Category: Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature

States, Civilization, & Reducing Violence

States, Civilization, & Reducing Violence

Posted on by jabittan
People today are pretty terrified of living in a totalitarian state. Following the 1900’s, when Nazis rounded up and killed millions of Jews and when dictators in South America like Pinochet in Chile made dissenters “disappear”, people have become concerned about the power of the state and the possibility that the state would use violence against the population in order to maintain power and control. Totalitarian states do exist and are still scary (China’s surveillance is particularly alarming, Russian misinformation is a huge problem, and North Korea’s willingness to live in poverty if awful), but it is possible that people have gone too far in terms of their fears of the state in much of the world.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that states have made people and societies much safer, and that stronger states have done a better job of reducing violence than weaker states. He writes, “Hobbes noted that humans in particular have three reasons for quarrel: gain, safety, and credible deterrence. People in nonstate societies fight about all three.” When you live in a powerful state, you can be relatively sure that you cannot use violence for personal gain. States can provide a feeling of safety by patrolling crime in a fair and competent manner. Through deterrence, states can reduce violence. Without a functioning state with the resources to provide credible deterrence, safety, and prevent people from using violence for gain, then individuals can take these things into their own hands. They are incentivized to perpetuate violence against others for their own gain, safety, and deterrence of future violence.
 
 
Totalitarian states may be awful, but well functioning and strong states (short of totalitarian regimes) reduce violence and allow people to interact in meaningful ways. We shouldn’t hate the state and constantly be fearful of the state simply because the possibility of totalitarianism is always there. It is easy to imagine a state that has been continually weakened and reduced by its population to become effectively powerless, incapable of stopping violence for personal gain, incapable of providing safety, and incapable of providing credible deterrence against violence. Such a state could be overwhelmed and taken over by a despot who wishes to impose totalitarian governance. Governments need to be strong and well functioning in order to reduce crime and violence. “The reduction of homicide by government control,” writes Pinker, “is so obvious to anthropologists that they seldom document it with numbers.” Somehow we forget this when we are mad at our government for increasing taxes to try to provide important services, improve public conditions, or to try to promote a more representative bureaucracy.
 
 
I don’t want to minimize the danger and threat that totalitarian governments pose to the world. I do however want to highlight the absurdity of claiming that any government action within a democracy is a threat that could lead to a dystopian and totalitarian regime of violence. If violence is our main concern, we might want to consider the dangers of an inept government more than the dangers of a strong government.
Accidental States

Accidental States

Posted on by jabittan
An idea from a recent segment of The Naked Scientists podcast has stuck in my mind the last few days. The idea was that we view the world with a bias toward our present moment and assume that everything within human history happened for a specific reason to get us to our present moment. We assume that our past selves and our ancestors all made specific decisions because they were deliberately working toward our current moment. Our bias assumes that world history unfolded intentionally.
 
 
However, this is likely not true. As an example, a guest on The Naked Scientists argued that this bias has shaped the way we view the relationship between humans and dogs. We assume that humans looked at ancestral wolves and saw an opportunity if they partnered with the animals. We assume that humans deliberately bred less aggressive wolves until they ended up with a domesticated creature that more closely resembles modern dogs. This narrative, however, may be a victim of present focused bias. It may have been more random, and in a sense accidental, that humans ended up getting close to dogs. It may have been less of a deliberate action and choice by humans to breed less aggressive wolves for specific protection and assistance purposes, and more of something that developed beyond human effort and control.
 
 
This is an interesting perspective and is fun to use when looking at other aspects of humanity. For example, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes, “early states were more like protection rackets, in which powerful Mafiosi extorted resources from the locals and offered them safety from hostile neighbors and from each other.” This is a framing which suggests that states may have been as accidental in their development as the relationship between humans and dogs. Ancient humans may not have been sitting down in a council to think through the best ways to organize their society. They may not have been deliberately thinking about creating governance structures with the intention of building institutions that would serve humanity for thousands of years. Instead, early states may have been effectively random. They may have been chance agglomerations of people effectively acting as gangs with some better than others.
 
