The Better Angels of our Nature

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

I recently attended a book talk by Stephen Pinker, a renowned evolutionary psychologist from Harvard, who draws his title, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. Pinker’s central argument is that over the last several centuries and indeed, even the last few years, human society has become less violent. He claims that while people have a tendency to privilege traumatic memories, making violent episodes particularly impressionable, when we step back from our prejudices, statistical data shows a dramatic decrease in the rate of violent killing. Unfortunately, the Sheldonian Theatre was built before the development of overhead projectors, so he was not able to utilize a power point presentation to display his quantitative evidence, but allegedly 5,000 years ago among Paleolithic humans the rate of violent death was 15%. More recently, analysis of 27 studies by ethnographers suggest a death rate of less than 0.5%. I’m a bit skeptical of these numbers because I have read books that suggest that rates of violence were far lower before mankind established complex civilizations and modern-hunter gather tribes continue to have lower rates of violence. Also, to what extent can archaeological evidence differentiate between violent death by saber-tooth tiger as opposed to murder, and did Pinker attempt to control for the degree to which recent advancements in medicine may artificially suppress the death rates in modern society? However, his numbers do suggest a decline that is substantially large so as to offset these quibbles, and I haven’t had time to pour through his 700-page book, so for now, I will grant his intermediary conclusion. The more interesting part of his claim is the causal argument he advances.

Pinker cites a number of contributing factors in what he calls the Pacification process. Namely, the Civilizing Process, whereby the state asserts a monopoly on the use of violence within society (35 violent deaths per 100,000 in Medieval England as opposed to 1/100,000 today), the Humanification Process, in which we did away with judicial torture and capital punishment in the 19^th century and the Rights Revolution, after which we see a dramatic reduction in targeted killings of women, children and ethnic minorities. He even argues, the despite the immense bloodshed of the First and Second World Wars, the twentieth century can be describes as The Long Peace because in previous centuries the great powers were constantly at war, whereas we have recently seen a marked decline in the incidence of inter-state warfare and the duration of wars. He argues that many of the causes for this can be traced back to Kant’s “Perpetual Peace,” namely democracy, trade and international institutions. While human nature has not changed (2-year olds, the most violent section of the population, still hit, bite and kick) but adults have learned to channel aggression through vicarious expressions of violence and new emphasis on restraint. Morality, reason and empathy mediate our violent impulses while the state acts as an arbiter in disputes and the threat of government punishment inhibits excessive aggression. How can we account for the enhanced roles of reason and empathy? The rise in literacy, access to education and growth of the public discourse encourages us to the better assess fairness and recognize the futility of violence. Meanwhile, globalization and cross-cultural interactions have expanded our previously narrow circle of empathy by allowing us to recognize the paradigms of others. Thus, we are to conclude that rather than fostering depravity, modern society actually promotes the “better angels of our nature.”

Two things that I think are worth bearing in mind: First, the dramatic population growth enabled by industrialization and modernization mean that even if the percentage of violent death is decreasing, the absolute numbers are not. Some studies suggest that in the last decade five-million people have died from violent conflicts in Africa alone. Second, while formal inter-state warfare is declining, violence has found new ways of manifesting itself. A few days after seeing Pinker, I was at another talk by Keith Krause, where he rejected Pinker’s claims (admittedly without even seriously looking at the book) and argued that inter-state violence is being replaced by new forms of political violence, much of it within the state through civil war, state sponsored purges, drug wars, genocide, etc. So while the development of the state has constrained the number/type of agents who can make legitimate claims to the use of force, it has also allowed for more centralized, bureaucratized and effective mass killings in societies where ethical and legal controls have failed to keep pace with advancements in political organization. Thus, we need to continue to strengthen what Lincoln called the “bonds of affection” and “mystic chords of memory” before we can recognize that men are not enemies but friends. We can only hope that the world will produce leaders with his wisdom and integrity to lead us through the infighting that lies ahead and usher in the prosperity and fraternity that has graced our formerly war-torn Union.