Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Some places are more violent, some places are less. Overall, the recent figures probably indicate less violence per capita than previous times. However, this can change on a dime.
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The world is becoming less violent?
- Thread starter sandandfoam
- Start date
Me Myself
Back to my username
he didn´t say non violent, he said less violent.
It would also be interesting to define "violence" for this context.
I am glad there is less needless violence.
Sure, but I doubt anybody has quantified or even attempted to estimate the global rates of all damaging/injurious force worldwide and attempted a chronological comparison to uncover potential trends. There's no statistical backing at all for any claims of the world becoming more or less violent. On the whole, the world becoming less violent would be a disaster; Earth is inherently a dynamic system, and cessation of damaging/injurious force would represent an unprecedented stagnation of the very underpinnings of our planet. We'd probably go extinct as a result of such stagnation, as it would utterly break the entire climate.
Even if we're limiting our assessment to just humans, we just don't have accurate data from a long time ago to be able to make a statement like "humans are becoming less violent" either. Even with the statistics we have today, many, many incidents of damaging/injurious force go unreported as they're deemed insignificant with respect to what those statistics are tracking (usually crime). If you've ever pounded your fist into something in frustration, that's damaging force and quite violent. If you've ever raised your voice against someone in anger or to intimidate, that's verbal violence. Nope, violence is part of the human condition. I don't see that ever changing given its pervasive utility. The ability to exert force and power - which is sometimes damaging and injurious - is vitally important for the survival of just about any animal species.
Maybe the OP intended to mean something more specific, like rates of human deaths at the hands of other humans. I'm not sure we have good statistics on that either, particularly not from way back when.[/QUOTE]
Someone had described his latest book to me when it came out, and I foolishly chose to base my opinion off of this person's interpretation of Pinker's analysis and conclusion at first. Luckily, I happen to be working the day Pinker was giving a talk about his book, so I went down to hear him. I was glad to be wrong, and subsequently read his book.
There were, however, a few things (both in his presentation and his book) which were not exactly accurate and/or were somewhat distorted. Some were, I think, due to the simplification necessary to write a book on so broad an issue and make it non-technical. Others were more likely a result of Pinker's specialty (and the fact that he discussed much which has little or nothing to do with this specialty).
For example, he deals a lot with frequencies of violence, classified into various categories.There are currently a several international organizations which attempt to provide comprehensive reports on violence in various regions, such as EuroStat, WHO, HEUNI, etc. In the 2011 World Development Report: Conflict, Security, and Development, which alone is about half the size of Pinker's book and is only concerned with understanding modern violence, crime, etc., we can't even get to the Intro without the following: "One of the greatest challenges in researching lessons on violence prevention and recovery is the lack of available quantitative and qualitative data, due to challenges of security and access, along with low statistical capacity. Even in the World Banks comprehensive data sets, countries most affected by violence often register empty data columns."
HEUNI's chapter "Homicide" in it's Insternational Statistics on Crime and Justice (2010), like Pinker, deals with the issue of categorizing violence. Unlike Pinker, however, the concern is only with the most recent data. And homicide in particular "is perhaps the most widely collected and reported crime in law enforcement and criminal justice statistics". So we'd expect to see the least issues here. Yet instead we find "the challenges of cross-national comparability are considerable" (p. 7). Even for the EU (see EuroStat's Crime and Criminal Justice report), not only is classification a problem (different legal systems), but so too is missing data.
In other words, the leading organizations concerned documenting, classifying, and analyzing current trends, tendencies, and frequency of violence in the world continuously note the major roadblocks.
Pinker, on the other hand, is not primarily concerned with actually analyzing data (e.g., ensuring that the comparisons he makes are accurate), but taking datasets and interpreting them on a global scale throughout human history.
The most glaring example of an almost complete failure to properly understand violence trends is his treatment of genocide. Pinker discusses the "genocides" in the Homeric epics, the Bible, as well as other ancient literature. The problem here is that the destruction of Troy, or slaughter of the Hittites, and ancient warfare in general isn't genocide. At least not in the way the term is used to day. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious way to demonstrate this is etymologically: the word is a combination of the Latin for killing/murder with the Greek genos. For the Homeric epics in particular, but also for ancient Greek in general, the word meant "tribe" or "family" more than "race." Ancient warfare (like most warfare in human history) was characterized by going into some other city, or the region occupied by some other tried, and slaughtering them. Usually this included rape, enslavement, etc,. but sometimes just destruction and wholesale slaughter. Yet the only way we can classify this as genocide is by thinking that "race" means living in a particular city.
The anthropological models of genocide do tend to make comparisons with the past, but only in terms of certain common characteristics which can help inform underlying psychological mechanisms at play. Hinton's study "The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide" (the introductory essay in the edited volume Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide; vol. 3 of California Series in Public Anthropology) makes this quite clear: "Prior to the twentieth century, the concept of genocide did not exist." (p. 3). It's true that althought "the concept of genocide is a twentieth-century invention, the types of destructive behaviors it references go far back in history" but with "the advent of modernity, however, genocidal violence began to be motivated by a new constellation of factors" (p. 7).
