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[link] Relative angels and absolute demons
I wanted to bring attention to two posts from Razib Khan's Discover magazine gene expression blog (some of you may have been readers of the still active original gnxp) on the polemic surrounding Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?
This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.
Relative Angels and absolute Demons (and the related But peace does reign! )
There are two separate points to note here; a specific and a general. I suspect Steven Pinker knows more history than Elizabeth Kolbert. I’ve talked to Pinker once at length, and just as in his books he comes across as very widely knowledgeable. I’ll be frank and say that I don’t feel many people I talk to are widely knowledgeable, and when it comes to something like history I’m in a position to judge. Ironically Kolbert is repeating the Anglo-Protestant Black Legend about the Spaniards, rooted in the rivalries and sectarianism of the 16th and 18th centuries, but persisting down amongst English speaking secular intellectuals. The reality is that the Spaniards did not want to kill the indigenous peoples, they died of disease and the societal destabilization that disease entailed. Europeans who arrived from Iberia in the New World ideally wished to collect rents from peasants. The death of those peasants due to disease was a major inconvenience, which entailed the importation of black Africans who were resistant to the Old World diseases like malaria which were spreading across the American tropics. The violence done to native peoples was predominantly pathogenic, not physical.
...
I suspect that Kolbert’s emphasis on the European colonial experience of much of the world is influenced by the ubiquity of the postcolonial paradigm. Those who take postcolonial thinking as normative sometimes forget that not everyone shares their framework. I do not, and I would be willing to bet that Steven Pinker would also dissent from the presuppositions of postcolonialism. That means that the facts, the truths, that many take for granted are actually not taken for granted by all, and are disputed. One of the issues with postcolonial models is that they seem to view Europeans and European culture, and their colonial enterprises, as sui generis. This makes generalization from the West, as Pinker does, problematic. But for those of us who don’t see the West as qualitatively different there is far less of an issue.
I generally agree with some of his arguments, but found this quote especially as summing up some of my own sentiments:
A postcolonial model is ironically extremely Eurocentric, with a total blindness to what came before Europeans.
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Comments (64)
For those who don't have the book, I suspect a lot of the meat could be found in Pinker's previous essays on the topic of historical violence:
We no longer draw and quarter people, but we imprison far more people.
State repression that was once considered extraordinary is now routine. Before the French Revolutionary Red Terror, the Spanish inquisition, which killed a dozen or so people every year, was the standard evil example of repression, and Queen Bloody Mary, who murdered a couple of hundred and caused a thousand or so to flee, the classic tyrant.
Today, however, Prince Sihanouk, however, who murdered twelve thousand, many of them in ways colorful, dramatic, and extraordinary, is however sainted for his extraordinary peacefulness and tolerance.
Pinker pats progressives on the back because we no longer draw and quarter people, but Aristide murdered his political enemies in grotesque ways as vile as any medieval despot, and yet, like Prince Sihanouk, is sainted for his peacefulness and tolerance. Aristide personally gouged out the eyes of one of his goons, a job that any medieval despot would have given to a masked executioner.
We civilized white people no longer gouge out people's eyes, nor burn people alive, the way we used to, and the way our pet despots like Aristide still do , but we imprison a hell of a lot more people than we used to, in part because of increased underclass criminality, but in part because so many things that respectable white middle class people do have been criminalized.
Over the past hundred years, state and private violence has increased massively - the private crime rate has risen, and the imprisonment rate has risen faster, which arguably constitutes increasing state crime. The World Wars were worse than Napoleonic wars, and modern repression has been spectacularly and enormously more severe than medieval repression. Queen Bloody Mary was a tyrant for killing two hundred, but Tito not a tyrant for killing two hundred thousand.
That's probably attributed to the parochialism of Bretons of the era -- they couldn't know about the Yangzhou massacre in China where 800,000 people were slaughtered, and the Massacre of the Latins in the 12th century in Constantinople wouldn't stick in their minds.
