Tag: Violence

American Homicides & Honor

Honor & American Homicides

Posted on by jabittan
The United States has more guns and more homicides than many other WEIRD countries. Compared to Europe in particular, the United States has much more gun violence, gun deaths, and murders in general. Peter Singer offers one plausible explanation for this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.
 
 
Pinker writes, “In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms. … In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.”
 
 
The argument that Pinker makes is that Americans maintained their weapons because they never allowed government to become strong enough to take their weapons away. Americans never fully gave government the sole authority to use violence. Americans have retained the idea that they should be able to use violence to protect themselves if ever needed. In an almost mythical manner, weapons and defensive violence have been enshrined in the United States.
 
 
However, having weapons and placing defensive violence in a special place is not the entire explanation for higher rates of murder in the United States that Pinker offers. Pinker suggests, especially in the South, that the United States has also maintained a culture of personal honor. In such a culture, any slight against the individual needs to be avenged so that the individual’s honor is not damaged. Pride, family heritage, and displays of strength and power are important in such a system, and must be upheld (it is fitting that the biggest movie franchise in the United States is the Avengers).
 
 
The way this translates into more homicides is not through direct murders for individual advancement or gain, but through murders following individual fights. Pinker writes, “southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, only in those sparked by quarrels.” Southerners are far more likely to turn to violence, and accept violence, when it is a response to aggression or a slight against an individual. Honor, it turns out, is a dangerous force and idea that leads to more homicides surrounding frivolous slights.
 
 
I don’t think Pinker’s explanations fully capture or fully explain why homicide rates in the Untied States are higher than in other WEIRD countries.  I do think they demonstrate different aspects of the United States which contribute to greater uses of violence. When combined with ideas about racism in the United States, extreme positions of inequality, lack of social safety nets, and some capitalistic aspects of our economic system, I think Pinker’s considerations are very important. Violence is not fully owned by the state because our population won’t allow the state a full monopoly on violence. Many parts of the country still cling to honor cultures that tacitly encourage violence – especially in self-defense or preservation. As a result, the murder and violence potential of the Untied States is higher than many WEIRD countries, and that shows through in the data.
Violence and Statelessness Within a State

Violence and Statelessness Within a State

Posted on by jabittan
Recently I have been making efforts to take longer views of history, to understand how things that happened and developed a long time ago still impact the world today. Sometimes this is easy to do. In a city, infrastructure decisions are evaluated and planned with 30 or more years of useful life intended for the investment. A building, bridge, or park is expected to stick around for a while, shaping its immediately area for a long time (or possibly forever if we chose to maintain the infrastructure indefinitely).
 
 
What is harder to see is how cultural products, as opposed to physical infrastructure products, stick around and continue to shape the culture and development of human social worlds. We are used to thinking of humans as individual actors who have the power to change and adapt to any given situation. We don’t think about how specific cultural arrangements could influence people for the long term. But the reality is that cultural interactions, products, and institutions can have a dramatic long term impact on people, just as a park or bridge can have a long term impact on a city.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker discusses how lower-income African Americans ended up with higher rates of violence due to poor policing. These higher rates of violence translated into discriminatory practices that have lasted for a long time, and are still with us today. It is easy to think that any black person in the US today can simply chose to be different, to ignore the long influence of history, but that is to ignore the real social institutions that shaped how African Americans understood themselves in our nation. Just as it would be foolish to ignore the impact that a park had in making a city an enjoyable place to live, ignoring the discrimination that African Americans faced and the subsequent violence that grew within African American communities would be foolish.
 
 
Pinker writes, “communities of lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honor (sometimes called the code of the streets) to defend their interests rather than calling in the law.” When government discriminated against black people, when the police were not a reliable and trustworthy source of justice, when black people had to defend their own honor or risk being taken advantage of, violence became a solution. By segregating black people, denying them access to quality services, and by racially profiling communities of color in policing, a stateless people were created within our country. The law did not afford equal protections and the state did not provide the same opportunities and engagement for black people relative to white people. This created situations in which violence flourished, furthering the very systems of inequality and injustice that created the situations for violence in the first place.
 
 
This history is long. It is not something that can be understood simply by looking at the violence that exists in African American communities today. To understand how we ended up with Black Lives Matter, to understand why rates of violence in communities of color are what they are, and to understand racial tensions, we have to take a long view of history. We have to acknowledge that cultural factors can have long-term impacts and consequences, just as infrastructure decisions can. Discrimination created a stateless people within the United States, and that statelessness incentivized violence. None of this is a matter of individual moral failings, but a consequence of decades of institutional and governance failings.
Dogmas About Violence

Dogmas About Violence

Posted on by jabittan
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker demonstrates that many of the ways in which we think about violence are inadequate for actually understanding violence. Often, our views toward violence are more dogmatic than evidence based. We have ideas, views, and beliefs of violence that seem to fit, but that don’t actually have much historical backing and don’t really take full context into consideration. Pinker’s book pushes back against such dogmas to help us better understand what is happening in world-wide violence trends. His argument is that by better understanding the causes and underlying factors contributing to violence, we can better understand actual trends in violence and shape our responses accordingly.
 
