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Steven Pinker on Thinking About Our Society

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Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, delivers a lecture entitled Thinking About Our Society: Why Violence Has Declined.

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49 thoughts on “Steven Pinker on Thinking About Our Society”

  1. He has changed from the first video I saw he is now a really skinny much older individual ,,,old age and decline …well no one is excempt are they?

  2. the darwinist and biology perspectiv is winning ground on disourse, but pinker is sadly not necissary the whole truth by far from it…sadly i have too litle space to debunk him.

  8. No it isn't. The fallacy argumentum ad hominem is committed when one attempts to argue that:

    S asserts P.
    S has undesirable characteristic Q.
    Therefore, P is false.

    Simply ridiculing S is not an example of ad hominem, unless it is asserted that what S argues is incorrect because of the matter over which S is being ridiculed. Lern2Logic.

  12. Take into account the exponential increase in the world population and the fact that the statistics provided illustrates the density of violence, I can't help but to interpret this lecture in a more pessimistic way. That being: violence simply hasn't caught up with the increase in population. As both rates levels out due to dwindling world resources, I can't help but to imagine that violence will catch up. Time will tell…

  19. Gee that talk is going to deflate the doom sellers. How are the fear mongering politicians going to overlord the masses if there isn't any fear to peddle? The poor law makers might have to come up with real progressive policies and try and keep up with society or they'll be left in the dust. They could always try and fabricate some global calamity to sell to the credulous masses, I suppose. But surely they wouldn't do that… Would They?

  22. You mean what he talks about 8 mins in? Or his denunciation of harmful or oppressive state ideologies 28:00? Or the effect of commerce and trade on the decline of violence @ 32:25? Or the beneficial effect of global communication technologies and 34:10?

  25. I dont really agree with him on the causes of wars. Currently there are number of wars going on for resources, started by highly developed nations. There were wars for resources, the British Empire, the French… nearly all western countries got rich by invading the rest of the world and taking the resources. Sometimes the resources were people, labor force. Nowadays mineral resources are much more easily transportable than before, we are using them much faster, so there will be wars for those.

  27. Governments implement wars.

    Violence in the soul of humans continues in massive amount. This will bring World War Three inside the Great Tribulation.

    Do Not Be Fooled: Humanity is forgetting the lessons leading to WW2 and is doomed to repeat all of the mistakes preceding it.

  28. Most Americans commit felonies during the course of a lifetime and are hypocritical. The USA is one of the most hypocritical countries on Earth.

  29. You know, with the medical advancements letting people live longer, and the, might I say, 'sissifying agenda' to stop all acts of violence and bullying, I think we are going to be in a worse world than we already are. People need territory. We have an over populated planet. What are we to do when there is no space for food, shelters, water, and people? Deaths are necessary. What will be the new form of population control? A law on how many kids one can have? Good luck, look at China's mess.

  30. The thing about animal cruelty is comparative to human cruelty in my opinion. I say this because keeping anything in a cage for their entire life is crueler than killing them immediately. Animal husbandry is the root of animal cruelty, if you don't own an animal there is a lesser chance of their being anything cruel done to it. Caging an animal is cruel. Hunting a free animal is not cruel, it is survival. Caging a man for life is cruel, rehabilitating him, or executing him quickly is not cruel.

  31. The only thing I disagree with is the assertion that violence towards animals has declined. We now enslave and slaughter more than a billion animals each year and conditions for animals in factory farms are much worse than the conditions of animals were before their advent. Really the state of animals has gotten much worse, even if there has been a notable increase in the number of vegetarians/vegans.

  33. He speaks only about physical violence, but not psychological violence. Today we know a lot more about the human mind and psychology and it would be ignorant and naive to think, that this knowledge is not being used to manipulate, supress and regulate people in other peoples interest. So if he got some statistics about psychological violence in the sense of using unconscious psychological mechanisms for own gains by elites, then he would get a different Picture i think.

  34. With a direct punchline sort of speak: What is the difference in violence between killing someone and making him kill himself?

  37. He actually answers that kind of question in this other video:"In Conversation:Steven Pinker talks to Robert Rowland Smith on Violence" pretty early on,so you don't have to watch it all, if you don't want to. He's not going much into detail there and I thought he should. It might be that violence transformes over time from physical to psychological, which fits to my prefered reason for violence decline: The Leviathan forcing our violent nature to express itself in ways that we can get away with.

  40. Granted, as thorough as this lecture is and as dense as it is with information, it's still only a less-than-40 minute lecture, and this is quite a broad topic.
    It's impossible to cover everything in such a span of time, but that being said, "guerrilla warfare, genocide and similar" receive some attention in this lecture. I invite you to watch it again more closely.

  41. I guess he doesn't account for medical industry, prisons, car accidents, video games. He is basically arguing that humans are imprisoned and pacified like other caged animals which may have some truth to it.

  42. Hmm. Blatant, ignorant violence is on a general decline but aggression, competition and consumption are on the rise. Shifting from blatant to sublime doesn't speak to a change in our nature and is ultimately worse. I appreciate the fact that there is no legal slavery but capitalism is torture.

