Renowned linguist, psychologist, Harvard professor Steven Pinker talks at Authors@Google event about his about The Better Angels of our Nature and argues that violence has been in decline…below is the full transcript of the talk at the event…
Female Presenter: Today’s speaker — I’m not going to go on and on about all of his qualifications because you already know that. So I’m going to turn it right away to data because he likes data. In 2007, our speaker came here and spoke about his book ‘The Stuff of Thought’. Now when that YouTube video went up, it rapidly ascended the charts. He has over 175,000 views now. For a talk that is an hour 15 minutes, that is a lot of eyeball time. I appreciate that. He’s in the top 15 out of 1100 plus videos. And he’s in the company of Lady Gaga, Conan O’Brien, Christopher Hitchens, Noam Chomsky and someone we all love, Randall Monroe.
Now, today we are fortunate enough to have him come speak to us, the linguist, psychologist, Harvard professor, I’ll throw that in, to speak about his new book ‘The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined’. Please welcome Steven Pinker.
Steven Pinker – The Author, Psychologist, Harvard Professor
Believe it or not — and I know most people do not — violence has been in decline for long stretches of time. And we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence. The decline of violence has not been steady. It has not brought violence down to zero and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to persuade you that it is a persistent historical development visible on scales from millennia to years from wars to genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals. I’m going to walk you through six major historical declines of violence, identify their immediate causes in terms of particular historical events of the era. And then try to tie them together in terms of their ultimate causes. That is, general historical forces interacting with human nature.
Pacification Process
The first historical decline I call the pacification process. Until 5,000 years ago, people everywhere lived in a state of anarchy without central government. What was life like in this so-called state of nature? This is a question that thinkers have speculated on for hundreds of years.
Thomas Hobbes famously said that a state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. A century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau countered that “nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state.” Both men were talking through their hats. Neither of them had any idea what life was like in a state of nature.
But today we can do better because there are two sources of evidence about rates of violence in non-state societies. The first is forensic archeology. You can think of this as CSI Paleolithic. Mainly what proportion of prehistoric skeletons have signs of violent trauma such as bashed in skulls, decapitations, arrow heads embedded in bones, or mummies found with ropes around their necks?
There are, I found 20 estimates and they span quite a range, but the average is 15%. That is, 15% of people in these samples died violently. Let’s compare that 15% sample to those from some more recent periods for example Europe and the United States in the 20th century at 6/10th of a percentage point. If we include the entire century, the entire world and all violent deaths, including those from genocides and man-made famines, we can get the figure up to about 3% and if we look at the world as a whole in the year 2005, the bar is less than a pixel high. It comes in at 3/100ths of a percentage point.
The second source of evidence of violence in non-state societies comes from ethnographic. The wave of government that expanded out of the first civilizations left a few pockets on earth in which the people still lived in anarchy until recently namely hunter gatherers and hunter horticulturalists. Ethnographers, in many cases, have tabulated the various kinds of death in those societies. Here are 27 estimates. And once again they span quite a range, but their average is 524 per 100,000 per year. That is about a half of a percentage point per year. Again, let’s compare that to some figures for states and I’ll pick some notoriously violent states in their most violent periods for comparison just to stack the deck against states.