 
Accidental states are interesting to think about. When we first start to seriously consider government and governance (sometime in high school for many of us) we are introduced to ideas by Hobbs and Lock. Government is presented as a deliberate and well thought out institution, especially in the United States. We view the formation of American Government through our present moment, constantly looking at each developmental step along the way as if it were an inevitable and deliberate journey to our current political system. But perhaps governance, American and other, is more random. Perhaps there was less long-term planning and forward thinking than what we like to imagine. Perhaps protection rackets slowly morphed and evolved over hundreds of years. Perhaps tribes and kin-based institutions slowly changed though both internal and external influences to become something more like modern government, without any real intention or deliberate planning involved. Perhaps we have more accidental states than deliberate states.
The Security Dilemma

The Security Dilemma

Posted on by jabittan
How do we stop arms races? How do we stop people from fearing that they will be attacked by someone else, and prevent them from constantly gearing up to be prepared to kill someone else before someone else kills them? How do we sidestep the mindset that we have to defeat others so that they don’t defeat us?
 
 
This is an important question and in the world of international relations is known as the security dilemma. Even if I am non-violent, even if I generally don’t want to inflect any negativity on another person, I don’t know that they will be the same toward me, and I must therefore be prepared to defeat them and survive at all costs. When everyone thinks this way, we end up in a perpetual arms race where even if we know  there is no threat, we prepare for it just in case. This creates an inevitable competition for means of destruction, even among allies. That competition can lead to violence. As Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, “competition breeds fear. If you have reason to suspect that your neighbor is inclined to eliminate you from the competition by, say, killing you,  then you will be inclined to protect yourself by eliminating him first in a preemptive strike.”
 
 
Within the world of international relations and national security, the solution to this problem has been MAD. Mutually assured destruction (MAD) is a byproduct of nuclear weapons. By stockpiling arms that would plunge the world into a global apocalypse, we ensure the peace and safety of the world. But this is not really a solution to the problem. Pinker continues, “whatever peace a policy of deterrence may promise is fragile, because a deterrence reduces violence only by a threat of violence.”
 
 
Ultimately, I think that we reduce violence by shifting thinking away from zero sum competitions and mindsets. There are certainly, and will very likely always be, some zero sum competitions in life. Capitalism and market economies rely on zero sum competitions to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and promote technological progress. But in many other areas we can eliminate zero sum thinking and focus less on fears of losing things and more on positive sum thinking. Pushing us to think in terms of zero sum competition encourages fear and the impulse to destroy others, but the reality of our world is that less is truly zero sum than we believe. We no longer live in tribal societies where a single male can dominate all the potential female mates. We no longer live in a society where food and resources are so scarce that we need to control as much as we can and build political coalitions to ensure our survival. We no longer live in a world where losing a job means that you will starve on the streets. We have reduced the zero sum nature of many aspects of human lives and can continue to do so in ways that reduce our need to protect ourselves by shooting first or ensuring the mutual destruction of all. Reducing zero sum thinking is just one way to get to this point, and may help reduce our reliance on MAD.
Christianity & Torture

