While images of school shootings and violence across the world
beset our consciousness, we, in fact, are living in a peaceful era
compared to the ages that preceded us. This was the central
argument of noted cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in his
Distinguished Speakers Series address last night in the Center for
the Arts Mainstage theater.

Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard
University and author of bestselling books like “The Language
Instinct” and “The Blank Slate,” presented a
lecture built on themes of his most recent book, “The Better
Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” (Penguin,
2012).

“Believe it or not—and I know most people do
not,” Pinker said, “we may be living in the most
peaceful period in human existence.” While this relative
peace isn’t guaranteed to continue, it is nonetheless
“a persistent, historical development.” Furthermore,
this pacific trend is scalable across both “millennia and in
years,” he said. Throughout his lecture, Pinker pointed to
elaborate slides of statistical information concerning historical
forces of violence and pacification from ancient times to the
present.

Pinker’s slides also included images of medieval forms of
punishment and other visuals to bolster his argument. Clearly
practiced in delivering this particular lecture, he punctuated his
points with wry humor and agreeably answered audience questions
following his address.

Pinker cited Thomas Hobbes’s famous remark in his 1651
work, “Leviathan,” that “the life of man [is]
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Pinker contrasted
Hobbes’ bleak assessment with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
comment a century later that “nothing is so gentle as man in
his primitive state.”

“Both men were speculating from the armchair,”
Pinker said. “Neither had any idea what life was like in the
non-state societies.” Today, however, we can attain more
accurate insights because of the advantages of forensic archaeology
and also ethnographic studies and evidence, he pointed out.

With forensic archaeology, for instance, historic skeletons show
decapitations, embedded arrowheads and other evidence of a violent
demise. In fact, estimates are that 50 percent of prehistoric
skeletons “have signs of violent trauma,” Pinker
said.

Pinker traced how a civilizing process gradually became more
apparent in human history, certainly, in a country like England
where homicide estimates are available from the Middle Ages onward.
A person living in England today, he said, has “a 135th
chance of being murdered as did his medieval ancestor.”
Gradually, as Western European principalities were consolidated and
other medieval political structures altered or replaced, criminal
justice systems were nationalized, Pinker explained. The rule of
warlords gave way to “the king’s justice.”
Economic developments also had a significant role in stemming some
of the brutal violence of the distant past.

Meanwhile, sadistic practices, such as sawing a person in half
or impalement, thankfully became outmoded or outlawed as a
“humanitarian revolution” ensued. “Country after
country replaced these forms of corporal punishment,” Pinker
noted. These developments were generally characteristic of the late
18th century and were seen in the U.S. with the adoption of the
Eighth Amendment to the Constitution forbidding cruel and unusual
punishment. Similar progress can be seen with the death penalty,
which was once imposed for such crimes as “robbing the rabbit
warren,” and in the U.S. specifically, for such offenses as
witchcraft.

Assertions that the 20th century was the most violent epoch are
unfounded, Pinker said. Almost never are these impressions or
statements based on statistical or scientific comparisons with any
other century. “There is only one data point.”

In fact, Pinker argued, there has been a decline in inter-state
war, and no nuclear wars since Nagasaki, “confounding every
expert prognostication” at the time. And whereas war between
France and Germany, for example, is now inconceivable, such
inter-state conflict was relatively constant in Western Europe for
at least 600 years. Pinker added that the number of world civil
wars also declined after 1945. Moreover, conflicts now tend to be
local or regional. And while these engender much misery, the death
toll is far less than was the case with inter-state warfare, he
said.

Pinker also traced the rise of “rights revolutions,”
giving examples of positive campaigns to recognize obligations to,
and the needs of, minorities, women, children and animals. He again
cited declines in the numbers of abuses in each of these groups.
What initially were laws and policies to eliminate discrimination
have evolved in many countries into more active measures such as
affirmative action. For instance, the U.S. has seen a sharp decline
in the number of states that allow corporal punishment in
schools.

As to why violence is apparently diminishing, it would be
tempting to think that it has been “bred out of us” in
an evolutionary sense. But we still see violence in 2-year-olds who
kick and bite, Pinker said. And we all know that many adults
vicariously take pleasure in violence by playing certain video
games, watching or reading Shakespeare, seeing violent movies, or
even playing or observing hockey, he said, to audience
laughter.

A more likely explanation is that we’re capable of
counteracting violent tendencies that are part of our
“complex human nature,” thus invoking “our better
angels,” to use Lincoln’s phrase, Pinker said.

As to which historical developments bring out our “angels
and stay our hands” from fomenting violence, Pinker traced
several factors. They include expanding one’s circle of
empathy so it can extend further than “close friends, blood
relatives and cute, little fuzzy animals.” Historical forces
of cosmopolitanism, along with exposure to journalism, literature
and other sources of education, may allow violence-prone
individuals to gradually understand, rather than demonize, their
foes.

Whatever is the explanation for historical trends toward peace,
the implications are “profound,” Pinker said. They
should lead to a reconsideration of a “moralistic
mindset”—when it comes to issues of war and
peace—to one that is empirically based. The question, he
said, is not “Why is there war?” but “Why is
there peace?”

In any case, “violence of all kinds is decreasing,”
Pinker said, and this long-term trend should inspire
“gratitude” for the historical forces that make it
possible.