Integrative Thoughts on the Lifton versus Pinker Debate (article)

The Sunday January 7, 2012 edition of the New York Times featured a fascinating dialogue between two very important thinkers on the topic of violence in the contemporary world. Steven Pinker’s recent 800 page book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined sparked the discussion in which Robert Jay Lifton provides some initial thoughts on the “paradox” of contemporary forms of violence. The New York Times piece led The Social Research Center for Public Scholarship at The New School to invite Lifton and Pinker to debate the overall question of whether we live in a more or less violent period of history. The current paper will provide a brief analysis of Pinker and Lifton’s basic arguments and add some preliminary thoughts on how their positions may not be as contrary as they initially appear.

Steven Pinker, Harvard University Professor of Psychology, in the book that triggered the debate, seeks to answer a number of provocative questions on the nature of violence in human history. His central thesis is that we currently live in the most peaceful and least violent period of human history and that people living today have a significantly reduced risk of being victim of violence or cru-

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elty than in any other historical period. Pinker provides a convincing argument chock-full of statistics and research from a number of different fields, including history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy and economics. He initially seeks an explanation for his findings in genetic inheritance, but quickly finds that not enough time has passed for evolutionary differences to account for the decreased violence. Instead, Pinker turns toward a more sociological explanation. He uses the idea of a “pacification process” to partially explain the decrease in interpersonal forms of violence. He outlines history in terms of the way in which the legitimate use of force has become monopolized by the state, resulting in a reduction in violence.

Pinker appears to have a convincing argument concerning interpersonal forms of violence, but he runs into some difficulty with his “pacification” theory—less than a quarter of his list of the 21 worst atrocities in human history occurred before the rise of the modern nation state, and the events he lists as pre-modern lack specificity. The latter occurred over large spans of time and place with ambiguous primary historical actors. They contrast sharply in this way with the more modern atrocities that make his list, primarily WWII. He also runs into some difficulty with his reluctance to explore neurobiological explanations for reduced interpersonal violence. Pinker argues that the brain of 60 years ago is the same as today, which focuses his explanation on changing socializing influences on aggression. It seems to be largely true that alterations in genetic inheritance cannot account for the change Pinker documents, but as modern neuroscientists are consistently finding, very small epigenetic changes can have very significant impacts on human behavior and recursive changes in social systems. This mutually reinforcing process has the potential to impact societal and behavioral norms exponentially.

A simple example of this recursive process may be the changing male brain and the rapidly changing socialization of masculinity found throughout many parts of the world. In just two or three generations, we have seen a change in the size of the corpus callosum in males, primarily responsible for communication across hemispheres, in that it is now indistinguishable with that of a female, which was previously found to be larger. Experimental re-

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search has consistently demonstrated the impact of rearing on the corpus callosum via epigenetic mechanisms. Because of its integrative function, an immature callosal axon “results in an inability of the affective and symbolic energies of the right hemisphere to be externalized through the verbal expression of the left hemisphere” (Allen Schore, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self, 2003, p. 228). An argument can be made that the changing socialization of masculinity has impacted the development of this brain structure, increasing its functional capacity to cope with aggressive impulses and recursively impacting change in social systems.

The neurobiological evidence seems to provide a localized site of action and further explanation of the decreasing rates of interpersonal violence and may be an adjunct to Pinker’s emphasis on the “pacification process,” but the question of larger systemic forms of violence remains in dispute. Our understanding of the nature of violence and how it has evolved over time requires closer scrutiny. Interpersonal forms are easiest to define. It is the systemic forms that provide for some difficulty. David Gill, emeritus professor of social policy at Brandeis University, adds to the Times discussion a definition that includes structural violence. He emphasizes “acts and/or socially maintained conditions that inhibit human development by interfering with the fulfillment of universal human needs, including biological/material, social/psychological, productive/ creative, security, self-actualization and spiritual needs.” With this definition, large segments of our world’s population fall into the category of victims of violence not represented in Pinker’s model.

