policies against the Iraqi people that he judged were genocidal in nature -- policies that had only one goal, regime change. In the years ahead, both of them worked tirelessly to stop the inevitable march to madness, the March 2003 invasion of this ravaged and mutilated country. http://gicj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97&Itemid=59 http://gicj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97...

dash2 12y ago

There are lots of good reasons to worry about the ability of standard statistical tools to predict the future in the non-linear world of the social sciences. This article fails to hit its target, though. John Gray mentions other kinds of violence - incarceration, civilian casualties. But he offers no evidence that these are going to be so negatively correlated with casualties in war as to overturn Steven Pinker's thesis. He also talks about proxy wars, but these are included in the war statistics, no? An actual attack on Pinker's evidence would require getting your hands dirty in the numbers. Instead we get handwavy complaints about the murkiness of official statistics and the opacity of numbers. It's true they are murky, but they are less murky than intuition and anecdotes.

lbarrow 12y ago
The author links to a much better critique of Pinker by Nassim Taleb. The basic idea is that Pinker uses data about very thin-tailed processes, like street crime, to make inferences about very fat-tailed processes, like casualties in war.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  Some have successfully picked apart Pinker's numbers even with regard to street crime. Murder rates have fallen because of amazingly improved trauma care, not a decline in assault and battery. Beatings and stabbings that were lethal 50 years ago are now routinely survived.
  - leroy_masochist 12y ago
    That's an important point. For a more detailed discussion of it, I recommend Dave Grossman's On Killing. He makes a convincing argument that the long-term downward trend in the U.S. murder rate is a function of faster trips to the hospital (due to better first responder protocols), and better care once in hospital. An examination of the combined total of reported aggravated assaults and murders, according to Grossman, implies that we're getting more violent over time.

jim_greco 12y ago

The best part about Pinker's book is he actually uses data to backup his thesis. Gray is just rambling and appealing to emotion.

foobarqux 12y ago
Except Pinker's data is problematic, cherry picked in a way to support his thesis. For example casualties in the Afghanistan war were not counted because it was labelled as a civil war. He also defines "less violent" as relative to the size of the world population which is at least debatable.
- michaelchisari 12y ago
  I agree with using a percentage of the world population, though. If you look at it in terms of what percentage of people are acting non-violently towards each other, 90% of the population being peaceful versus 99.98% seems to show a clear positive movement. It not only shows that, as a whole, we are more capable of being non-violent, it also provides more opportunities for people to move away from violent situations into peaceful ones. I'm open to criticism of Pinker, but I don't think this article proves that Pinker's position is totally flawed.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  > cherry picked in a way to support his thesis. 1000 pages is a lot of cherry picking. And let's face it, at least his thesis is declared and we can interpret his data selection in that light. Gray offers no quantitative evidence. As far as I can tell, he's trying to cow the reader with a lot of "I read way more political philosophy than any a' y'all." Taleb offers a statistically oriented critique, but again offers no data, and apparently no proof-reading. If anything, the evidence we have from Gray and Taleb is N=2: 2 ostensibly smart fellows found enough grist in Pinker's work to write a publishable response without gathering any data themselves. That alone suggests Pinker's thesis has merit.
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    Pinker's data being flawed doesn't make Gray's critique good. If you want a good critique read Herman and Petersen's. My own view is that the thesis is not important. What is really at issue is the subtext that we should not be too worried about western violence because we are doing better than ever before and that violence is decreasing "naturally", neither of which is true or follows from the claim that violence has been historically in decline.

lbarrow 12y ago

This article is a bit over the top and has a lot of non-sequitors, but the statistical critique of Pinker's book by Nassim Taleb the author linked to is excellent: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tek-cyb-org 12y ago

Ask the arab and muslim world how non violent democracy is.

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
Ask the Ferguson protestors.
danbruc 12y ago
This. We portray the USA as a good peaceful nation while it was at war 218 out of 239 years of its history since 1776. On the other hand we portray Iran as an evil danger to mankind while they did not attack any country since 1795 but were invaded several times. Okay, there is IS having people with backward religious believes, attacking innocent countries, torturing and executing people, terrorizing their own people, producing propaganda and deliberately lying to get support for or justify unjust actions...uppps, sorry, that was the USA, too, sometimes I confuse them.
- knowaveragejoe 12y ago
  > Okay, there is IS having people with backward religious believes, attacking innocent countries, torturing and executing people, terrorizing their own people, producing propaganda and deliberately lying to get support for or justify unjust actions...uppps, sorry, that was the USA, too, sometimes I confuse them. Arguments could be made for this in the case of the US, but it's pretty cut and dry as to IS.
  - danbruc 12y ago
    With more time you could probably make this statement a lot smoother, I admittedly wanted to force it into shape quickly. Notwithstanding what I wrote, comparing the USA and IS involves a lot of apples and oranges and I don't want to imply otherwise. Still there are disturbing parallels.
  - Litost 12y ago
    If you watch pt1 and pt2 of this series, and take them at face value, you'd arguably be hard pushed to see a huge difference in them either? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqwboEpZe88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqwboEpZe88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDeT2tD97s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDeT2tD97s