Christianity & Torture

Posted on by jabittan
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker is critical of Christianity for it’s acceptance and use of torture. Modern day Christianity may not encourage torture of the living, but it still holds on to the threat of eternal torture to pressure people into behaving in certain ways. And while the bible has been reimagined and reinterpreted, it still contains many points of serious violence. The heart of Christianity, Pinker argues, Jesus dying on the cross, is emblematic of the eternal torture that awaits those who do not live up to the Christian god’s expectations. Pinker writes, “by sanctifying cruelty early, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe.” 
For Pinker, there is a direct link between the Crucifixion of Jesus and subsequent periods of atrocities committed by the Christian Church. Pinker lists examples of people who were burned at the stake, had bodies and limbs destroyed, and faced agonizing deaths because they challenged church doctrine. Like Jesus, who was violently killed though he didn’t himself commit a violent crime, many non-violent church dissenters faced violent ends.
In his book, Pinker focuses on Christianity’s use of violence to show how much human societies have changed with regard to violence. A religion that today views itself as peaceful was once quite ready to use violence to punish people and to signal to others that they needed to obey church authority. Violence was inflicted upon people openly and publicly.
Violence today cannot be inflicted so publicly or openly, not even by totalitarian rulers. Religious institutions do not go about murdering or torturing non-believers and dissenters in public. And if people find out that violence took place behind closed doors, there is likely to be public outrage about the use of violence to shape people’s behaviors. Even within religious schools the use of corporal punishment is no longer acceptable in large parts of the world.
In human history violence was seen as proper and necessary to keep people in line and punish those who stepped out of line. Today, violence is declining. Even for our most awful criminals we are less likely to seek the death penalty in many parts of the world. And when we do allow the state to end an individual’s life, we do so as peacefully and non-violently as possible, through lethal injection. Jesus was killed in public in a painful and agonizingly slow manner for a petty crime. A punishment we would never accept today as we have moved away from violence and toward more peaceful societies.
Ignoring Old Testament Violence

Ignoring Old Testament Violence

Posted on by jabittan
I am by no means a biblical scholar and I am not a religious person in general, but my understanding is that the Christian god in the Old Testament is a wrathful and vengeful god. I understand that there are examples of genocide perpetuated by said deity, that there are murders ordered and condoned by the god, and that the text is quite violent in general. But much of that violence seems to be ignored, referenced as not being literal but symbolic and metaphoric, and generally less of a focus among religions that view the Bible as a sacred text.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about this phenomenon in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature to demonstrate how people and societies have become less violent over time. “In recent millennia and centuries,” he writes, “the Bible has been spin-doctored, allegorized, superseded by less violent texts …, or discreetly ignored. And that is the point. Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.”
 
 
Pinker references the violence of the Old Testament and the lack of violence in subsequent religious texts while demonstrating that the world has become a less violent place. Religious violence and violence condoned by a deity is simply less common. Texts which followed the Old Testament became less violent as the people writing those texts also became less violent. Today, violent sections of religious texts are almost entirely ignored or explained in a way that deemphasizes their violence. The modern world is less violence and accepts less violence in policing, maintaining authority, and organizing society. This is a huge change for humanity, and can be observed in our cultural products such as our religious documents and attitudes.
Dispelling Paradise Lost

Dispelling Paradise Lost

Posted on by jabittan
I hate when people fall into paradise lost traps in their thinking. It is too easy for us to think that the past was somehow great and that our modern times and our pathway to the future are bleak. We always seem to be looking back to some sort of paradise that we have lost, some great golden age that has passed, some point in the history of humanity where everything was better. We criticize high school kids today as being worse than we were when we were their age. We imagine times when humans were more civil to each other.  We lament a loss of our connections to nature and a natural way of life. Underneath all of these ideas is a fallacy.
 
 
I think the heart of paradise lost mindsets is the long human childhood development period. We literally did have someone who watched over us and provided for all of our needs (if we had a full, healthy, and enriching childhood which is not the case for everyone). This sets our mind up to believe that there truly was a golden time where everything was perfect. That there was a paradise that we lost as we got older. The reality of course, is that we were simply young and didn’t have fully formed brains. We were not aware of the difficulties and tragedies of life, if we were lucky.
 
 
Also playing into this fallacy are various errors in human memory and judgment. We fail to remember the boredom, tedium, and frustrations of our youth. We are more likely to remember positive moments, even if they were few in number, than the long and unremarkable stretches of time or our past fears and anxieties. This misremembering process takes place in other areas too. We fail to remember how bad long traffic commutes were for previous jobs, we fail to remember minor contentious political and social events that created ill will and animosity among our societies and families, we forget how painful workouts were from back when we were in better shape. We fail to remember all kinds of negativities in our lives and we fail to recognize how awful life has been for other humans across space and time. And life has been miserable, violent, and deadly for humans across time.
 
