I have only read the summaries of Steve Pinker’s new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” but I wonder about the demographics on which it is based:
As the centuries go by, is violence declining proportionally or absolutely? I suspect it’s the former. The population grows Malthusianly, but as civilization progresses, the proportion of violence “tolerated” goes down. Yet at our exponential population growth rate, that still leaves it open that the absolute amount of human/human violence is still growing, daily, relentlessly — just not as fast as the human population is growing.
So, yes, it’s nice that the relative proportion of violence is not growing as fast as the population, but that’s just a statistic. The number of (human) sparrows felled (by humans) daily is still monstrous: bigger than it ever was, and growing. Taking solace from the fall in proportion is akin to tobacco-company thinking, it seems to me: Is Steven Pinker unwittingly falling into apologetics for the unpardonable, whether then, since, or now?
(And let’s not forget — although it’s well-hidden and sanitized — that the absolute amount of violence we are heartlessly inflicting daily on the helpless nonhuman creatures that we purpose-breed — not out of necessity: for savour, not survival — is growing just as exponentially as our own numbers…)
This absolute/relative question has obviously been put to Pinker many times:
Q: Your claim that violence has declined depends on comparing rates of violence relative to population size. But is that really a fair measure? Doesn’t a victim of violence suffer just as much regardless of what happens to other people of the time? Was the value of a life less in the 13th century than in the 21st just because there are more people around today? Should we give ourselves credit for being less violent just because there has been population growth?
But Pinker’s reply to the question is not very convincing:
R: You can think about it in a number of ways, but they all lead to the conclusion that it is the proportion, rather than the absolute number, of deaths that is relevant. First, if the population grows, so does the potential number of murderers and despots and rapists and sadists. So if the absolute number of victims of violence stays the same or even increases, while the proportion decreases, something important must have changed to allow all those extra people to grow up free of violence.
This reply provides solace to statisticians, but not to victims.
R: Second, if one focuses on absolute numbers, one ends up with moral absurdities such as these: (a) it’s better to reduce the size of a population by half and keep the rates of rape and murder the same than to reduce the rates of rape and murder by a third; (b) even if a society’s practices were static, so that its rates of war and violence don’t change, its people would be worse and worse off as the population grows, because a greater absolute number of them would suffer; (c) every child brought into the world is a moral evil, because there is a nonzero probability that he or she will be a victim of violence.
Try replacing potential “victim” by potential “perpetrator,” and add that to the fact that the absolute number of victims is still growing.
R: As I note on p. 47: “Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, `If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?’ [Either way, we are led to] the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.”
If one takes the allocentric rather than the egocentric perspective on this, a declining proportion of suffering does not compensate for a growing amount of suffering unless we give my potential pleasure more weight than your actual pain.
Q: What about all the chickens in factory farms?
R: I discuss the chickens in a section on Animal Rights in chapter 7, pp. 469–473.
Well, I guess that settles that, insofar as concerns any potential complaints from the chickens (whose unlucky numbers are not only growing absolutely but whose proportions are not even declining relatively, like those of the lucky human survivors): So let them take solace in humanity’s increasingly angelic nature the same way the growing number of absolute human victims do. (A sentiment reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette — or perhaps a moral-credit Ponzo Plan, in which we amortize the increasing number of victims of human violence by increasing the total human population even faster…)
Yet, all that said, I too think there’s hope: but it will only begin to be realized when it is the absolute number of victims (human and nonhuman) that begins to decline — and not just the proportion. And, yes, reducing rather than increasing our own absolute numbers might not be a bad step in that direction…