But I'm sure they remembered St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in the 16th century -- and in Central Europe "Vlad Tepes the Impaler" who killed tens of thousands people was known too.
Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius "The Great", proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD.
Those incidents were war, not repression. You need to compare twelfth century repression with twentieth century repression, and twelfth century war with twentieth century war.
Modern repression is enormously more violent than ancient repression. Modern wars are larger and bloodier than ancient wars. Incidents where the populace of a vanquished city were massacred may be less common in modern wars, but if so this may be because we can accomplish the same effect more efficiently by such means as were employed at Dresden and Hiroshima. If you flatten a city before you take it, this discourages resistance more effectively than slaughtering a city that stubbornly resisted for an unreasonably long time.
Thanks for the link. But I think you should have done a little more analysis, seeing as how this is Lesswrong and not Digg or Reddit. :)
Pinker is certainly much above the typical academic of today, but reading his arguments, I can't help but conclude that even an exceptional figure such as him is nowadays incapable of discussing matters like these sensibly. He simply lacks an adequate and broad enough knowledge of history and other relevant fields, as well as a reasonably unbiased view of the modern world, and ends up constructing arguments based on a naive and cartoonish view of both history and the present.
On the whole, Pinker is great when he sticks to topics where arguments based on particular solid scientific findings suffice, like for example in The Blank Slate. However, his attempts at grand theories such as these, where a sensible argument would require a very broad knowledge of a great many things that is not offered by today's elite education, as well as many insights into the modern world and modern history that go significantly beyond the cartoonish textbook accounts, strike me as painfully naive and misguided.
One one hand I agree (facially the claim about the Enlightenment fostering resistance to slavery is particularly bizarre, or at least lazy.) On the other hand there's frequently great value in works that painstakingly document an empirical trend, even if the causal explanations they offer inspire skepticism - the work of Gregory Clark comes to mind.
I'm curious why you think this, looking at the history to strikes me as fairly obvious. The meme that slavery is wrong in principal, as opposed to only being wrong when it happens to you, is definitely a product of the enlightenment.
That's true only under a highly contrived definition of the Enlightenment, which defines it more or less as the set of all intellectual trends in the 18th century that are in sufficient agreement with today's respectable opinion. (Admittedly, this is more or less how the term is used in today's standard cartoon history.)
In reality, the modern anti-slavery attitudes are due to the political (and military) victories of the abolitionist movements in the English-speaking world in the period 1807-1865. These were strongly religious in character, and influenced by the Enlightenment only insofar as all major intellectual trends influence each other to some degree.
From what I've heard, the enlightenment played into making American slavery as bad as it was. Since the enlightenment said that it was bad to enslave people, but slavery was very profitable, a pattern of rationalizations were built up that Africans were innately inferior and slavery was good for them.
The French First Republic abolished slavery in 1794 -- and that one was explicitly anti-Christian. Spain abolished slavery in 1811.
I don't really disagree with you factually about the role of England or of Christians... but Christianity had been around for about 1800 years by that time. Christianity wasn't a new thing that we can therefore attribute the end of slavery to its coming.
In short: P(Abolitionist ideas|Christian Ideas) < P(Abolitionist ideas|Enlightenment Ideas)
You seem to be assuming that my goal is to make a point that would somehow be in favor of Christianity in general. My writing was not motivated by any such goal, and lumping all historical Christians (under whatever definition) together on an issue like this is meaningless, given the diversity of their views. Moreover, it is clear that the concrete people and denominations who stood behind abolitionism were on the outer fringes of Protestantism, and motivated in their activism by their peculiarities much more than any universal Christian beliefs.
My goal was merely to clarify the historical origin of the concrete anti-slavery laws and attitudes that are in force in today's world, not to speculate on what exact circumstances are likely to give birth to anti-slavery ideas.
Well ... it's a little more complicated than that.