 
As an example, Steven Pinker writes about the amount of violence that ancient humans experienced. Skeletal remains that we can recover from hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of years ago show substantial signs of violence. It is quite common to find remains with signs of major injuries that occurred before death and were very likely inflected by other humans in acts of violence. “Perhaps at the turn of the first millennium,” writes Pinker, “the only bodies that got dumped into bogs, there to be pickled for posterity, were those that had been ritually sacrificed. But for most of the bodies, we have no reason to think that they were only preserved because they were murdered.” According to Pinker, it is unlikely that so many of the bodies that we have recovered have signs of trauma consistent with human to human violence simply by chance. The reason why there is so much violence identified by anthropologists on ancient bodies is likely because there was a lot of violence experienced by ancient humans. Pinker continues, “prehistoric remains convey the distinct impression that The Past is a place where a person had a high chance of coming to bodily harm.”
 
 
It is fashionable today to say that humans should live like our  hunter-gatherer ancestors. That in moving to big modern cities we lost some part of paradise and have disconnected from our humanity. That we need to eat like a caveman, need to be one with nature, and need to reconnect with our natural human instincts. But this is just a fashionable myth. Our ancient hunter-gatherer forebearers were quite violent and lived short and painful lives. The paradise is today and lies ahead of us, not behind us where we were under constant threat, were undernourished, and killed each other or inflicted violence upon one another to a greater extent than we do today.
Less Violence Correlates with Better Societies

Less Violence Correlates with Better Societies

Posted on by jabittan
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker makes an argument that doesn’t appear to be correct at face value. He argues that humanity has become less violent over time and that our societies are following a progression toward less violence as we work toward specific societal goals. While it may feel like our society is constantly on the verge of a meltdown and while we may hear about violent murders, robberies, and attacks in the media, the reality is that humans and our society have become less violent. This is true if you take a long view of human history, going back thousands and perhaps even tens of thousands of years, and it is also true if you take a more modern look at society, looking back a century or even a couple decades. There are fluctuations year over year, but the general trend is downward.
 
 
In his book Pinker writes, “across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade.” Pinker acknowledges that each of these correlations are complex. It is hard to say that being less violent made a society richer, or that being better governed reduced a society’s levels of violence. None of these variables is easy to separate from the other. But it is clear that less violence is correlated with everything the areas Pinker highlights.
 
 
What is important to note is that these correlations reflect a better society that is more favorable to live within. If populations are mobile enough, you would expect people to move toward the more peaceable societies because they want to live in a richer, safer, healthier, and better governed society. Societies which lean into violence, or perhaps that have other negative qualities that cause greater levels of violence, will be less successful and worse off. Populations will want to leave those societies. They will not want to live within and support them. Cultural evolution doesn’t follow a specific path or goal, but we can expect people to want to live in places with the correlates from Pinker’s quote, and we can expect people to try to move toward those better societies. The feedback mechanisms are complex, so we can’t simply say that societies should be less violent for all these positive things to follow, but it does give us an insight into what matters and what societies should strive toward if they want to be successful relative to other societies.
Misperceptions of Violence

Misperceptions of Violence

Posted on by jabittan
In general, I am very interested in our misperceptions. We constantly go about making judgments of the world, making decisions, and developing a general sense of how the world operates based on what we pay close attention to, what we hear on a regular basis, and all the information that makes its way into our orbit. But there is only so much that we can pay close attention to and various factors will influence what information comes our way. This means that our perceptions of the world are subject to bias and noise. We may be very interested in one topic and become an expert in that narrow topic. A co-worker may constantly talk about a subject they are fascinated by, so we may pick up certain ideas from their conversations. Newspaper headlines may shape the way we think about certain topics, even if we never read the whole story.
 
 
Violence is one such area where we may have misperceptions of reality due to bias and noise. News stories are biased toward the exciting and unusual events that take place. No one wants to listen to a story about how an improved traffic calming near a school reduced car collisions and improved pedestrian safety. News outlets know this and instead cover the instances when there is a traffic accident in a school zone. Social media channels are similarly fueled by the surprising and emotional things that people have to share. Once again, people are likely to react more strongly to a story about a robbery at a shopping center near a school than a story about how improved lighting and a night time security guard at the shopping center reduced crime in the area by 10%. As Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, “no matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.”
 