tim333 12y ago

>Lacking any deeper faith and incapable of living with doubt, it is only natural that believers in reason should turn to the sorcery of numbers. How else can they find meaning in their lives? - strikes me as a bit of a straw man argument. As a believer in reason myself I see it as rather uncorrelated with living with doubt. People up on reason can often handle probabilities and uncertainties - it's more the religious who have a problem with doubt. Looking at Pinker's numerous statistics it seems highly probable the world has been getting more peaceful. Gray's arguments implying doing the stats is dubious when you can nit pick some of the details seem rather weak.

pnathan 12y ago

If someone is chanting about how war is a relic of the past, how humanity has ascended past all that, then one should look to their powder: that is the exact attitude displayed in the 1900-1913 era, just prior to the most horrific cataclysm of violence yet to date. And it was also popular in the 20s and 30s, as a sop to the wounds of the Great War.

mikeash 12y ago
When was the last time the planet went 70 years without a major war? Maybe it won't last, but it seems like something has changed.
- pnathan 12y ago
  Well, the US and the USSR pointed nukes at each other... But maybe reframe the cold war (korea, vietnam, contras, etc), as engagements in a long war (which harmonizes with at least some of the mentalities going on in that period). I think then the thesis of "no war" vanishes.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The Cold War wasn't so much "no war" as it was nearly constant, ongoing, small-scale war. Terrible for those involved, but overall considerably more peaceful than the norm. It didn't really change after the Cold War ended, either. The war landscape from the 1990s through today looks much the same.
- jccalhoun 12y ago
  Besides World War I and II what other major wars have we had? We any of the european conflicts more or less major than more recent wars in other parts of the worlld?
  - gosub 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

johngossman 12y ago

Basically Gray's argument comes down to: human nature hasn't changed. This may be true, but considering the irrefutable real advances in agriculture, medicine, literacy, communication, education and transportation reflected in such things as life-expectancy, infant mortality and various standard-of-living measures, it is certainly debatable.

sowhatquestion 12y ago
Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine. People assume that because (for example) the human tendency towards selfishness hasn't changed, that "human nature" is a reliable constant. But as philosophers have been pointing out at least since Hegel, it's human nature to create technologies--and I mean technologies in the broadest sense: language, tools, artistic works, social and political institutions--that thoroughly reshape and redirect the influence of innate nature. You don't have to go all the way to strong social constructivism in order to understand this, but people treat it as an either/or!

TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago

"Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past." - Steven Pinker. From John Gray's: Pinker dismisses the role of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the use of other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas has not prevented war in the past; but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive. The First and Second World Wars were so shockingly destructive as to make Europe realise that, perhaps, there are better ways of going about things. Like trade. No serious military historian doubts that fear of their use has been a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Well, between two Great Powers -- the former USSR and the USA. Does anyone really think the only thing preventing China, the USA, and Russia from engaging in all-out war is the threat of nuclear annihilation? Everyone stands more to gain from trade. Moreover deaths of non-combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of non‑combatants, whereas around half of the more than 50 million casualties of the second world war and over 90% of the millions who have perished in the violence that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category. That's disingenuous. Historically whole villages and towns, even cities, were routinely laid to waste. Gray's article is sufficiently hand-wavey and cherry-picky to not even bother with. From Taleb's critique: Loss of the Island Effect: My point now is the loss of island effect, from interconnectedness. The number one danger is a biological agent that can travel on British Air and reach the entire planet. And it can be built in a high school lab, or, even, a garage. That sounds a bit sensationalist. A biological agent that has the potential to be the number one danger can be built in a high school lab, or, even, a garage. Well, ok, sure, given a sufficiently equipped high school lab or garage -now we might as well call it a Biological Weapons Facility- but built by whom? Surely not high school students or me. Generating a sufficiently virulent biological agent isn't trivial, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Maybe at some point in the future I'll be able to '3D print' a biological agent with all the right traits. Let's hope that never happens. Taleb's statement above trivialises biological weapons, and spreads FUD. Nuclear Potential: As I explain in Antifragile, risk management is about fragility, not naive interpretation of past data. If Fannie Mae is sitting on a barrel of dynamite I would not use past statistical data for my current analysis. Risks are in the fragility.(Sensitivity to counterfactuals is more important than past history, something Greenspan missed in his famous congressional testimony). Pinker in 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' does repeatedly point out that we can't assume anything about the future based on the past but that there does appear to be a trajectory. Whether Pinker is wrong about that trajectory is beside the point here because Taleb is taking issue with naive interpretation of past data, yet Pinker wrote in the same book "Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past." Pinker conflates nonscalable Mediocristan (death from encounters with simple weapons) with scalable Extremistan (death from heavy shells and nuclear weapons). The two have markedly distinct statistical properties. Yet he uses statistics of one to make inferences about the other. And the book does not realize the core difference between scalable/nonscalable (although he tried to define powerlaws). He claims that crime has dropped, which does not mean anything concerning casualties from violent conflict. I'm half way through reading 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' and that certainly isn't something I'd say about the book. Pinker admits that simple weapons and nuclear weapons are different, but that he focus on death rates in war over time. Pinker treats civilian <> civilian deaths separately as 'murders', so surely Taleb isn't conflating murder and simple-weapon-war-deaths. Another way to see the conflation, Pinker works with a times series process without dealing with the notion of temporal homogeneity. Ancestral man had no nuclear weapons, so it is downright foolish to assume the statistics of conflicts in the 14th century can apply to the 21st. A mean person with a stick is categorically different from a mean person with a nuclear weapon, so the emphasis should be on the weapon and not exclusively on the psychological makeup of the person. Should it? Why? Saying it should doesn't make it so, and doesn't convince. If we place the emphasis entirely on weapons potential this is most certainly game over. Yet global nuclear (and biological weapons) capacity has decreased since the height of the Cold War, and we're still here. This is one point of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' -- that despite our ability we eradicate ourselves we've chosen -so far- not to, and Pinker acknowledges this means nothing about predicting the future. Now, I can't speak much for that part of the world I know little about, geographically & culturally, and also mathematics isn't something I've studied a lot, so I'll take it as given that Tabel's paper 'On the Super-Additivity and Estimation Biases of Quantile Contributions' is correct, and that Pinker's time series data is shaky. So good, I've learned something from Taleb, and I think it's important to read criticisms. Tabel's paper doesn't contain the words child, women, race, religion, rights, animals. Edit: copy paste mistake resulted in only half my comment, corrected within 1 minute of posting.

alricb 12y ago

Auguste Comte, little-known? Le Bon, maybe, but Comte? The best explanation I've seen for the lower homicide rate in the developed world is that it's mainly due to a more powerful state with better policing, leading to fewer people dying in fight-homicides. Back in the more "tribal" days of Europe, people's safety depended on their belonging to some sort of group (extended family, today we might call them gangs), because usually the "police" was one guy per village or neighborhood who could do little to stop a cycle of vengeance except by trying to get the involved groups to negotiate. It was also fairly easy to escape punishment by getting away from the area were the murder had been committed. This meant that fights over minute matters could easily escalate into deaths, and that murder begat murder. (the classic fight-homicide escalates from an argument over which Pink Floyd album is the best; tempers flare up, the protagonists punch each other, the loser of the fistfight comes back with a handgun)

_greim_ 12y ago

A common way to get riled up about your favorite cause is to point to the state of the world and say "See? Look how bad things are." Pinker's argument will thus fall into the cross-hairs of almost anyone with a political agenda.

foobarqux 12y ago
It's the reverse: Pinker's book serves as a justification to ignore or diminish the significance of (western) violence.

golemotron 12y ago

I think Pinker is right about violence and war but reductions in those are probably offset by social aggression and surveillance as Gray mentions when he talks about the panopticon and incarceration rates. We are biological creatures and we should expect that when interests collide there will be aggression. When violence is hampered, it turns into other forms of aggression.

jqm 12y ago

Eh... let resources get scarce and social systems start breaking down. Then we will see if increasing non-violence and altruism is really a trend.

comice 12y ago

Gray seems to approach his criticism of Pinker from pretty much the same pro-establishment viewpoint, and struggles to make clear the problems. This 2012 article by by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson demolishes Pinker's book far better and with fewer words: http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/12/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-decline-of-violence/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/12/steven-pinker-on-the-alleg... I doubt the Guardian will be rushing to publish it though. Gray is much safer.

tim333 12y ago
Had a look. Meh. Moans about pinker not going on about the 1%'s economic violence against the 99%, ignores the facts that you're vastly less likely to die in war than was previously the case.