Slavery was abolished for the first time in England in 1102, though it kept coming back; it was abolished again in Cartwright's case of 1569, for instance. However, when people refer to "abolition of slavery" today, they usually mean the abolition of the African slave trade and then of slavery in the New World, notably the Caribbean colonies and the United States.
In Great Britain, many Enlightenment philosophers including Locke and Mill were significant opponents of slavery and the slave trade — although so too were many religious dissenters, notably Quakers, who tended to be better organized and more committed. The mainstream Church of England, in contrast, held many slaves itself; so this wasn't a case of religion vs. irreligion. For that matter, religious toleration, which led to the legalization of the Quakers and other dissenting churches, was itself arguably an Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment was never an expressly atheistic movement in Britain or America; English Freemasonry, rather deeply involved with the Enlightenment, to this day does not accept atheists.
Meanwhile in France and the French colonies in the New World, slavery was abolished by the "Enlightenment" (and "rationalist"!) French Revolution, then shortly re-established by Napoleon. That didn't work out so well for Haiti ...
Well, yes, it is a lot more complicated if you want to get into all the details. However, the concrete political movements that led to the abolition of British slave trade in 1807, the subsequent British commitment to stamp out the slave trade globally with the Royal Navy, the Empire-wide Abolition Act in 1833, and the American struggles over slavery that culminated with the Civil War, were overwhelmingly instigated and promoted by religiously motivated people coming mostly from Quaker and certain other Dissenter groups. The modern anti-slavery attitudes draw their ideological origins primarily from these people and their work.
Also, some of your details are not quite right. Locke was by no means a principled opponent of slavery -- he considered slavery legitimate in certain cases ("state of war continued") that he outlined in his Second Treatise. (Also, I have read, though never seen conclusive evidence, that he had some financial interest in the slavery business and participated in drafting a strongly pro-slavery constitution for the Carolina colony.) Mill can't be classified under the Enlightenment unless its definition is made absurdly overbroad, and even regardless, he was a latecomer to the whole issue.
It is true that the British and American Enlightenment was never as atheistic as the French. (This was to some degree because of its representatives' actual beliefs, but also because atheism was more dangerous for one's reputation and career in Britain and America than in France.) However, the leading British and American Enlightenment figures -- from Locke to Hume to Smith to Gibbon to the U.S. founders -- were definitely not among the leading anti-slavery activists of their day, and I'm not sure if any of them even made a principled condemnation of it. Whatever we make out of it, the people who actually started and promoted abolitionism as an ideological and political force were first and foremost religious Quakers and other Dissenters, for whom the Enlightenment was at most a side influence.
Back before 1940 progressivism was nominally Christian and protestant.
The new testament takes an extreme socially conservative position on sex and marriage: Marriage should be patriarchal, a woman should never divorce her husband, no matter what, and a divorced woman should never remarry while her husband lives. It takes a moderate position on alcohol, suggesting one should drink socially at meal times, and an alarmingly moderate position on slavery. It is desirable to free one's own slaves, at least if they convert to Christianity, but by no means required, and one should not free anyone else's slaves by any pressure stronger than moral suasion.
That branch of Christianity that was in substantial part a political movement, the ancestor of today's non communist left, found the new testament inconvenient, and tended to demote Jesus from God to major community organizer, since the politics of the new testament imply no role for Christian political activists - Christians are supposed to do good, but, if they take the new testament seriously, none of the good they are supposed to do is appropriate to being done through the state. A theocratic Christianity is a absurd as a non theocratic Islam, so to the extent that Christians have been active in politics, they tended to ditch the New Testament, (Christians on the left) or else claim with varying degrees of plausibility to be defending the Church from state intervention (Christian conservatives)
RETRACTING: I missed the Pauline quotes from Corinthians, which makes my whole post irrelevant.
You're right about one of these, that the new testament (specifically Paul) says marriage should be patriarchal. The other words you spoke are the exact other way around. The exact New Testament quotes are:
"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?" " After a long passage Jesus at the end responds "What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." and also Mathhew 5:32 "But I say to you, That whoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery: and whoever shall marry her that is divorced commits adultery."