 
Misperceptions of violence, along with other misperceptions about the world, matter. People make decisions about public policy, make personal choices, and interact with each others in society in different based on their perceptions. Thinking of violence specifically, we make different decisions about where to invest government funds, how long to incarcerate criminals, and how many police officers to hire depending on our perceptions of crime. We chose which schools to send our kids to, where to go out for dinner, and where to live based whether we think violence is prevelent in a given area. We shop at certain businesses, smile at or look away from strangers, and exercise indoors our outside to some degree depending on our perceptions of violence relative to safety. Misperceptions in these areas can lead to discrimination, inequality, over- and under-policing, and over- and under-investment. Failing to accurately understand levels of violence can have real world consequences that can lead to wasted and misallocated resources and unfair treatment for some communities, particularly in societies with long histories of racial or economic injustice.
 
 
We pay attention to the flashing lights of police vehicles, remember news stories about gruesome murders, and react strongly to stories of violence on social media – thereby boosting the visibility of those stories – and as a result we feel like we are living in a dangerous world. We don’t remember all the times a family member went running at 6 in the morning and didn’t get mugged. We don’t remember all the daily commutes to work without seeing a police chase, we don’t remember the days where the national news and our social media channels were not dominated by stories of violent crime. We perceive that the world is getting less safe, that crimes are increasing, and that we must take steps to better secure ourselves and our property. However, this is a misperception. Despite fluctuations from year to year (I will note that crime rates have increased since 2020, however it is unclear if this is a new trend or random fluctuation) humanity world wide has become less violent and has been trending toward reduced violence for a very, very long time. In The Better Angels of Our Nature Pinker argues that we would experience a different world if our perceptions of violence matched reality.
Does the Arc of Humanity Bend Toward Justice? - Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens - The Better Angles of our Nature Steven Pinker - Joseph Henrich the WEIRDest People in the world - Joe Abittan

Does the Arc of Humanity Bend Toward Justice?

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “there is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along. There is no proof that cultures that are beneficial to humans must inexorably succeed and spread, while less beneficial cultures must disappear.” Harari effectively argues that there is not a grand arc of humanity bending toward justice, that our cultures and civilizations around the globe are not necessarily moving toward being more cooperative and peaceful, that cultural evolution is not driving us toward better lives. If that is happening, then it is chance, Harari may argue, or we may be moving in a better direction, but that our path is not necessarily the most optimal for humans. Harari continues, “There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benefit.”
 
 
Around the same time that Harari published Sapiens, Steven Pinker published The Better Angles of Our Nature, and in that book he argues that the grand arc of humanity does bend toward justice, and that humans are becoming better and building better cultures over time. Pinker presents many objective scales on which humans are less violent, less impulsive, and are living better lives compared to humans of the past. Across multiple measures and various perspectives, humanity is improving and the history of humans does seem to be working toward our benefit. It may not feel that way, but cultures are becoming less violent and impulsive, and we can measure it in many ways.
 
 
In 2021, about 6 years after Sapiens was published, Joseph Henrich published The WEIRDest People in the World, in which he examines what cultural values contributed to western, educated, industrialized, rich, democracies, and how Europe and the Untied States became so WEIRD. He suggests that history could have taken different paths and that chance events could have moved history in different directions, but shows how certain cultural arrangements seem to have had different outcomes for humans, and how some cultural arrangements were more favorable and spread in an evolution-like manner. There may not have been a specific WEIRD end goal of this cultural evolution and one could argue that human culture lost some valuable aspects along the way, but Henrich’s argument seems to suggest that Harari is incorrect in stating that beneficial cultures for humans do not outcompete less beneficial cultures.
 
