Violence: A New History of Humanity

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Violence: A New History of Humanity (original The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined ) is a 1200-page book by the American-Canadian evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker that was published in New York in 2011 and deals with the development of violence . The main thesis of the book is that violence has decreased over the course of history .

The publish Pinker in 2018 book Enlightenment Now: For reason, science, humanism and progress - A defense (original Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress ) is based on the book violence and is seen as a continuation .

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Chapters 2–7 deal with various historical developments that Pinker interprets as a decrease in violence. The pacification process (Chapter 2) describes the transition from anarchic hunter-gatherer cultures to forms of state organization as a result of the Neolithic revolution . Pinker evaluates ethnographic and paläoanthropologisches of material and is based on the Leviathan model of Thomas Hobbes . In The Process of Civilization (Chapter 3) Pinker leans heavily on On the Process of Civilization by Norbert Elias and describes the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age . This civilization process reduced the number of murders in Europe to one thirtieth. The Humanitarian Revolution (Chapter 4) in the Age of Enlightenment led to the outlawing of tyranny , slavery , torture , killing out of superstition and duels . The Long Peace (Chapter 5) deals with the development of interstate violence since the Second World War and The New Peace (Chapter 6) with the development since the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War . In The Revolutions of the Right (Chapter 7), Pinker describes how human rights were increasingly established and enforced in the nineteenth and especially in the second half of the twentieth century . Abolition of slavery , desegregation , enforcement of women's rights , children's rights , rights of homosexuals .

In the following two chapters, Pinker discusses the psychology of violence from an evolutionary and neurobiological perspective. In the inner demons (chapter 8), he examines the destructive forces of human nature and names predatory lust, desire for domination , revenge , sadism and ideology . These forces are contrasted in The Better Angels (Chapter 9) with mechanisms that can limit violence, namely empathy , self-control , morality (the meaning of which is doubtful) and reason , whereby the role of intelligence ( Flynn effect ) is also discussed.

With this book, Pinker makes a contribution to research into the decline in violence and crime by continuing the work of Manuel Eisner and Max Roser through investigations before the Middle Ages.

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"The decline in violence is likely to be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species."

- page 1027

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Pinker was criticized in various German newspapers for his allegedly dubious source selection. In the FAZ, for example, Herfried Münkler describes the historical part of his book as a “risky ride through history”. On the one hand, Pinker is not a historian and, on the other hand, he uses figures from historical chroniclers to substantiate his theses (e.g. records of the conquests of Genghis Khan or Timur Lenk, Homer's Iliad or the books of the Hebrew Bible). Since the chroniclers of earlier times often only wanted to express the size and enormity of an event with the information they provided, considerable doubts are appropriate about the figures. In addition, he multiplied these numbers by a factor by which the world population should be larger today than it was then. This numerical basis can only be an estimate and is therefore unsuitable for such mathematical operations. In this way, Pinker wanted to make the effects of violence and death rates comparable across history. However, z. For example, the murder of the Jews of Europe is no longer a unique event; it does not even appear in Pinker's list of the twenty greatest catastrophes of violence in human history.

The killing rates that he gives for archaic hunter-gatherer cultures are just as questionable, according to journalist Hubert Filser. Here he is referring to archaeological finds, which naturally only depict a very small section of reality, so that they would certainly not be suitable for statistical calculations. Moreover, he makes no distinction between violence between individuals and war between groups.

The social psychologist Harald Welzer does not criticize Pinker's figures . He assumes that the decline in violence in the process of civilization is historically accurate. But that does not mean that it will continue to do so. Even Norbert Elias had "considered profound processes of decivilization to be possible"; the direction of the civilization process once taken is by no means irreversible. Rather, one has to assume that the increasing peacefulness is related to the increase in material prosperity, and this “was based on the global spread of the capitalist economic model, which ensured an increase in the level of prosperity by increasing productivity, which in turn made possible through permanently increased use of energy and resources has been". But this only worked out as long as the earth could provide enough resources to increase prosperity. In the meantime, however, the limits of growth have been reached, and the overuse of the earth's resources is confronting more and more people with not having a share in the earth's riches. "At the moment when there wasn't enough for everyone [...] the process of civilization was reversed and violence returned."

John N. Gray in Prospect magazine contradicts Pinker's thesis that the superpowers and developed states have not been at war against each other since World War II. According to Gray, rich states have "exported" their wars against one another to poor countries, but have not stopped them. The superpowers would have their conflicts z. B. in the Korean War , during the Chinese occupation of Tibet or the civil war in Angola . Pinker's argument that the humanistic worldview of the Enlightenment is the cause of the decline in violence also overlooks the fact that many important thinkers of the Enlightenment advocated violence as a form of social change. In addition, Pinker contradicts his own earlier views and the Darwinism he advocates if he assumes that a certain worldview has changed human behavior so massively. In The Blank Slate. The modern denial of human nature was Pinker still of the opinion that there is a constant human nature and that behavior cannot be changed at will.

Regardless of the sense of a "ranking" of the worst human acts of violence, Dagmar Röhrlich of Deutschlandfunk Pinker agrees with regard to the change in social attitudes towards everyday violence. This happened especially in Europe and North America. So what happened "inhumanities in the Roman Empire, in the Middle Ages or at times of Reformations and Counter-Reformations, [...] happened in front of the public and much to their pleasure and amusement". In contrast, many crimes committed by the National Socialists, for example, took place “more or less hidden”.

Münkler also admits: "The world has probably become more peaceful than it was in the early days". This applies at least to Europe.

The Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka criticizes Pinker's "scientific provinciality " due to his lack of interest in non-English-language publications. He assumes without reflection that the meaning of the English word "violence" is the same as the meaning of the words used for "violence" in other languages. She uses examples to show that this is not the case and that the American concept of violence is by no means universal.

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  1. ↑ Critical links to the book at www.perlentaucher.de
  2. ↑ Herfried Münkler: Steven Pinker: Violence: All curves point to eternal peace . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 18, 2011. Retrieved June 27, 2013.
  3. ↑ Hubert Filser: How the war was invented . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung ., April 22, 2012. Accessed June 27, 2013.
  4. ↑ Harald Welzer: Think for yourself. A guide to resistance , Frankfurt am Main 2014, p. 161 f.
  5. ^ John N. Gray : Delusions of Peace . In: Prospect , September 21, 2011.
  6. ↑ Dagmar Röhrlich: Violence: A New History of Humanity . In: Deutschlandfunk , December 18, 2012. Accessed August 2, 2013.
  7. ↑ Christian Weber: "A highly political question" . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 2, 2011. Accessed August 2, 2013.
  8. ↑ Anna Wierzbicka: Imprisoned in English. The hazards of English as a default language . Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-932150-6 , pp. 55-57.