 
Regarding some dogmas that people hold about violence he writes, “on the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.” Morality doesn’t necessarily seem to be a key to stopping violence. Pinker demonstrates that many religious wars, such as The Crusades, were fought by people who believed they were very moral. In fact, their morality was at the center of their conflict. Morality today is still used to justify violence, such as when we tie capital punishment to a sense of justice. The idea is that someone who killed another deserves to have the same violence inflected upon themselves. Our moral sense is that more violence is a worthy response to violence.
 
 
Pinker continues, “a Third dubious belief about violence is that lower-class people engage in it because they are financially needy … or because they are expressing rage against society.” What Pinker found is that this isn’t necessarily true. People in the lowest socioeconomic levels, Pinker argues, tend to be “effectively stateless.” At a certain point, legal recourse to address crimes is just not possible for people in the lowest economic spheres. People may be dependent on government aid and assistance, but  they may be locked out of some of the protections that government and institutions afford more affluent people. Violence is better than trying to resolve conflicts legally for these individuals.
 
 
From a middle class perspective, impulse control more important for future success and security than it is for lower class individuals. Being impulsive and using violence against another person could lead to a job loss, a financial loss, the loss of friends, and the loss of familial assistance. If you have already lost those things, then the cost of violence falls. Approaches to address violence that are designed for the middle and upper classes literally are ineffective because they don’t operate on the proper incentive structure facing people in the lowest socioeconomic classes. And when those approaches fail, it can lead to a positive feedback loop where the poorest people are simply blamed for being impulsive and violent. We miss the importance of larger institutions and incentives.
 
 
Understanding these dogmas and the reality of violence helps us better understand why people are violent. Taking a long view of humanity allows us to more clearly see how these dogmas are built from limited perspectives of our current moment and current socioeconomic situations. To get beyond these dogmas requires that we think differently about the systems, structures, institutions, and incentives in people’s lives and how those factors can influence violent behavior.
Declines in Elite Violence

Declines in Elite Violence

Posted on by jabittan
Violence among the elites and upper classes isn’t something that never happens, but it is less common than violence within lower socioeconomic status groups. This feels obvious and not really worth calling out, unless you take a long view at human history and violence. Medieval Europe was a place of great violence inflicted by elites. Even the American South from the inception of chattel slavery on the continent to the Civil War was a region of violence inflicted by elites. It has not always been the case that in human societies the elites and highest socioeconomic status individuals were the least likely to use violence against other humans.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes, “The European decline of violence was spearheaded by a decline in elite violence. Today statistics from every Western country show that the overwhelming majority of homicides and other violent crimes are committed by people in the lowest socioeconomic classes.” Humanity has gotten more peaceful in part because violence among elites has fallen. We no longer live in a world with economic systems (in WEIRD countries) where feudal lords and slave owners can use violence to drive workers and manage their estates.
 
 
Pinker continues, “One obvious reason for the shift is that in medieval times, one achieved high status through the use of force.” Gang violence, black markets, and crime syndicates can be a pathway to riches today, but they are not the dominant ways or preferred ways to riches. They are risky, particularly because they operate outside of the state and the legal protections of the state. In medieval times, however, the state did not have the ability to prevent violence and illegal means of wealth creation in the ways the state can today. Similarly, slave owners could use violence to force and compel their workforce of subjugated humans. Violence was a necessary and even expected tool in wealth creation in the Antebellum South.
 
 
What this demonstrates is that changing economic systems and structures changes levels of violence in human cultures among socioeconomic strata. When incentives existed to use violence to obtain wealth, then it was common for elites to use violence. When institutions and incentives shifted, elites became less violent. In the Untied States we view ourselves and our decisions, actions, and behaviors through a lens of individualism, often forgetting the larger institutions and incentives that push us to make certain decisions, take certain actions, and generally behave in certain ways. But what Pinker shows is that incentives matter, even for our elites, and that shifting incentives has been key in driving down violence at the highest level of our socioeconomic system.
Explaining Nazi Violence During a Time of Civilizing Processes

Explaining Nazi Violence During a Time of Civilizing Processes

Posted on by jabittan
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes about German sociologist Norbert Elias and his theory of civilization. Over time, people became less impulsive, less disgusting, and more civilized, and this trend toward civilization among people corresponded with declines in violence between people. For Elias, a decline in violence was a result of increased civility among human beings.
 
 
But Elias was writing in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, a country controlled by a political power that launched some of the greatest violence the world has ever seen. Elias had to explain how humans became more civil and less violent and how his own country managed to be so awful. Pinker writes, “he documented the persistence of a militaristic culture of honor among its elites, the breakdown of a state monopoly on violence with the rise of communist and fascist militias, and a resulting contraction of empathy for groups perceived  to be outsiders…” Pinker goes on to explain that homicide rates and other rates of violence did continue to decline in Nazi Germany while violence toward outsiders and the rest of the world spiked. Pinker affirms that violence and civility continued their inverse relationship through WWII despite German violence and aggression.
 
