The Most Peaceful Time In Our Species Existence

If you were an alien, observing the planet Earth solely through United States’ media coverage of the 2016 presidential election cycle, you would have a fairly bleak understanding of Human civilization. Our media does not necessarily develop a productive picture for its viewers. Without getting bogged down in the ethical notion of journalistic integrity, allow me to present this idea as a philosophical proposition. We all have a subjective engagement with staying informed with the current events of the day. For some, their news is from cable television shows or social media. For others, it is through the major networks and their cable affiliates that provide 24-hour news coverage. And then for an additional handful, there are foreign outlets and non-mainstream news sources like Wikileaks or Cryptome. Within this media menage, especially in United States, there is a slight bias towards negativity.

When we use the term negativity in media coverage, we are noting a trend to cover social actions that are deemed criminal. The U.S. Constitution is founded on the jurisprudence of negative law: we criminalize behavior — as opposed to emphasizing (and rewarding) good behavior through our legal framework. This cultural framework based on the superstructures of law and mass communication is not unique, in fact it is replicated throughout the Anglosphere. Furthermore, one could argue that it is the moral framework for Capitalism to spread through principles of neoliberalism. I digress, let us return to the aliens and their perception of Human civilization, through the lens of US political discourse and its endemic media coverage.

The presidential candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential election have each been accused of negativity towards specific cultural demographics that comprise United States’ electorate. People of color have been referred to as super predators, criminals, and rapists; Women have been demeaned solely for their gender; immigrants have been threatened with deportation and internment camps. These issues have raged while wars in our inner cities and abroad continue to raise the national death count. The one politician that has spoke of cultural change that would lead to a greater share of the wealth and a more inclusive social arrangement has been maligned by the two parties for his “unrealistic” ideas. The aliens, observing our culture through the lens of Fox News and MSNBC, see cut throat contests where the rhetoric is of doom and destruction. If he wins, women will only be allowed to work as mothers and domestic servants; if she wins, we will all end up slaves to a brutal military regime (as opposed to the current reality of being economically indentured to corporations); he can’t win because his ideas are unrealistic; the other guy must lose because he would be the fall of the party. These are some general sentiments that one could take away from our news coverage, much less be able to ascertain by viewing the debates.

As our alien guests continue to observe, I can not help but wonder if this reality deters them from making contact. If we were to build our own spacecraft, fly to their orbiting path, and propose the question: Do you hide because you see our violent tendencies? I have a feeling that they would respond, yes. If I were the one privileged enough to have this dialogue with our foreign dignitaries, I would respond, “but all is not lost my dear friends. Numbers do not lie!” As they look at me with a quixotic glare, I would recount a TED Talk from Steven Pinker, titled “The Myth of Violence.”

Mr. Pinker’s discussion ends on the proposition that rather than focusing on what we are doing wrong, why are we not focusing on what we are doing right? The data shows that violent deaths, murder at the hands of the church and state, and from fellow citizens have drastically declined over the course of human civilization. This would include pogroms, riots, and other mob violence (lynchings in the South). This emphasis is built on a critical analysis that proposes a specific path of discovery. First, Pinker breaks down the history of human civilization at three scales: the Millennium Scale, relating the present to its past Hunter/Gatherer state and the Bible, as a written record; the Century Scale, tracking violence from the Middle Ages to present through the cultural, religious, and state sanctioned forms of violence through European countries; the Decade scale, tracking cause of deaths from war and other civil strife from 1945- to the early millennium. Mr. Pinker is not simply picking and choosing to support his own argument, he connects each scale with the overall progression of Human civilization through legal and technological developments. Finally, he proposes four possible reasons for the vast decrease in deaths through violence that has produced a modern society, more peaceful than anyone in the media is willing to acknowledge.

In noting the hunter-gather societies that characterize early human civilization, we begin at the theoretical genesis of social order. One could argue that this period was the first stage towards modern society. It is in this act of collectivization that Conservative ideology locates its historical base. Francis Fukuyama in his work The Origins of Political Order, traces our current neoliberal government to tribal societies. For Fukuyama, the most primitive of the hunter-gatherer or tribal societies, is based around the concept of the Big Man. The Big Man, Fukuyama does acquiesce to the Big Woman, of a tribal society has a first priority, that is caring for family and kin. Next, is the law and order of the greater society. For the author the Big Man is limited in his ability to be a fair and balanced arbiter of jurisprudence. This is because Fukuyama holds the modern neoliberal Republic to be the pinnacle and ceiling of human civilization. His work is championed by the neoconservatives of the U.S. political establishment, I would assume, because of his patriarchal stance on the species genesis.

For Fukuyama, the progression from tribal societies would inevitable blend into feudalism, centralized around the King and his kin. The patriarchal construct of his theory will see that individual leaders remain, even as Representative Democracy evolves towards its modern incantation. Ironically, this very construct in the middle ages of Europe, is where we can begin to isolate the inherent or declining propensity towards violence that is found within the human nature. For Pinker’s argument, it is within the middle ages that we begin to keep track of violent crimes committed by fellow citizens, religious institutions, and the state. One practice of the Dark Ages that continues to pervade in Western civilization is the tracking of causes of death and by in large, mortality rates. The meticulous collection of mortality rates and causes would give us a relative understanding of violent deaths over a significant sample of time. In fact, Pinker notes seven countries in which violent deaths were recorded from the Middle Ages until the new millenium.

Following the two wars of the 20th century, we can see a drastic decrease in homicide, death in battle, and mob violence. No one is arguing that these social factors do not exist. What Pinker argues is that relative to the human population, say 1 death per 100,000 people, we can see a dive in the statistical count of violent deaths. With the exception, as Pinker notes, of the 1960’s. So, what we are discussing here is that despite the media’s portrayal of life in constant strife; despite the rhetoric of the War on Drugs or War Against Terrorism; despite the ever growing Prison Industrial Complex, the world is becoming a safer place. If our alien friends are in fact observing us, I am sure they are aware of our societies progression. Perhaps, the Genocide of Native Americans, Slavery in the South, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, are hard learned lessons for the growth of humanity. If this is the case, its only a matter of time before we make contact. After all, if we use the decline in infant mortality rate to be a benchmark for a civilized nation, why would we not count the decrease in violent deaths?