The Decline of Violence in an Era of Apocalyptic Danger (article)

Violence comes to us in vivid and gruesome images on the television news, our electronic devices, and newspapers. The prevalence of violence in the media leads many thoughtful people to believe that life had to be better earlier in history, at least before the Nazis. They are wrong! The average individual in our species has never been safer than at the present time. Our relative safety is reflected by greatly reduced death and homicide rates, an enormous increase in lifespan, higher standards of living, and the ability to travel safely far and wide, rather than huddle together in small bands of relatives fearful for their lives. Steven Pinker, in his monumental study, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2011) has documented this decline with considerable data.

So why don’t we feel safe? When we turn on the television, go online, or read newspapers, the images we focus on incline to be those of danger and violence. Living in my safe neighborhood, where no one has broken in on the nights when my wife and I have forgotten to lock the front or back door, many of the television programs we watch will involve murder and violence in multifaceted forms. Despite this safety, many neighbors have expensive burglar alarms installed. Our sense of insecurity is partly historical in nature. Our ancestors, rubbing sleep from their eyes as they peered out of their caves, looked in all directions to be sure there were no man-eating predators or murderous enemies in the neighborhood. In looking at images of violence in the media, we are both checking

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to see that we are safe, and also fulfilling certain inner needs regarding danger. If the danger is out there among the armed burglars, child molesters, and murderers, then the threat is not within. Yet the reality is that our danger from suicide is much higher than the danger of murder. This is generally true throughout the country and in the developed world. Some years ago, when I asked the coroner of my 900,000 mostly suburban county what the ratio of suicides to murders were, he said it was at least 10 suicides for every murder. We provide almost unlimited funds to fight terrorism—however ineptly—and we as travelers suffer all sorts of airport indignities as a part of this struggle against the murderous other. Conversely, we are much more economical when it comes to protecting ourselves from mayhem on the highways that kill far more of us.

Our perception of living in a violent society leads us to act in a much more fearful manner. Suburban mothers drive their children to school, wait in their car for the school bus to pick them up, or chauffer them to the corner because they’ve heard of an incident halfway across the country of a child being abducted waiting for the school bus or walking home from school or the school bus. Children have been taught in school to be extremely wary of strangers. Our world is safer, but we see it as more dangerous.

The murder rate goes down over time, but our fear does not do the same. Based on our societal focus on violent danger—as reflected in so many of the TV programs we watch, the books we read, and the newspaper stories that grab our attention—we appear to want, whether consciously or unconsciously, some danger in our lives. Perhaps our attraction to danger is meant to keep us on our toes. Although I’ve never believed in the “death wish” for society in general, certainly many individuals have such a wish. These include the “cowardly suicides” that seek “death by cop,” sometimes after an atrocious act of violence.

As a historian teaching courses on Western Civilizations, I have sought to help my students understand that generally violence has been declining through the ages as a consequence of a number of factors. These factors include: more personal and societal self-control, a more rational approach to life, the concept of human rights, and an increase in empathy for our fellow human beings.

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The repudiated forms of violence I focus upon comprise the legal practices of child and wife abuse, incest, infanticide, nonconsensual sex, witch burning, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, the blood feud, cannibalism, debtor’s prison, human sacrifice, personal justice, public burnings (the auto de fe), floggings, genocide, public hangings, mutilation, the press gang, physical humiliation in the stocks, serfdom, slavery, stoning, and torture. The focus is on the complex psychological and societal processes involved in repudiating the legal processes of these behaviors. However, these behaviors continue to exist less frequently on an individual basis and in periods of historical regression, as under the Nazis.

The spread of democracy has helped quell violence, since democracies are much less likely to go to war with each other, although recent U.S. history attests that this does not preclude the start of war with non-democracies. There is also a generational cycle of sons going to war to prove that they can measure up to the heroism of their fathers. George W. Bush, who went into the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, took the U.S. into two wars partly to prove his manliness. Military men who have experienced real combat spoke off-the-record of some bellicose leaders without any real combat experience, such as Dick Cheney, who had five draft deferments during wartime, as being “chicken hawks.” Of course, some hawkish leaders eager to prove their manhood, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, are quite brave. The main point is their desire to take their country to war. (This is not always a bad thing, in that Churchill proved to be an ideal war leader in World War II.)

Is the decline of violence of western man partly a consequence of our shift from being a shame society to much more of a guilt society? In a shame society, the inclination is to fight for one’s personal honor or the honor of one’s family, the way some Muslims in Afghanistan will blow themselves up at the behest of the Taliban because they have felt so shamed that life is not worth living. Sometimes, they will kill their daughter or sister who has shamed the family by dressing in a western manner or refusing to accept an arranged marriage with a man several times her age. When shame gives way to guilt, the dominant force within members of society is an internalized inhibition on acting violently.

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While I think there is some merit in this formulation, its limitations readily become apparent when I think of dedicated Nazis who sacrificed their personal preference and feelings for their individual “good Jews” in the service of their Nazi superego. In The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton has done an outstanding job of pointing this out. Thus, while shame serves as a reason to fight for the honor of ourselves, our clan, our group, our religion, our nation, etc., guilt can also serve murderous purposes. (In a pessimistic mood, my thoughts race to Nietzsche’s aphorism that “the good war halloweth every cause.”)

Earlier this year, Lifton and Pinker engaged in a public discourse on violence in New York City. Pinker, in The Better Angels of our Nature and Lifton, in the entire opus of his brilliant work on the human propensity toward violence, both have an incredible amount to offer. As pointed out at the beginning of this brief essay, our lives are far safer today than in the past, yet Lifton is right in that our world faces a danger of apocalyptic and virtual destruction. The approach is not easy to reconcile regarding these two brilliant and eloquent public intellectuals who bring to mind the Hebraic prophets calling on my ancestors to lead more moral lives. The moralism is more directly apparent in the case of Lifton, as David Lotto pointed out so well in the September Festschrift issue.

The 5,000-year-long human experiment in civilization has become less violent because of the growth of a civilizing process, the development of humanitarian ideals based upon the spread of reason, self-control, internalized taboos on killing as shame gives way to guilt, governmental controls of violence, and much else. It is not a consistent process, and, as demonstrated by the Nazis, Serbians, and Rwandans and so forth, regression is always possible. There is so much to be thankful for and much to fear, but to the extent we let ourselves be dominated by unrealistic fears, we weaken ourselves and our society. The civilizing experiment continues.

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