 
I find Pinker’s analysis of the explanations that Elias provides for why Nazi Germany could be so violent at a time of declining violence very interesting. Throughout the book Pinker supports the idea that a militaristic culture of honor can lead to increased violence. When people feel a need to protect their honor via force or equal punishment for slights against their honor, then violence can escalate. When the state loses its control on the use of violence and force, individual vigilantes and armed militias can become dangerously prominent. When people begin to dehumanize other groups and justify violence against them, then pockets of violence can easily erupt. These factors still promote violence in the world today.
 
 
Ahmaud Arbery was shot in Georgia, a state in the Southern United States where honor cultures have always persisted to a greater extent than elsewhere in the United States. Perhaps he was in a place he shouldn’t have been, perhaps he had stolen something in the past. But the violence inflicted upon him was a result of a culture of honor that has long persisted and encouraged a sense of vigilantism among Southern Whites. Across 2020 and 2021 in the United States the breakdown of the state monopoly on violence factored into a lot of violence and death. Armed militias killed Black Lives Matter protesters and stormed the Nation’s Capital. These groups certainly appeared to be in part fueled by a lack of empathy for people they perceived as different and other, as somehow wrong and less deserving than themselves. The diagnosis from Elias on why Nazi Germany became so violent seems to be echoed in the recent uptick of violence within the United States.
 
 
(Please note that I am not saying the United States today or in the last few years is Nazi Germany. I am simply identifying some factors that explained Nazi Germany violence and asking if they also explain some trends observed today in very different places, times, and settings.)
Gentle Commerce

Gentle Commerce

Posted on by jabittan
On a recent episode of the show Solvable from Pushkin, a guest interviewed about reality TV said that contestants on reality TV shows are rarely as good or as bad as they appear in the series. The shows present narratives which causes us to think about contestants in an extreme way. We seem to fall into this type of thinking very easily, and I think it shapes the way we think about real world actors outside of reality TV settings. I think the same piece of advice can be applied to big businesses, government, and sports. In particular, and the focus of this post, I think we view big business as being much worse than it truly is.
 
 
This is a view that Tyler Cowen puts forward in his book Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. It is also an idea that Steven Pinker shares in The Better Angels of Our Nature. In his book Pinker writes, “though many intellectuals … hold businesspeople in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.”  One benefit of global free markets its that customers can chose where they shop. They can spend their money on things that are important to them and they can buy things where they feel respected and supported. We are often critical of big businesses for being uncaring and for having too much power, but big businesses have to listen to political and social trends. They have to try to be responsive to people to provide them with products, services, and narratives that they want.
 
 
Pinker continues, “a good businessperson has to keep the customers satisfied or a competitor will woo them away, and the more customers he attracts, the richer he will be.” This is an idea known as doux commerce (gentle commerce), which suggests that free markets and big businesses reduce violence by participating in positive sum games. “If you’re trading favors or surpluses with someone, your trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead,” writes Pinker.
 
 
Businesses encourage us to think about what our customers need, want, and expect. While businesses may be cold, may be greedy, and may have all sorts of problems, they do reduce violence. Many people dislike that big businesses are trying to conform to social pressures today,  but the reality is that businesses are always trying to react to the social changes and pressures of the time. Successful businesses empathize with people to win them over. They are not trying to wipe out or alienate any segment of the population, but trying to predict where the market is going and sell to that future market. For all the problems of markets and big businesses, reducing violence is one bright spot. Perhaps big businesses, as Cowen would argue, are not as evil or as bad as we might think they are.
An Offense Against the State

An Offense Against The State

Posted on by jabittan
Who is harmed by a homicide? Certainly the individual who loses their life is harmed, but who else? Any family that is connected to the individual or depends on them is harmed, but beyond that, one can argue that the entire society to which the individual lived is harmed. If you take this broader view, then it makes sense that the crime of homicide could be an offense against the state, and not just an offense against a single individual or their close family.
 
 
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker thinks about what this shift in perspective regarding the crime of homicide means for violence between and amongst human beings. He writes, “for centuries the legal system had treated homicide as a tort: in lieu of vengeance, the victim’s family would demand a payment from the killer’s family… . King Henry I redefined homicide as an offense against the state and its metonym, the crown.” When murder shifted from an offense against an individual or their family to an offense against the state, the potential rewards from murder dissipated. A single family could only do so much to seek retribution from a murder. And if the killer was big enough, strong enough, and influential enough in the local community, there was no chance that the family could ever seek justice. Murder was a path to riches, to status, and to power when it was only a crime against a single family or person.
 
 
The state, however, had more power, resources, and authority than any local individual. There may have been some individuals with extreme power and the ability to get away with murder, but shifting homicide to an offense against the state reduced the number of individuals who could kill without regard for consequences. Murder, for most, no longer existed as a good pathway toward greater riches. Shifting the offense shifted incentives and encouraged greater civility, reducing violence. The state, and its justice system, created an institution to reduce violence where previous institutions encouraged violence.
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.
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.