  43. I agree, I appreciate sincere sharing of insight from institutionalized intellectuals but once they write a book on a topic… well, marketing is a job.

  44. @***** What if it is because of the state and government that prosperity and progress is possible? That would imply that the reduction of violence is indeed because of the state, wouldn't it?  

    And yes, in industrialized countries government has a monopoly over violence but that means Pinker's is right, if the government has the monopoly it means the rest of us don't, thus less violence percentage-wise.

    You said you're not satisfied that the metric for violence is that it leads to death. What other metrics for violence would you propose?

  46. What a spin on the truth in the year one bc there were to people Cain and able so that year 50 percent of the wold died in war violence in the twentieth century 600000 Jews died 30000000 people died in WWII India and Pakistan partition killed about 4000000 people not counting Korea veitnam Gulf wars 1&2 ruwanda million and a half extra so according to his thinking the frost century nice wAs the bloodiest in history a dangerous spin by a fool this world needs a lot of fixing

  47. I think this analysis, though I don't doubt the truth of the numbers, is critically flawed, in that it is misleading and missing the point.  Here's what I mean.
         The default implication is that life for humans is better now that violence has decreased.  But if you have two parties of roughly equal potential for violence, and one transgresses upon the other, the other feels reasonably capable of retaliating.  And Pinker's presentation suggests that, that is what they do, and a cycle of violence ensues.  
       On the other hand, if you have one party with a monopoly on violence, they can transgress all they want, effectively enslaving those without power, with impunity, and there will be no retaliation, and no violence, because the aggrieved party will know itself to be powerless to fight back.  
       I'm not sure that's a good thing.  This is the question of liberty vs security.  A powerful state robs you of liberty to grant you security.
        My understanding is that, as violence has gone down, suicide rates have gone up.  Proportionally?  I don't know.  And that, to me, suggests that happiness has gone down.  I expect this is not because people need the violence in order to be happy.  Rather, they, to varying degrees, need freedom to be happy.  

       When I imagine life as an ancient warrior, I suppose I'd endure a lot of pain and have died in my early 20s.  But it would have been a life of intensity, passion, pride, glory, no matter what the cause, as long as I believed in it.  Even if it was just my clan vs your clan.  Plenty of pain, but a person can get accustomed to pain and better able to handle it.  Lots of death, but then, maybe the passions of life were more sacred to them than the preservation of life.
       Modern man enters school before kindergarten, where he is effectively enslaved, heads from school into a cubicle where he sits until he can retire at 64.  Not to put too fine a point on it (to borrow Pinker's phrase) but modern life seriously sucks.  Adaptable as we are, we find was to delude and distract ourselves. But approaching half the country is on antidepressants and climbing, and still committing suicide.
       Pinker is a brilliant scholar who has risen to fame, prestige, glory, and presumably, some wealth in the current systems of power.  He's bound to recognize the virtues of that system more readily than its faults.  But let me say…
       Slavery has NOT even begun to disappear.  Whether you work the field or the house or the office cubicle, whether you are told what work you will do and give the proceeds to your owner, or you get to choose which work you do, but your owner takes whatever portion of the proceeds that it sees fit, and has full authority over all your behavior, you are a slave if you have to obey the men of power and render unto them the proceeds of your labor, in full or in part, under threat of violence.
       And slavery does violence to the human spirit.

       I would like to respond, by way of analogy, to one other point Pinker makes.  The monotheistic religions once served to reduce violence by codifying morality within societies and enforcing a' common law.'  But they gave rise to their own form of violence, first against non-believers internally,and then, in the form of religious wars.  Even if they were, on balance, a boon to humanity, I think Pinker would agree with me that they have, by now, served their purpose and become obsolete and a drag upon human progress.  
       Well, I would make the same argument about the centralized power of the large state.  Sure, it initially reduced violence internally by enforcing common law and codifying morality.  But it turned into its own form of violence.  And even if inter-state war has recently subsided, it is partially because America is powerful enough to bully the rest of the world with impunity from retaliation.  But also, as I mentioned, it robs its own citizens of their liberty.
       It seems to me that the benefit of the state in reducing violence has become obsolete, as the global culture of internet/TV/radio/written media, etc., does the job much better and without the cost.
       I see a strong parallel between State and Religion.

  48. On the eve of World War II the world had an estimated amount of 2.3 billion people. About 70 million were annihilated in the conflict. That amounts to 3% of world population at the time. Today we have around 7 billion people in the world. Suppose global conflict emerges and 140 million people get killed. That amounts to 2% of world population at the present. Even though this imaginary conflict would kill twice as much as the inconceivably violent World War II, condescending fascists like PInker would still have the arrogance to suggest that humanity should be proud of having grown less violent – because its "better angels" would have reduced mortality from 3% to 2% of the overall population.

    I am forever dumbfounded at the fact that such ludicrous line of reasoning can be so easily publicized as 'hard science'. Clearly some people are ready to believe whatever they want to.

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