And also Luke 16:18: "Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery. "
--
In short, in complete opposition to what you said, the new Testament says that a man should never divorce his wife, and that a divorced man should never remarry after a divorce (or marry a woman who was divorced) -- it's the man who is committing adultery in both these cases, or who is causing the woman to commit adultery (and thus is portrayed as ultimately responsible for this sin).
I want to be charitable in my interpretation of your words, but these factoids seem way too reversed to have been an honest mistake in your part.
It's easy to google the quotes up. Here's one.
Here's another:
Let us compare. Romans says:
1 Corinthians says:
sam says:
Sounds like it's saying the same thing in different words.
Let us compare. Romans says:
1 Corinthians says:
sam says:
Sounds like it's saying the same thing in different words.
Source.
Ah, you're right, I somehow missed those Pauline quotes from Corinthians when I was looking up quotes about divorce, and I thought sam had deliberately mangled the Jesus quotes instead.
I'll retract my earlier comment. Thanks for the correction.
The history of Europe strongly suggests otherwise. There's a reason that the Catholic Church in the 19th century labeled the idea of separation of Church and State a heresy dubbed "Americanism".
Excuse me? Most left wing Christians make a big deal about how they care about the New Testament and not the old. The second claim is simply wrong. The whole modern return of evangelicals to the political sphere (starting in the 1970s) was explicitly to put religion back into government. Jerry Falwell is one example of this approach. More extreme are the Christian Recontructionists. And even the fairly moderate Mike Huckabee has explicitly said that if the US Constitution is not in keeping with God's law that it should then be modified to fit it.
It's a subtle point, but theocratic doesn't mean "rule according to religious dictates"; it means "rule by the clerical arbiters of religious dictates." Medieval Christian states, with the notable exceptions of the Papal States and Montenegro, were not theocratic. In other words, Iran is a partial theocracy; Saudi Arabia, at least de jure, is not. Nevertheless, official religion is probably a more oppressive force in Saudi Arabia than it is in Iran.
The Christian Reconstructionists give me the willies just as much as anyone else around here, but it is probably not correct to label them theocratic (and the fact that they aren't theocrats doesn't make them less dangerous).
Voting your comment up for being a valid point. That said, while that may be the intended use of theocratic, but in context here it seems that the poster intended to mean theocratic in a more general sense. I
Note that given the historical existence of the Papal States, the claim is, even when interpreted in the narrow sense, still wrong.
This also runs into the problem that many governments in the Islamic world did not generally have a theocratic element in this narrow sense. The Ottoman Empire for example did not have clergy members involved in politics (although technically speaking the sultan was officially considered to be the heir of the caliphate, I think.).
So while you've made a good point about the technical meaning of the word, I don't think it saves the poster's remarks.
The pope at least pretended not to be a theocracy. Theoretically the Holy Roman Emperor was Caesar, in "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, render unto God that which is God's" To the extent that they actually were a theocracy, they were criticized for it, and denied it. The Spanish inquisition was supposedly answerable to the King of Spain, and theoretically the Pope's minions were supposedly merely advising them, much as Harvard theoretically merely advises the federal bureaucracy.
Most left wing Christians in the protestant line are in practice indistinguishable from Unitarians, and Unitarians don't give a tinker's damn about either testament.
If one testament is less right wing than the other, it is the old testament that is the less right wing, since the old Testament places limits on debt and slavery, The old testament position on slavery is markedly less reactionary than the New Testament position on slavery - not that left wing Christians read either one.
To add a related data point, the same thing happened in the rest of Latin America. Abolition of slavery was of the first measures of many of the revolutions against the Spanish in the early 19th century, which were heavily inspired by the Enlightenment. Brazil held out a few decades more, because slavery was a lot more integral to its economy.