 
Harari may be correct if the evolution of humanity moves in a similar direction to the evolution of chickens. Chickens are some of the most abundant living things on the planet. There are more chickens alive than humans. What  they did to become so evolutionarily prosperous was become incredibly valuable to humans as a food source. However, this evolutionary success in terms of overall numbers is not good for individual chickens. Their lives are short and brutal. Their species population has exploded at the cost of the individual chicken’s life quality deteriorating. If this is the ultimate fate of humans, then Harari may be correct, human evolution does not move in a direction that makes the most out of life and existence.
 
 
However, that doesn’t seem to be where our species is headed. Birth rates globally are declining. While humans face great challenges with climate change and technological development we certainly don’t seem to be heading toward a world of more and more humans with ever less enjoyable lives. And Harari is incorrect in saying that we cannot find a universal measurement with which we can evaluate human progress. We fight fewer wars, kill each other less, and are less violent toward others, as Pinker demonstrates. By all measures (possibly with the exception of happiness measures from physically dominant 25 year-old males who want to fight everyone) this is an objectively good thing. Additionally, Henrich demonstrates that cultural factors which favored increasing trust with strangers, as opposed to only being able to trust family clans, favored a more civilized and peaceful society, thus outcompeting less beneficial cultural arrangements.
 
 
In short, both Pinker and Henrich provide examples which refute this post’s opening quotes from Harari. The arc of humanity does seem to bend toward justice and human cultures do seem to evolve in a direction that is better for humans over time, even if that evolution is slow, more complex than we fully understand, and not necessarily the most optimal pathway of all possible pathways. 
Acquiring Virtues

Acquiring Virtues

Posted on by jabittan
In The Better Angles of Our Nature Steven Pinker writes about the civilizing process that humans have gone through to be less impulsive, less vulgar, and less violent over time. We are less likely to lash out at people who offend us or minorly inconvenience us today than people of 500 years ago. We have created spaces of privacy for personal grooming or using the bathroom and in 2020 we made such an effort to limit the spread of bodily fluids that wearing masks in public has become second nature to many of us. Beyond these niceties, we are also less likely to murder someone who has seriously wronged us or our family and political leaders (despite the feeling we often get in the news) are less likely to send their countries to war. But what was the process that humanity went through in acquiring virtues that Pinker praises us for in his book?
Pinker spends hundreds of pages demonstrating the declines of violence alongside the civilizing process I mentioned before. What Pinker uses a full book to explain, Quassim Cassam sums up in a single line, “How are virtues acquired? By training, habituation, and imitation.”
In the book Vices of the Mind, Cassam generally takes a consequentialist view when thinking about virtues and vices. He specifically examines epistemic vices, which are thoughts, habits, traits, behaviors, and characteristics that systematically obstruct knowledge. They don’t necessarily need to be evil or clearly dangerous on their own, but what is important, and what characterizes them as an epistemic vice, is that they systematically result in the obstruction of knowledge and information. He characterizes vices based on their real world outcomes. To contrast this view, we can look at virtues as thoughts, habits, traits, behaviors, and characteristics that systematically lead to more positive outcomes for individuals and society. Beyond the realm of epistemology, we can see that Pinker’s praise of impulse control, civilizing forces in history, and reductions of violence are praises of specific virtues.
These virtues did not spring up over night, as Pinker demonstrates with graphs stretching back hundreds of years showing declines in all forms of violence. These virtues were built over time through training, habituation, and imitation, the civilizing process that Pinker refers to throughout his book.
This means that the positive trends identified by Pinker on a global scale can be understood at individual levels, and it means that we can become more virtuous people through our own efforts. By increasing our self-awareness and thinking critically about our thoughts, behaviors, and actions, we can direct ourselves toward ways of being that will systematically produce better outcomes for ourselves and humanity as a whole. By training ourselves to avoid things like epistemic vices, we can put ourselves on a path to be better. We can become habituated toward virtues, and other people can imitate our behaviors to expand the civilizing process and the spread of virtues. Our virtues, and presumably our vices, don’t exist in isolation. They have real world consequences that can be studied and examined in context, and our virtues can be strengthened, harnessing the better angles of our nature, if that is what we set our minds to.