Decline of War

[Itse]

Originally Posted by peter12

He's an English philosopher of a particular type.

A dickheadish type perhaps?

What Gray is talking about here, and throughout the essay, is the failure of sociological imagination present in all statistical analysis that purports to tell the whole story without considering the particulars of history and culture.

I mean, if violent crime was decreased by the cultural effects of mass incarceration and abortion, then a different kind of violence is being perpetrated by the State with arguably more pernicious effects.

He's talking about it at great length, yes. However his argumentation is IMO terrible. For example, he doesn't even try to really explain why he sees the new kind of violence as worse or more prevalent than the old one. That's why I don't think it ultimately amounts to much more than flowery academic name-calling.

Reading Greys text, I'm inclined to think that the actual failure of imagination here is John Greys failure to accept things that challenge his worldview.

Pinker simply argues his case much better.

[peter12]

Well, as Gray said, you hold an article of faith that cannot be easily challenged.

[peter12]

Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist, has worked through Pinker's statistical claims, and challenged about 90% of it.

ie. That violence was endemic in pre-state human systems.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...e-is-adaptive/

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by peter12

He's an English philosopher of a particular type.



What Gray is talking about here, and throughout the essay, is the failure of sociological imagination present in all statistical analysis that purports to tell the whole story without considering the particulars of history and culture.

I mean, if violent crime was decreased by the cultural effects of mass incarceration and abortion, then a different kind of violence is being perpetrated by the State with arguably more pernicious effects.

Except "the sorcery of numbers" is a negative connotation for "facts I do not like"

A) mass incarceration is not a worldwide phenomenon and explains nothing

B) whether or not you agree with abortion, it's a failed argument to say that type of violence is comparable to the effects of forced child bearing, poverty and crime that was associated with mothers without that choice


The realized effects are less suffering, real or imagined

[Itse]

Originally Posted by peter12

Read "The War of the World" by Niall Ferguson.

Democracies were involved in the bloodshed too. America carried out genocide against the indigenous, and dropped the Bomb.

The British Empire drained itself of blood in the two great conflicts.

I'm not sure what democracy has to do with it. The 20th century was brutal.

In order to back up your claim about the 20th century being particurarly terrible, you need to compare it to other centuries. Pointing out terrible things that happened in the 20th century doesn't mean anything.

As for democracy, oppression is generally linked to things such as human rights and rights to take part in ruling the country.

Maybe you should explain what you mean with it, and what things you think got worse during the 20th century in comparison to the 19th or 18th centuries for example.

Originally Posted by peter12

Well, as Gray said, you hold an article of faith that cannot be easily challenged.

On the contrary.

Pinkers views are trivial to challenge. There are few things easier to challenge than statistical claims. (Disproving them outright is more tricky, but at least a challenge is really easy.)

[peter12]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Except "the sorcery of numbers" is a negative connotation for "facts I do not like"

A) mass incarceration is not a worldwide phenomenon and explains nothing

B) whether or not you agree with abortion, it's a failure argument to say that type of violence is comparable to the effects of forced child bearing, poverty and crime that was associated


The realized effects are less suffering, real or imagined

I'm not a statistician. I maxed out at STATS 201,but I do know that Pinker's real argument rests on a single period between 1945 and the present, which is pretty small. As Gray said, a single nuclear detonation would erase any gains or claims made around this historical period.

Mass incarceration is a global phenomenon. Imprisonment has been exploding across the globe.

Your argument on abortion is akin to saying this is a moral argument that I do not like, so I will disregard it at face value.

Anyway, anti or pro abortion doesn't matter. It is a pretty straight-forward matter to see that we have traded lives lost in violent crime to fetuses eliminated before they can commit crimes. As I said, this is violence of a different type, and more pernicious because we can't see it as such. Maybe you are right, and the trade-offs are worth it, but let's not hide it.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by peter12

Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist, has worked through Pinker's statistical claims, and challenged about 90% of it.

ie. That violence was endemic in pre-state human systems.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...e-is-adaptive/

From the article.

there is a huge gulf between what chimpanzees do and what humans do. Human warfare, in essence and practice, is structured by social institutions and learned behaviors, and carried out through shared symbolic understandings. Explaining why, when, and where humans go out to kill can only be done by studying these cultural realms.

Or in other words:

It only takes exception to Pinkers comments about chimpanzees. Which I think we can agree isn't exactly the central point?

It does weaken Pinkers arguments about the reasons for the decline of violence, but not actually the central claim that violence has declined.

