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[anonymous]13y00

This comment of yours has got me thinking:

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.

I'm not sure what exact atrocities attributed to Theodosius you have in mind with this comment (there were certainly many). However, it is significant that after the most notable of his atrocities -- the massacres following the suppression of the rebellion in Thessalonica -- Theodosius was openly rebuked by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and the foremost intellectual authority of the church at the time, and was forced to repent publicly. The incident was left as a permanent stain on his record, and even in Christian traditions that recognize him as a saint, the event is recognized as a reminder that great and saintly men can be fallible to the point of committing horrible sins. (Also, the title "Great" for a select few rulers has traditionally referred to the extraordinary magnitude of their historical impact much more than to the general righteousness of their character and deeds.)

In my opinion, this perspective compares rather favorably with the 20th century custom of utter idealization of ideological movements and leaders. (This includes the still ongoing idealization of the predecessors of the current U.S. regime, especially those from the New Deal/WW2 era, but also the later ones.)

(I'm not pointing this out in order to side myself against you in the ongoing discussion, but because it does seem to me that this trend of, for lack of a less ugly term, ideologically motivated idealization of political gangsters and swindlers really has reached extraordinary levels in recent history.)

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16 [link] Relative angels and absolute demons

by [anonymous]

10th Oct 2011

3 min read

16

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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[-]gwern13y100

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:

[-]sam034513y10

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.

[-]ArisKatsaris13y130

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.

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.

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

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.

[-][anonymous]13y00

This comment of yours has got me thinking:

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.

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[-]sam034513y-10

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.

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.

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.

[+]sam034513y-140

[-]Vladimir_M13y60

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.

[-]Oligopsony13y50

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.

[-]Vladimir_M13y110

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):

Compared to 1960, the year our analysis begins, we estimate that without these developments in medical technology there would have been between 45,000 and 70,000 homicides annually [in the U.S. for] the past 5 years instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000.

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.

[-]Eugine_Nier13y80

(facially the claim about the Enlightenment fostering resistance to slavery is particularly bizarre, or at least lazy.)

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.

[-]Vladimir_M13y150

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.

[-]ArisKatsaris13y50

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.

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)

[-]Vladimir_M13y30

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.

[-]fubarobfusco13y50

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 ...

[-]Vladimir_M13y100

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.

[+]sam034513y-70

[-]Alejandro113y20

Meanwhile in France and the French colonies in the New World, slavery was abolished by the "Enlightenment" (and "rationalist"!) French Revolution

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.

[-]NancyLebovitz13y40

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.

[+]sam034513y-150

[-]Oligopsony13y40

A postcolonial model is ironically extremely Eurocentric, with a total blindness to what came before Europeans.

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.)

[-]torekp13y20

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.

[-]Oligopsony13y50

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.

[-]torekp13y00

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.

[-][anonymous]13y20

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. :)

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