The Complexities of Being Civilized

Answering the question of whether we are more or less civilized depends on what is meant by we, civilized, and the time frame under discussion. The “we” means humanity as a whole, and the “when” from 1800 to the present. Most definitions see the necessity of a centralized authority in a nation state with a monopoly on force. Some writers emphasize standards of behavior for the populace, others focus on high culture, and some believe the citizens’ needs and inclinations must be taken into account.

To me, civilization is a mixed bag. It has led to our highest achievements and most horrendous actions. I believe a centralized authority with a monopoly on force provides the stability that has

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enabled much else to unfold, including creativity, science, technology, widespread affluence, and self-realization. On the other hand, centralized state authority has led to exploitation, oppression, wars, and tyranny. The question then of “Are we more or less civilized?” is a double-edged sword. Civilization not only engenders discontent, it is also full of paradoxes.

As well as establishing civil peace, a state can abuse power, use terror, and engage in barbarous wars. When does the monopoly of force cross the line, causing a society to no longer be civilized? Violations of the international laws of war, U.N. Declarations, and the crime of genocide would be some criteria. Rulers using force on their own people that undermines social order could be another determination. Wherever that line may be, there is no getting around that civilization is creative and destructive. Humans are a kind and killing species.

The discussion of whether we are more or less civilized is exceedingly complex. This topic arose at a Psychohistory Forum where Paul Elovitz and I disagreed about Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). I want to proceed in a twofold manner. First, to consider one aspect of violence: is there more or less killing since 1800? Any information that can show humanity is being less destructive should be given a full hearing. This paper will examine Pinker’s claims. Second, after the discussion on murder and mayhem, I will assess where we are more and where less civilized.

Pinker maintains that the state monopoly of force has resulted in a decline of homicides, that the Enlightenment, reason, self-control, commerce, and empathy have resulted in a more humane reality. The rights revolution has helped lessen many horrible activities including slavery, human sacrifice, witchcraft, and cruel and unusual punishments. He says this is a period of a Long Peace with no wars between superpowers since 1953. Pinker writes “violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species existence” with “unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence” (Pinker, Better Angels, xxi). His provocative and often brilliant book brings to the forefront the questions of the place of violence in civilized life.

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Criteria for Knowing if Humanity is More or Less a Killing Species

What knowledge is needed to determine if humanity is more or less lethal? The four following categories help us comprehensively address the state of killing: (1) suicide, (2) war, genocide, tyranny, (3) homicide, and (4) killing other animals.

Suicide

Suicide is self-directed lethal violence, it is self-murder. There are over 800,000 suicide deaths every year. Suicides rates have increased 65% in the last 45 years (WHO, “Suicide Prevention,” suicide.org, 2014, “International Suicide Statistics”). Some years more people die by taking their own lives than are murdered or die in war. Pinker does not discuss suicide itself, just suicide terrorism. Given that the most lethal form of violence towards humans may be self-murder, this is a significant omission. Many who kill themselves do not expect the better angels to ever come their way. Pinker would have had to write a somewhat different book if he put the violence of suicide front and center.

War, Genocide, and Tyranny

What are the rates of deaths by war, genocide, or tyranny of all those alive in different periods? Quincy Wright and Matthew White address this question. Wright was a historian of war who Pinker treats as an authority. In 1965, Wright found that the proportion of deaths due to war related activities in Europe went up from about 2% in the 1600s to 3% in the 20^th century (Wright, A Study of War, 1965, 245).

White confirms Wright’s claims on loss of life. In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, White chronicles history’s 100 worst atrocities. Not all scholars are enamored by White’s work, but Steven Pinker is. He writes that White “has compiled the most comprehensive, disinterested, and statistically nuanced estimates available of the death toll of history’s major catastrophes” (Pinker, “Foreword,” to White, 2012, xi). White ascertains that in the 18^th century 0.6% of all deaths were due to war, genocide, or tyranny. In the 19^th century it was 2%, and in the 20th century it was around 3.5% (White, 2010; “Statistics of Wars, Oppressions, and Atrocities in the Eighteenth Century,” 2010; White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, 2012, 541). White’s conclusions are particularly

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telling for Pinker as the latter’s main criteria for measuring violence is not by the raw number killed, but by the percentage of the population who die by violent means. Given Wright and White’s statistics, a claim that state related killing is declining is not justified.