EDIT: For the record, I do not support Pinkers "deep roots of violence" theory, which is about why violence has declined. I think the phenomenon is real (a decline in violence), but I think their explanation is lacking.

[CliffFletcher]

Man is violent because we're status-seeking primates. The rate of violence among primitive people was staggering.

Originally Posted by peter12

Scientific humanism has also wrought horrors never seen before in history. Pinker breezes past the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the Holocaust like they are outliers.

No, he doesn't. Read the book. He captures all of those events and includes them in his empirical analysis.

He also documents the incredibly high level of day-to-day violence in pre-state peoples. Ever since Rousseau, thinkers in the West have been attractive to the myth of the noble savage. Of Eden before the fall. But it's nothing more than a projection of our desires. We're uncovering more and more evidence of systematic violence among our earliest ancestors. Heads stove in. Bones showing terrible trauma from weapons. Mass strangulation.

Read up on the way Russian peasants lived before the revolution. It's as good a window into the Middle Ages as we have, and it was appalling. Brutal, ignorant people living in cramped and filthy conditions, the man of the house a vicious tyrant who routinely threatened and beat his children, spouse, in-laws, farm-hands. Disputes over boundaries and farm tools routinely leading to someone's head getting stove in with a rock. Drunken festivals devolving into family feuds with savage beatings and murder by knife or club.

The murder rate in medieval London and Paris was twenty times what is it today. Affairs of honour, whether the crude disputes of gambling dens or the ritualized duels of gentlemen, routinely led to someone bleeding out on the ground. This sort of low-level violence is responsible for far more deaths than wars.

Then there's non-lethal violence. Spousal beating, severe corporal punishment of children, and grotesque cruelty to animals were commonplace up until recently. Three hundred years ago a family visiting a market in Europe would roar with delight at the spectacle of a cat being lit on fire, or dogs tearing apart a bear.

Originally Posted by peter12

This past century was the most violent, oppressive, blood-soaked century in human history.

Not on a per capita basis. The conquests of the Mongols in the 13th century, for example, left 40 million dead. That's the equivalent of 278 million people in the mid-20th century (55 million were killed in WW2). Pinker's stats rank WW2 as the 9th most lethal event in history. The most level event? The An Lushan revolt in China in the 8th century, which left an estimated 36 million dead (or the equivalent of 429 million in the mid 20th century). Our sense of scale when it comes to violent events has a strongly Western bias, the East being largely ignored by popular Western culture.

You can read some of Pinker's responses to frequently asked questions here.

Originally Posted by peter12

If the detente we have now is only because weapons of war have become too deadly to use on a scaled basis, then this is not some sort of massive altruism unleashed by modernity, but an existential dread that has frozen us all in place.

Nobody has claimed it's altruism that has prevented war. The long peace post-WWII is owed to a monopoly on violence by a small number of great powers, an expanding web of mutually-beneficial trade arrangements, the decline of religion, the rise of democracy, the modern ridicule of honour culture, and increased cultural exchange.

[peter12]

In order to back up your claim about the 20th century being particurarly terrible, you need to compare it to other centuries. Pointing out terrible things that happened in the 20th century doesn't mean anything.

As for democracy, oppression is generally linked to things such as human rights and rights to take part in ruling the country.

Maybe you should explain what you mean with it, and what things you think got worse during the 20th century in comparison to the 19th or 18th centuries for example.

I'm familiar with both the Hobbesian claims made by Pinker and yourself. I also know that for the most part, violence has declined proportionally, although Pinker himself makes it clear that this is not a linear process, and violence tends to spike periodically out of the norm. He is probably right to say that WWI, WW2, the Tsarist pograms, dekulakization, Cultural Revolution, the Purges, and the Holocaust are statistical outliers in 4 centuries of gradual pacification bracketed by his so-called Humanist Revolution and the Long Peace.

I find no real issue here. His statistical analysis appears to pass the grade from expert reviewers. But the body counts do increase, and are only dwarfed by a correlating explosion in demographics brought about by Western technology.

His discussions regarding moral psychology, political systems, and human existential questions are lacking.

This has been brought up by many reviewers. He does not have much to say for instance of the increased stakes brought by violence being concentrated in the hands of state players armed with nuclear weapons or the ability of a mass society to wage violence on a particular group - the Jews in Poland are brought to mind (See Tyler Cowen).

He also ignores the contributions of Christianity to Enlightenment morality (see David Bentley Hart).

The waters are further muddied by Pinker's arrogance, a character trait that has attracted criticism in the past.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Flash, is this opinion or fact?