Not that all historians or anthropologists agree. There are some who would define, as Pinker does, older massacres of cities and so forth as "genocides". But as Gellately & Kiernan note in a similar essay to the once cited above (in that it too is the introduction to an edited volume on genocide), even scholars who argue genocide is as old as war, this tendency to "underline continuities in the human condition as explaining the recurrence of mass murder" (p. 9) misses extremely important factors. The authors (who are the volume's editors) write "In this book, Omer Bartov, Marie Fleming, and Eric Weitz focus on the specific modernity of genocide. In their essays here they insist that there is something very new about many (if not all) of the twentieth-century mass murders, such as those inflicted on the Armenians or the Jews. Many of us would agree with the point made by Isabel Hull in her essay in this volume. On the basis of what happened to the Herero tribe in German South West Africa before the First World War, she argues that the vastness and totality of recent genocides or final solutions aimed at what she terms problem populations is such that they can be pursued only by an institution like the modern state." (p. 9).
Pinker cites Chalk and Jonassohn's book both in support of the idea that genocide is ancient, and to explain why people are under the (false) impression it is new. Using their work as back-up, he writes "historians have never found genocide particularly interesting." It's hard to find interesting a concept that didn't exist until recently. And one need only look at the samples of definitions of genocide from just the 80s onward in Jones' textbook (Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction 2nd ed.), which require about 3 pages even though some are only one line long, to not that "never found interesting" can only be true if we ignore the past 30 years.
To compare the warfare in Homer to the Holocaust, the "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia, the slaughter in Rowanda, and similar hallmarks of the 20th century in particular (it has not stopped and there are comparable stains in the history of humanity from e.g., colonization) is at best flawed, and at worse to trivialize these horrors.
Let's just say that Pinker did some great work trying to present a balanced view of history, but the secondary nature historiography played in his work, his lack of familiarity with the study of history and historiography, and the incredible complexities inherent in his project all resulted in some rather unfortunate distortions. Hopefully, his conclusions aren't too affected by them.
Violence is not just corporeal. It is emotional or spiritual. Today the firmer has come down the latter is on the go. More and more people divorcing one another. The world is getting uglier place to live in speaking environmentally and are we not in violence when we damage our ecology?
"our ecology"? Certainly, the frequency of divorce in places like the US, Canada, the UK, etc. (places where we tend to have reliable data), is greater than it was about 60 years ago. But how is this meaningful if we compare these figures to societies in which divorce is prohibited, or in which only the husband can opt to divorce? We are beset by even more difficulties if we try to compare the emotional or spiritual toll experienced in the modern era with those of the past:
What is included in "homicide"? Are wars included? And What it
Me period is covered in the stats? Just asking.
The saddest thing for me is the fact we have over centuries been mindlessly destroying this green planet. We will have little to bequeath to postrity. When i see people felling trees insensibly in my country or set a fire on jungles i feel there is little we have to give to our posterity.
tumbleweed41
Resident Liberal Hippie
No. however, looking at the deaths in wars;
WW II- 40,000,000 to 72,000,000
Mongolian Conquests- 30,000,000 to 60,000,000
Transition to Ming Dynasty- around 30,000,000
Qing conquest of Ming Dynasty- around 25,000,000
WW I- around 15,000,000
Iran-Iraq War- around 2,000,000
Crusades (Combined)- 1,000,000 to 3,000,000
American Civil War- 400,000 to 800,000
Say again?
I sympathize with Treebeard and Yavanna as much as the next individual, but
1) Some tries thrive only with fire
2) We aren't "destroying the planet"
3) However much the mindless or uncaring destruction of ecosystems, pollution, and similar acts done, being done, and alas likely to continue to be done, have, are, or will harm us, other animals, and other life forms in general, they will not destroy the planet. Nor will they end life on this planet. And the reason this is important is because it is not simply mindless (or intentional) acts like pollution which are the problem, but well-intentioned but ill-informed individuals who misunderstand the nature of the environment, its processes, and what we are capable of doing to "preserve" these.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.
Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
- Housman (from his A Shropshire Lad)
Never before has man had the means for his own annihilation. More people have been slaughtered in modern wars than all wars fought previously combined. Millions, perhaps billions, live in dire circumstances of poverty and oppression, due to the violence done by corrupt economic and political systems. Mindless mass killings are commonplace. Believe what you will. I believe statistics cannot change the facts of life today, that point to these as the last days. (2 Timothy 3:1-5)
Are they commonplace where you live?
They aren't where I live. Travel about 7 miles north and east of where I live, homicide is - there's a story every other day of somebody who was shot. Sometimes the story is a stabbing occurred. But mass killings don't even happen there in the neighborhood referred to in many circles as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the U.S.
And I drive through there most days when I travel to St. Louis.
But what the argument against your point about how mass killings are commonplace is that overall, on a global scale, mass killings are not as common per capita as they have been in the past.
dust1n
Zindīq
I think if the goal is to lessen violence, homicide is a good place to start.
I guess that's a good point. I'm sure there is significantly less death per capita as a whole. Even the violence one is most likely going to encounter is nothing compared to the many hardships of olden' days.
Killings are more surgical now-a-days, so I guess that helps.
Also abortion helps lower violent crime, so that's a win-win.
The one concern I have - I'm not sure 'per capita' really applies to number of people dying in a given year. If there are only 100,000 people about 10,000 die, or there are 1,000,000 people and 25,000 die, the latter is technically more death and sorrow.. Just because there are more happy people around the death and sorrow, the sorrow isn't really lessened, I wouldn't think.
Pegg
Jehovah our God is One
i think it is as violent today as it was in ancient times.
Yes, but do you have any evidence for that?