We all live with the feeling that there is more and more aggression and violence in society. Indeed, the media endlessly throws us information about new armed conflicts, murders and political repressions. However, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the level of violence has been steadily declining over time. And his arguments are very persuasive.
“In the 2005th century, we saw the horrors of two world wars, the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, the events in Rwanda and other manifestations of genocide. In the XNUMXst century, we have witnessed the ongoing genocide in Darfur (Western Sudan) and the war in Iraq. For many, this creates the feeling that modernity has brought us terrible violence. And that we have moved far away from the harmony in which primitive people lived. Here is an excerpt from a XNUMX article in the influential Boston Globe newspaper: “The life of the Indians was difficult, but they did not have the problem of unemployment, harmony in society was unshakable, drug addiction was unfamiliar to them, crime was almost non-existent. Wars between tribes were more ritualistic and rarely resulted in massacres.” You are all familiar with such touching theories. But I will present evidence that this understanding of the situation is wrong. In reality, our ancestors were far more violent than we are. The level of violence has been declining for long periods of time. And today, we probably live in the most peaceful time in the history of mankind.
Reducing the level of violence is a fractal phenomenon. It can be observed for millennia, centuries, decades and several years. Let’s take a trip through several orders of magnitude of the time scale – from the scale of millennia to years. 10 years ago and before, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers without permanent settlements or governments. This period is usually considered the era of primordial harmony. However, archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, studying the levels of combat losses among modern hunter-gatherers (this is the best source of information on such a standard of living), came to a different conclusion. He calculated that the percentage of deaths of men in the war in different tribes of hunters and gatherers varies from 60% to 15%. While the percentage of all violent deaths in the US and Europe in the 1th century, including losses in both world wars, is just over XNUMX%. If the death rate of tribal wars had taken place in the 100th century, then not 2 million people would have died, but XNUMX billion.
If we turn to the Middle Ages, we will notice that socially sanctioned forms of violence have declined quite noticeably since then. For example, dismemberment and torture were then common forms of punishment for crimes. For the violation for which you will be fined today, in those days you would have had your tongue cut out, your ears cut off, blinded, your hand cut off, and so on. The death penalty was a punishment for numerous non-violent crimes: criticism of the king, theft of a piece of bread. Detailed homicide statistics in European medieval villages, towns and counties are as follows: approximately 100 deaths per 100 population per year, while today the rate of intentional homicides in most European countries does not exceed three per 000 people.
Read more:
- “Normally Violent Can’t Be Tolerated”
Why does modern violence seem so massive to us? I think there are many reasons for this. One of them is a better means of communication: the Associated Press is a better chronicler of war than the monks of the XNUMXth century. There is a cognitive illusion: the easier it is to remember specific examples of something, the more likely you are to be convinced of it. The events that we read about in the newspapers with shocking photographs are remembered better than reports of more people dying of old age in their own beds.
In addition, the reduction of violence was accompanied by the elimination of psychological attitudes associated with the glorification of violence. Today, we are alarmed – and rightly so – when several murderers are executed by lethal injection in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We do not take into account that a couple of hundred years ago they could have been burned at a stake for criticizing the king after a trial lasting 10 minutes. And this happened regularly. Today, we look at the death penalty as evidence of how low our behavior can be, not how high our humanistic standards have risen.
Why is the level of violence decreasing? No one really knows this, but I can name four explanations, each of which, in my opinion, contains an element of truth.
Centralization. Thomas Hobbes was right when he said that in the pre-state period, life was “lonely, poor, dirty, cruel and short.” Not because, he argued, that people have an innate bloodlust or aggressive instincts, but because of the very logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, there is a constant temptation to attack your neighbor preemptively before he attacks you. One way to solve this problem is deterrence: you do not strike first, but publicly declare that you will retaliate mercilessly if your territory is invaded. This means that you must avenge all attacks, which will lead to new rounds of a bloody vendetta. Hobbes’ solution, “Leviathan”, is to entrust the legitimate use of violence to a separate democratically chosen agency – “leviathan” – then this will reduce the temptation to attack, since any aggression will be punished, which will reduce its effectiveness to zero. Indeed, the decline in murder rates in Europe has coincided with the rise of centralized states. This is an argument in favor of the Leviathan theory.
The value of life. The second explanation is that in ancient times, when suffering and early death were common in human life, people rarely repented, bringing suffering and death to others. As technology and economic efficiency made life longer and more enjoyable, the value of human life as a whole increased.. This is the argument of the political scientist James Payne.
Benefit. A third explanation was developed by journalist Robert Wright. Wright shows that under certain circumstances cooperation, including non-violence, can benefit both interacting parties, for example, profit in trade, when both sides exchange surpluses and win, or when both sides lay down their arms, save on military expenses, and are no longer forced to constantly fight. As a result, other people are more valued when they are alive rather than dead, and violence is reduced for selfish reasons.
Empathy. Philosopher Peter Singer believes that evolution has endowed humans with a sense of empathy: the ability to treat other people’s interests as comparable to one’s own. In the course of history, the circle of friends and family for whom man was ready to empathize expanded to the village, the clan, the nation, other races, the opposite sex, and, according to Singer’s arguments, the circle should expand to other sentient animals. The question is, what is behind this expansion?
Perhaps the expanding circles of cooperation that Robert Wright speaks of. Golden rule logic: the more you think about others and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is pointless to put your own interests above those of others, at least if you want to be listened to. You cannot say that “my interests are special, more valuable than yours.” The reason may be cosmopolitanism: history, journalism, memory, literature, travel, literacy – everything that allows us to imagine ourselves in the place of other people whom we may have treated as “subhuman”, as well as to realize the accidental nature of our own situation. that “it may very well happen that this is how fate disposes of you or me.”
Whatever the cause, reducing violence has profound implications. It should raise not only the questions “Why is there a war?”, but also “Why has peace come?”. Not only “What are we doing wrong?” but also “What are we doing right?”. Because we did something right, and it would certainly be good to understand what exactly.
Steven Pinker, American cognitive psychologist, professor at Harvard University, author of several books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (Penguin Books, 2011). Listen to Steven Pinker’s lecture “The surprising decline in violence” at ted.com.
Comment by political psychologist Hakob Nazaretyan:
“Pinker’s results fully confirmed the conclusions and calculations of our group (1). Our long-term research has shown: the higher the power of production and combat technologies, the more advanced means of limiting aggression are necessary so that society does not destroy itself and its environment. Probably, throughout human history, this law of techno-humanitarian balance has served as a mechanism for selecting socio-cultural systems. With the growth of instrumental power (which facilitated physical violence), the cultural values and norms of a particular group underwent an increasingly difficult test: societies that failed to bring their cultural and psychological regulators in line with the increased destructive capabilities were rejected from the historical process. And as a result, the level of violence decreased non-linearly, but consistently. It is important to emphasize that we are talking about physical violence: social violence (as the domination of one will over another) is one of the anthropological constants. As progress progresses, real violence is more and more replaced by symbolic violence, in particular, it is forced out into the virtual sphere.
1. A. Nazaretyan, S. Enikolopov, V. Litvinenko “The evolution of violence and the dynamics of compromise: bloodshed coefficient as a verifier of the hypothesis of techno-humanitarian balance” (News of the Taganrog State Radio Engineering University, No. 7, 2005).
Hakob Nazaretyan, psychologist, Doctor of Philosophy, professor at Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. Author of many books on social and political psychology, including Nonlinear Future (MBA Publishing House, 2013) and Anthropology of Violence and the Culture of Self-Organization. Essays on evolutionary-historical psychology” (Lenand, 2015).