Another thesis of Pinker’s is that people die due to war much less now than in the remote past. He concludes that the death rates from war among hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists is 15% (2011, 48-49). Some scholars believe this figure is unreliable. Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki found that “very little can…be said of the rates of war death in hunter-gatherer culture-areas” (Wrangham and Glowacki, Human Nature, Vol. 23, 2012, 16l). Comparing war-related deaths in pre-history to modern times does not currently have a reliable factual base and cannot be used to show a decline in violence between then and now. These findings on the level of state-related violence and violence levels in non-state societies seriously undercut a major side of Pinker’s contention that violence has declined.

Pinker describes the era since the Korean War ended as the “Long Peace.” White found that 19% of the worst atrocities occurred after 1945 (White, 2012, 529-531). Since World War II, the frequency of armed conflicts has not declined. There were 123 wars from 1900 to 1944, and “149 major wars” between 1945 and 1992 which totaled 23 million deaths. On “an average yearly basis, the number of war deaths in this period was more than double the deaths in the 19^th century, and seven times greater than in the 18th century” (UNICEF, 1996, “Children in War”). As there were more wars in the second half than the first half of the last century, can Pinker’s claim that this is the most peaceable time since humanity began be credible?

After studying armed conflicts across the globe from 1955 to 2002, Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues found that “there is no evidence to support a recent decline in war deaths” (Obermeyer et al, British Medical Journal, Vol. 336, 2008, 1482). White determined that atrocities after 1945 killed over 62 million (White, 2012, 529-531). These most recent mass murders all occurred in Asia or Africa, rather than in Europe or the U.S. where Pinker sees the better angels flourishing.

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Elizabeth Kolbert believes Pinker is Eurocentric, “The scope of Pinker’s attention is almost entirely confined to Western Europe. There is little discussion…about trends in violence in Asia or Africa or South America” (Kolbert, “Peace in Our Time,” The New Yorker, 2011). When Pinker cites numbers concerning the Long Peace, he discusses the lack of superpower wars, the absence of armed conflict in Western Europe after 1945, the fact that there have been no wars after World War II between “major developed countries,” and that “developed countries” have not conquered another country since the 1940s (Pinker, 2011, 250-252). What Pinker cites about the Long Peace all concerns the Western “developed” nations.

Does he show a bias toward Western culture? Pinker sees the better angels of our nature connected to the Enlightenment, reason, science, and equality that have grown on European and American soil. He does not often mention the contributions of cultures from other regions to human progress.

What can we conclude about killing since 1800? State related violence did not decline in the last two centuries, it increased. If there is a Long Peace, it is more a regional than a global phenomenon. The number of wars increased after 1945; more died after 1945 than in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, 19% of the worst atrocities in history took place after World War II. The evidence does not support that humanity as a whole is “blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence” (Pinker, 2011, xxi).

Homicide

Is homicide lessening? A number of European countries have shown a deep decline in the murder rate since the 14^th century, with a steep drop noticeable around 1800 (Pinker, 2011, 63). After 1800, much of Europe was engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars in which four million died (White, 259). While the number of homicides are low in Europe, they are high in the Americas, Africa and Asia. (UNODC, 2014, “Global Study Homicide: 2013,” 13-14). Killing declines in one domain or locale and goes through the roof in another. This simultaneous moving in different directions is not unusual in human affairs and in the history of killing.

How does Pinker deal with these complexities? In his

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book’s index, homicide in England has 10 listings, Europe 13, the U.S. 16, and the rest of the world 3. The Americas as a whole and Africa are not listed at all (2011, 785). When Pinker discusses the better angels of our nature, by “our” he primarily is referring to the “developed countries.” His ethnocentric provincialism leads him to make claims such as that this period may be “the most peaceable era in our species’ existence” (2011, xxi). As his calculations include “developed countries’ and often omit the rest of humanity, he is not in a position to make claims about our entire species. Pinker cannot make the case that murder is declining as he is not looking at all the evidence and he wears blinders when it comes to giving full consideration to the less developed.

Other Species

Humans inflict much more killing on other species than we do on our own. In the U.S. in 2010, there were 9 billion 176 million cattle, turkeys, chickens, and hogs destroyed for food (United States Department of Agriculture, 2011, “Livestock Slaughter”). About 53 billion animals are slain for food globally each year (Gruen, Ethics and Animals: An Introduction, 2011, 81).