I agree that documenting empirical trends is valuable, but only as long as the limitations of the data are not forgotten. A neat graph often makes things look misleadingly simple.
For example, the historical murder figures are already problematic for Pinker's thesis considering that the trend has, according to his own graphs, reversed at some point during the the 20th century -- but they are absolutely devastating whey you consider that the present murder rate would be at least several times higher without the 20th century advances in medicine, thanks to which most of the once lethal wounds are now easily treated. (And all this is without even considering that what is expected as regular behavior nowadays when it comes to precautions against crime would have struck people from not so long ago as utterly paranoid siege mentality, and so on.) Generally, arguments based on simple plots of historical trends are likely to overlook all sorts of relevant confounding variables.
As for the particular cartoonish and bizarre historical and political claims by Pinker, I wouldn't even know where to start. Most of his article would be deserving of a good fisking.
Edit: According to Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault 1960-1999 by A.R. Harris et al. (ungated link here):
Note also that the ceteris paribus assumption doesn't take into account the effect of the enormous changes in people's lifestyle since 1960 that have been prompted by the increased danger of crime.
This varies, of course, with the postcolonialist in question, but I wouldn't characterize it as ironic. The modern world arose as a result of a particular (Western) imperial/colonial long event - or at least it did if postcolonialists are anything close to correct - and people living in global south are just as much the inheritors of that legacy as those living in the north. So postcolonialism certainly does take a modern perspective, not those of imperial Malinese bureaucrats, Nahua mercenaries, or for that matter Carolingian knights. But it doesn't pretend to, any more than characteristically "northern" ideologies like liberalism do.
I have to run to class, but I can expand on this later if it's at all unclear (which self-calibrating has taught me my writing is oftentimes.)
Expand, please. Assuming the modern world stems from a colonial long event, why would that imply that "a total blindness to what came before Europeans" is only to be expected? Or, say (if we tone down the hyperbole a little) a large degree of blindness.
A large degree of blindness is a better way to phrase things, certainly.
At the risk of tautology, post-colonialism isn't centrally concerned with pre-colonialism, because, well, it's post-colonialism, not pre-colonialism. It's concerned with a very particular world, our modern world, and the interlocking parts within it.
Now, what I think Konqvistador (heh) meant - although I could of course be wrong - is that post-colonialists are always going around denouncing Europe and never the Celestial Empire or Four Regions or Triple Alliance or what have you, which were not so different than Europe in its heyday, after all, and that this reflects an obsession with Europe that belies their claims to draw attention to the colonized and their accusations that Europe sees itself as unique. This would be a mistake, but a very understandable one, because some of the implicit assumptions that postcolonialism sees itself as challenging is the idea that there are more or less independent, coherent nations stretching through history and which are in a process of, albeit at unequal rates conditioned by their internal characteristics and contact with more advanced nations, acquiring progressively greater degrees of modernity. (Like Sid Meier's Civilization, you might say.) If something like this forms your basic model and you don't read post-colonialists carefully (who has time to read everyone carefully?) it looks like they're complaining about Europeans doing what everyone else has been since the dawn of agriculture, just sucking less at it.
But in fact they're operating from a very different set of assumptions. Modernity, in this view, consists of incorporation into a (the) capitalist world-system, something that in some respects is much like the tributary empires of the past and in other respects quite different. It has its own organic logic to it, in need of differentiated parts fulfilling distinct tasks; it moves people, goods, and money around at rapid speed to create them; it fundamentally reconstitutes what goes into it. So what it means to say that the modern world arose from a colonial long event is that we're all colonialism's children, some much more favored than others, not that one of our dads beat the others' up. If you like, you can say that "ironically" postcolonialism says we're all Europeans now, in that a set of relations that first and primarily encompassed Europe now encompasses the globe, but of course this isn't actually ironic, just an example of semantic Dutch Booking.
What you said before wasn't unclear, by the way; I just wanted to hear more. You went in a somewhat different direction than I expected, so I'm glad I asked.