An Evolutionary View of Human Violence -- Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker rocks. He is far and away my favorite contemporary scientist writing for the public. In an article at Edge, based on his recent TED Talk (and originally published in The New Republic), Pinker dispels the myth of the noble savage.

The basic premise of the noble savage theory is that humans are basically good and that it is civilization, technology, and society that have corrupted us and made us violent. But anyone who has read much of human history, especially anthropology, will know that this is horribly false. We have not been inherently good. Primal societies are far from peaceful and loving. In fact, most primal societies are violent and barbaric by our modern standards.

In the article at Edge, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, Pinker argues the points I have just raised, only much more authoritatively and elegantly.

Ken Wilber has made exactly the same arguments at various times in his work. The integral developmental model of human evolution is partly founded on the notion that humans have progressively become less violent, less egoic, and more compassionate as we have evolved. Certainly, as even Pinker points out, we have a long way to go.

Here is a little of Pinker's article to whet your appetite -- and one of the interesting elements of this argument, mentioned in this passage, in the indictment of post-modern relativist historians:

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: 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.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: Steven Pinker, A History of Violence, evolution, barbarism, integral developmental model, TED Talks, The Edge