ARE PEOPLE LESS VIOLENT? (COMMENT). Both Dick Weisfelder and Nick commented on my most recent post on concussions in football, each expressing the thought that people today are more concerned about injuries in sporting events than in the days of gladiatorial combats and bare knuckle fighting—that, as Nick put it, in many ways society is more “civilized”. They are raising issues which have been raised by a new book by Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist: THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: THE DECLINE OF VIOLENCE IN HISTORY AND ITS CAUSES. The book is considered important and controversial—so much so that it was chosen to lead off a new feature in the Guardian (the “Reading room”) devoted to discussions with readers to “explore major new works by contemporary thinkers.” This article by Pinker from 2007 in The Edge website seems to be a good introduction to the book. One sentence which bears on the comments from Dick Weisfelder and Nick: “Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.’
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It seems doubtful that human nature has changed. The most likely explanation would be that modern culture gives us another way to resolve our difficulties namely, argumentation. In use continually as an educational technique since ancient times it is also a primary component of democracy-think free speech, free press and deliberative bodies.
My prior comment was just in the context of sports. Whether or not from Pinker, I have seen the argument that even the Holocaust, World War II, genocide in Rwanda, etc. do not contradict the notion that overall violence has been declining. According to that sort of analysis, the perception to the contrary is at least partially caused by the intense 24/7 media fixation with violence. But the argument also appears to rest primarily on the exponential growth of global population that causes the per capita incidence to decline. My view is that in absolute terms the 20th century was by far the most violent in human history fueled by the rapid escalation of the technologies of violence and the decline of the distinction between combatants and civilians.
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