I would be interested.

Military enlistment has always been greatly influenced by the economics of the time. High unemployment is a key indicator in recruitment success for almist 40 years now.

The us northeast is under represented enlistment while southern states are dramatically over represented.

Wage and education opportunities have always been used to entice lower economic status recruits to join as without enlistment those things are seen as unattainable.

Conversely, college recruitment is highly focused towards prestige benefits as education and wage are largely in reach to college recruits. Officer school etc is not wasted on canon fodder

[peter12]

Except that junior officers lead from the front, and have casualty rates on par with enlisted men.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by peter12

The waters are further muddied by Pinker's arrogance, a character trait that has attracted criticism in the past.

Like Christopher Hitchen, Pinker is unusually well-spoken, which makes him arrogant in the eyes of some. But he's far more polite and even-handed Hitchens.

He's also unusually commercially successful for an academic, which of course inspires resentment among peers.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by peter12

His statistical analysis appears to pass the grade from expert reviewers.

His discussions regarding moral psychology, political systems, and human existential questions are lacking.

Ok, so actually we agree probably about 90%

[peter12]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Like Christopher Hitchen, Pinker is unusually well-spoken, which makes him arrogant in the eyes of some. But he's far more polite and even-handed Hitchens.

He's also unusually commercially successful for an academic, which of course inspires resentment among peers.

This is a strange post.

[peter12]

Man is violent because we're status-seeking primates. The rate of violence among primitive people was staggering.

This assumption has recently been widely challenged.

He also documents the incredibly high level of day-to-day violence in pre-state peoples. Ever since Rousseau, thinkers in the West have been attractive to the myth of the noble savage. Of Eden before the fall. But it's nothing more than a projection of our desires. We're uncovering more and more evidence of systematic violence among our earliest ancestors. Heads stove in. Bones showing terrible trauma from weapons. Mass strangulation.

Once again, this is debatable.

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.o.../12/3/20160028

Read up on the way Russian peasants lived before the revolution. It's as good a window into the Middle Ages as we have, and it was appalling. Brutal, ignorant people living in cramped and filthy conditions, the man of the house a vicious tyrant who routinely threatened and beat his children, spouse, in-laws, farm-hands. Disputes over boundaries and farm tools routinely leading to someone's head getting stove in with a rock. Drunken festivals devolving into family feuds with savage beatings and murder by knife or club

.

So read Under the Old Regime, and find out why it was this way. Quite appalling, yes, but had a great deal to do with specific variables to a specific people at a specific time.

The murder rate in medieval London and Paris was twenty times what is it today. Affairs of honour, whether the crude disputes of gambling dens or the ritualized duels of gentlemen, routinely led to someone bleeding out on the ground. This sort of low-level violence is responsible for far more deaths than wars.

Yes, Nietzsche would call it honour.

Not on a per capita basis. The conquests of the Mongols in the 13th century, for example, left 40 million dead. That's the equivalent of 278 million people in the mid-20th century (55 million were killed in WW2). Pinker's stats rank WW2 as the 9th most lethal event in history. The most level event? The An Lushan revolt in China in the 8th century, which left an estimated 36 million dead (or the equivalent of 429 million in the mid 20th century). Our sense of scale when it comes to violent events has a strongly Western bias, the East being largely ignored by popular Western culture.

I'd be interested to the period of peace that followed the Mongol political consolidation? War is the Father of All, and almost inevitably leads to long periods of peace.

Rank ordering of violence events is highly suspect in itself. The historical consensus is that WW2 was the tail end of a half-century long conflict that began before WW1.

BTW the Lushan Rebellion figure has now been pronounced unreliable.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Like Christopher Hitchen, Pinker is unusually well-spoken, which makes him arrogant in the eyes of some. But he's far more polite and even-handed Hitchens.

He's also unusually commercially successful for an academic, which of course inspires resentment among peers.

Like Hitchens, Pinker has been accused of making hash out of complex cultural issues for book sales.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

Man likes agency.

Fighting for something one believes in gives the tangible feeling of contribution, of altering society and your place in it.

Great point, makes me want to lift it out so it doesn't get buried.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by Itse

Great point, makes me want to lift it out so it doesn't get buried.

And war is the greatest agent for change.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by peter12

And war is the greatest agent for change.

Highly, highly debatable.

Most wars in history didn't change much for most people. Most of the time it changed the name of the ruler, if that.

Personally I would argue that science/technology is the greatest agent of change.

(Of course there are many chicken-and-egg situations with war and science.)

[Vulcan]