Steven Pinker is Wrong About 20th Century Violence

Dear Editor,

Stephen Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), was often cited in the December 2014 issue of Clio’s Psyche devoted to the question “Are we more or less civilized?” The book’s major conclusion states “The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species” (692). The 20^th century was not the worst! Because of doubts about the worth of this entertaining encyclopedia of the history of violence, I ask to join the debate.

Chapter 10 of Pinker’s book summarizes five factors during

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the last two millennia, which the author maintains made the world less violent: 1. Dominant states (“Leviathans,” often democracies) established a monopoly on force capable of protecting their citizens; 2. Benign economic relations between them neutralized destructive hostility between nations; 3. An increase in the influence of women restrained the damage produced by male hostility; 4. Increased empathy and education guided leaders of such countries; and 5. Enlightened reason characterized many world leaders. However, Pinker’s most important claim regarding a diminution in violence remains unproven.

The predominant evidence the author uses to support his claim that human violence has declined over the last two millennia relies upon the conclusions of Mathew White in his works such as The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (2011) and Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History (2013). White’s publications from 2004 to 2011 investigated all of the world’s mass murders. Page 195 of Pinker’s book features a chart adapted from White (2010) tabulating the 21 worst atrocities from the 3^rd through the 20^th century. Here the 20^th century, with 142 million deaths, ranks only fourth in lethality below the 8^th century (429 million), the 13^th century (278 million), and the combined 15^th-19^th century period (about 250 million). How did Pinker recalculate White’s statistics to demote the 20^th century out of the position of civilization’s most lethal century? Contrary to White, who ranked the 20^th century with a hundred million fatalities as the most murderous, the author transformed that data through adjustments using incidence-prevalence deaths per population numbers. This statistical legerdemain assigns 429 million victims to the 8^th centuryAn Lushan Rebellion in China, generating a virtual population figure far more than the population of the world in that era.

Yet R.M. Grant (1977) asserted that population counts during antiquity were a “rhetorical exercise,” and P. Chuyin (1990) maintained that “ancient history remains wholly refractory to quantitative evaluations.” Meaningful comparisons between centuries of the past millennia are doomed by two factors. First is the increased capacity to kill produced by the technological advances ranging from stone axes to atomic weapons. Then there are tremendous changes over time in healing capability from neglect and

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abandonment of the dying to the use of hospitals, rapid triage, and secondary infection control.

How could Pinker, a celebrity Harvard academic psychologist, discount the unique violent horror of the Holocaust, two World Wars, Hiroshima, Abu Ghraib, and the Rwandan Genocide? A clue to the answer is suggested by several omissions in his book’s 30 page reference section. Absent are Sigmund Freud (briefly quoted at the beginning of a chapter), Edward Gibbon (who wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire), and “meta-historian” Arnold Toynbee (an authority on European civilization). Pinker’s comment that “The human brain is a swollen and warped version of the brains of other mammals” (485) implies a privileging of biology, experimental psychology, and empirical science verging on “Scientism.” Wieseltier (New Republic, 2013) conceptualizes this as an overemphasis on hard science in understanding the world while neglecting the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Such a perspective implies disrespect for depth psychology, historical complexity, and an ideology like religion. To fully comprehend mass violence we need both “depth psychology” of individuals and a psychology of group behavior.

I doubt that a century’s number of violent adult deaths provides an adequate measurement for human violence consistent with several contributors to the Clio’s Psyche’s debate about civilization’s civility. Here, Fuchsman nominated violence toward non-human animals. Denham chose “structural violence” as an important measure, a selection that is most relevant to future fatal risks of climate change. The decline of infanticide in world history is another valuable indicator of violence. I propose we add the historical impact of the major religions to Pinker’s above five developmental factors. To understand the triumph of Christianity over the military might of Roman armies, the ancient Jews’ ban of filicide, or the astonishingly rapid conversion of pagans and barbarians to the Christian faith (Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 1996), we require tools and methods outside the realm of science. Freud may have been correct in diagnosing religion as a comforting illusion but we can’t argue that its power might have inspired Confucius, Jesus, Constantine, and Gandhi to take up arms against violence.

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Sincerely yours,

Peter Barglow

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