Author Stephen Pinker argues that human violence is declining rapidly over millennia

[pampango]

Steven Pinker has a new book coming out next week, and I’m very much looking forward to it. It is titled The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined, and its premise is that humans have been becoming increasingly less violent over time. I’m very sympathetic to this view: I think cooperation, not conflict, has been the hallmark of human evolution.

There’s an overview of Pinker’s argument at Edge.

Believe it or not—and I know most people do not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence. The decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to convince you that it’s a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.

It’s full of charts — all kinds of graphs illustrating correlations and changing rates of war fatalities, homicide, slavery, etc. He identifies four causes of violence: exploitation, dominance, revenge, and ideology. He also identifies four forces that counter violence: the state as a mediator of justice, trade, an expanding circle of empathy, and reason.

I think the final and perhaps the most profound pacifying force is an “escalator of reason.” As literacy, education, and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally, and that will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others. Reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. And it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.

It’s hard to imagine that republicans will ever “be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others.” Promoting their own interests over those of others is the way they operate.

Repubs also fail when it comes to “the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules.” Tribalism (“us” vs “them”), authority and puritanism are an accurate description of republican philosophy, while “a morality based on fairness and universal rules” is closer to a progressive belief that unites people across “tribes” and countries.


http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/09/27/urge-to-killfadingfading/

[fasttense]

1. Really?

He can say this in the face of the Teabaggers: "Reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules."

What fairness do we have in the US when a supreme court justice can accept bribes and a President can authorize torture and murder?

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. I hope he's right! facinating topic

thanks!

rec'd

[Skidmore]

3. What planet does this man live on?

[tridim]

4. I bet the numbers are inversely proportional to the US prison population.

Because in America we lock up people for exercising personal freedom.

[duhneece]

5. Read "How the Mind Works"

I really enjoyed his book. This confirms my greatest hope, my most optimistic spiritual outlook...one that gets knocked down by events like the murder of Troy Davis, for instance. Am glad to read it and will read the book.

from Wiki:
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University<1> and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His academic pursuits include experiments on mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his less academic books, he argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. On this point, he opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker

[applegrove]

6. Republicans sure are working hard to shrink the circle of empathy.