Pinker notes that since Peter Singer’s 1975 Animal Liberation there is “a growing intolerance of violence towards animals” in the West. Pinker does not think that animal rights and human rights are equivalent. He is against any “ethical calculus that gave equal weight to any harm suffered by any sentient being, allowing no chauvinism toward our own species” (Pinker, 2011, 473-474). He does not include the killing of animals in ascertaining whether violence is on the wane.

Of the four most prominent categories of human killing, Pinker does not seriously consider two of them, and in the other two his Eurocentric focus keeps him from sufficiently including pertinent evidence from the rest of the planet. His favoritism toward “developed countries” and his chauvinism toward our species keeps him from being able to present a comprehensive picture of whether killing is declining or rising. Despite leaving out much of humanity in his analysis, he makes claims about our entire species. This ignoring of the less developed nations undermines his proclamations about peace in our time on this planet.

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Are We More or Less Civilized?

If the level of killing is an indication of our being civilized, then what can we conclude? In relation to state-related violence, combining Wright and White’s figures, it looks like the 20^th century had by far the highest death rate from war, genocide, and tyranny of the last four centuries.

Killing and destructiveness brings food to our tables. We practice homicide at a higher rate than any other species, suicide is also more prominent with humans than other creatures, not that many years ago we witnessed the bloodiest century in modern times, and the number of animals we kill for food makes us the world’s experts in violence. The high cultural levels humanity has achieved have been accompanied by levels of killing found in no other species.

A centralized state may use violence to preserve civil order. Many states grew by conquering their neighbors which lessened the threat of being attacked. Ethical or not, armed conflict has been an instrument of rulers since there have been political states. War often brings out the brutal, barbaric, and bestial in leaders and combatants. Some activities may be immoral and not uncivilized, and others may be both immoral and uncivilized.

To be uncivilized, violent actions must undermine social order and stability. Civil war, genocide, and wanton killing of many in the populace, of which Stalin and Mao are examples.

If the pursuit of knowledge is a sign of civilization, then we can say much of the world is highly civilized as such knowledge is flourishing beyond what anyone could imagine a century ago. Science, technology, business, and government have all developed a multitude of specialties and this specialization has produced extensive theoretical, artistic, and practical knowledge. Many have become more cultured, cultivated, educated, and developed, all of which are signs of the vitality of civilization.

Making slavery illegal, trying to limit violence against women and children, and limiting cruel and unusual punishments are ways society has lessened violence and created more social space for individuals to be able to have individual freedom. These actions have made us more civilized.

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Are we more or less civilized? Unfortunately, violence remains robust. Until we cease slaughtering animals and stop killing each other and ourselves, violence and civilization will remain inextricably connected. This is not the whole story. Even though, as Reinhold Niebuhr remarks, humanity is “only a little animal living a precarious existence on a second-rate planet, attached to a second-rate sun,” it is astounding what we have and are accomplishing (Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume I: Human Nature, 1964, 3). We are witnessing the transformation of the very conditions of human existence and opportunities for a fuller, more expansive life for so many.

The sciences and the humanities have produced knowledge that helps us understand ourselves and the universe. Thus, we are far more civilized than in the pre-modern era. This limited species of Homo sapiens has been endowed with a large brain, imagination, cognitive skills, creativity, social organization, and genius. It is a world of wonder and adventure. Humans flourish amidst the atrocities and tragedies that are as much a product of civilization as are the continuing revolution in knowledge and improvement in living conditions. Yet we often remain internally divided between deep caring and immense rage. As humans are psychologically double within themselves, so is civilization. Where there have been civil wars, totalitarianism, organized crime, and terror directed toward the nation’s populace, we have been less civilized. Where we use our capacity for invention, social collaboration, creativity, advancing knowledge, and caring for one another, we are more civilized. As E. E. Cummings writes, “when the sky is hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man” (Cummings, Selected Poems, 1994, 12). Destructiveness and creativity have characterized our species since we learned to hunt and gather; neither are likely to disappear as we further unravel the secrets of the universe.

NB: This is a shortened version of a much longer article with far more extensive citations and a detailed bibliography reflecting a great deal of research. It is available from the author.

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