An example from the United States would be our failing health care system. Recent yearly estimates suggest that 45,000 American deaths are attributable to lack of access to health care. A slightly older study from 1997 suggested the number was closer to 100,000. Another estimate from the Attorney General found that upwards of 85,000 African Americans died of treatable illnesses in the year 2000 alone. The fact that these numbers vary so significantly does highlight the inherent difficulty in quantifying systemic violence, but even the more conservative numbers are over three times the recent U.S. homicide rate, indicating that just this one form of systemic violence would have a significant impact on

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Pinker’s model; too large an impact to be ignored. The idea that such systemic forms of violence could only be born of modern nation states complicates matters further, as this appears to contradict Pinker’s explanatory model. It seems justified to ask: has the acting out of our violent impulses only transferred to less obvious, disguised forms in modern nation states? Has it become the role of the large group process to provide the necessary numbing to quell individual guilt while still allowing for the vicarious experience of murderous impulses toward delegated groups? These are fundamental psychohistorical questions. Pinker would have done well to explore the 40 years of psychohistorical research on the topic, including the work of Robert J. Lifton.

The life and work of psychohistorian Robert J. Lifton needs no introduction to the readers of Clio’s Psyche. Lifton reports that he read Pinker’s book with “special interest,” but found his own experience to be contrary to Pinker’s findings on decreasing violence. He doesn’t deny the possibility that life may be less violent today than in previous centuries, but his focus on the development and use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, primarily of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, has led him to focus on the “grotesque consequences of numbed technological violence” as the identifying feature of the 20^th century. The new capacity for killing is infinite, and he argues these capacities cannot be fully grasped by statistics on past war-making and killing. For Lifton, it is the “dynamic of mind and technology, in which technology creates a psychological attraction to ultimate power and protection from painful feelings associated with more direct forms of killing.” The paradox for Lifton is that life for most people today may be less violent than previous centuries, but never before in human history have we been in such danger of self-annihilation.

The difference between Lifton and Pinker on the topic of contemporary violence appears initially to be a matter of perspective. Pinker emphasizes the impacts of cultural developments on norms regarding the expression of violence and the civilizing and pacifying influence of the state on the individual. Lifton speaks from a more phenomenological perspective of how technological advancements and hierarchical systems provide the psychological numbing necessary for mass killing and violence forewarning fu-

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ture potentialities. For Pinker, modern society pacifies individual violence and for Lifton, it potentiates collective violence despite decreasing individual violence.

Lifton and Pinker both emphasize the socializing pressures of modern systems, but at the expense of the recursive nature of micro-macro pressures on human behavior. What is missing, and may prove integrative, is a discussion of how individuals and their psychological development impact the creation, development, and maintenance of social systems. From this perspective, social structures and their ideological underpinnings provide a defensive function as an arena in which internal conflicts and historical traumas, whether shared by the group or developmental experiences common to a group can be expressed and reenacted via projective and introjective mechanisms.

Epigenetic research provides a neurological correlate to developmental psychological theories, evidencing an increasing capacity to modulate violent feelings, thoughts and impulses. This supports Pinker’s assertion that interpersonal violence has been steadily decreasing throughout history without the need for a “pacification process”; an explanation that appears increasingly implausible due to continued victimization as a consequence of systemic forms of violence arising with the creation of the modern nation state. Lifton’s observations of the growing tendency to rely on the “numbing” effect of technological advancements and social systems suggests that our more insidious, violent nature is finding its expression increasingly in structural forms far removed from guilt, responsibility or empathic connection. The face-to-face victimization of another, which has become intolerable for most of us, finds expression in ideological policymaking. Our species’ evolving ability to modulate aggression should be celebrated, as Pinker rightly suggests, but we must continue to heed Lifton’s warnings of our growing reliance on systemic and technological violence. An emergent thrust to equate social and interpersonal forms of violence may succeed in broadening a definition in which policy related aggressions find similar psychological prohibitions as interpersonal violence. Lifton’s career as an activist researcher is an inspiration for those of us engaged in this endeavor.

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