For years Steven Pinker has been shooting his mouth
off about how peaceful the world is. It almost made you want to
clobber him. Preferably with his new 832-page book. Pinker’s latest
tome,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined, posits that no
matter how dreadful the evening news, no matter how many security
guards, house alarms, pit bulls, and conceal and
carry laws we need for protection, our chances
of a violent, excruciating death are much less today than in Days
of Yore.
I guess it makes sense, though. I mean, what wasn’t worse
in the Olden Days? If you listen to my Dad, every walk to school
was like the Trail of Tears. Or think about health care. In the
19th century if you got a paper cut you were as good as dead. The
wound would fester and the next thing you know your parents would
be renting out your upstairs room to Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
Then there was food safety. Actually, there wasn’t food
safety. That was the problem. Meat was so rancid even the maggots
turned up their noses. Men drank beer because it was purer than
water, which wasn’t fit for consumption. That was their excuse
anyway.
Generally speaking, people were more rude, smelly and
disgusting. If you think people are repulsive now, spitting on the
sidewalk, wearing their trousers around their knees, toting around
bags of dog poop, centuries ago they were 100 times more
disgusting. Only they didn’t know it because our wives weren’t
there to tell them so.
But it is violence that Pinker is most interested in.
His thesis is that, unlike in Times Past, our chances of
meeting a horrible, bloody end are virtually nil. We are
certainly more squeamish about cruel and inhuman punishment than
were our sicko ancestors. Take this account of the execution of
Hugh Despenser the Younger, convicted of treason in
1326:
Immediately after the trial, Despenser was dragged behind four
horses to his place of execution, where a great fire was lit. He
was stripped naked, and Biblical verses denouncing arrogance and
evil were written on his skin. He was then hanged from a gallows
50 ft high, but cut down before he
could choke to death. Despenser was then tied to
a ladder, and — in full view
of the crowd — had his
genitals sliced off and burned (in his still-conscious sight) then
his entrails slowly pulled out, and, finally, his heart cut out and
thrown into the fire… Just before he died, it is recorded that he
let out a “ghastly inhuman howl,” much to the delight and merriment
of the spectators. Finally, his corpse was beheaded, his body cut
into four pieces, and his head mounted on the gates of
London.
Today, we squirm just reading this. Unless you are a
sicko.
PINKER CREDITS THE Enlightenment and the rise
of the Modern State for the decline in violence. That is, once the
State stopped roasting, flaying, and
castrating its citizens.
Along with the rise of the State came an interest in
international trade. The smart guys decided it was more fun to make
piles of money selling surplus goods to foreigners than raping and
pillaging their villages, though that was fun too.
This didn’t happen overnight. Even America’s founding
fathers were extremely violent and scary people. Aaron Burr shot
and killed Alexander Hamilton over a few flippant remarks Hamilton
made about Burr’s haircut or something. The hotheaded Andrew
Jackson was riddled with more holes than a wheel of deli Swiss. In
those days, politicians would settle scores not by threatening
namby pamby legislative maneuvers, but with live rounds of ammo.
Imagine C-Span’s ratings if Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell settled
their political differences like real 18th century
gentlemen.
But what of the popular notion that the 20th century with
its world wars, holocausts, genocides, civil wars, proxy wars,
post-colonial wars, Marxist guerilla wars, drugs wars, cultural
revolutions, great leaps forward, uprisings, purges, forced
starvations, terrorist attacks, etc., was the bloodiest century
ever? Hogwash, says Pinker. What matters is not the number of
individuals massacred, but the percentage (of the population).
Spoken like a true intellectual.
Some may find it curious that Pinker has decided to make
this argument now, with the memories of 9/11 still fresh, with the
U.S. locked in a death struggle with Islamic Jihad, with Europe
awash in riots, and drug wars raging in cities across the Americas.
I suspect Pinker could easily have made the counter argument: that
the world is a much less peaceful place today.
But then we already knew that.
