Better Angels and Threats of Violence

Tomasz Kaye
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

I still haven’t read Stephen Pinker’s acclaimed book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, but just now I looked through the Blinkist summary. I don’t think I’m way off the mark with what I’m about to say. But if you’ve read it and disagree I’m counting on your comment to let me know.

The book talks about the good news that is the historical trend of declining rates of violence worldwide and offers reasons for why this trend exists.

To me the explanations are persuasive, and though I’m convinced that things are generally better now than they’ve been in the past, I think there’s a mistake in assuming that falling rates of violence mean that things are getting better — which I take to be an implicit part of the book’s message.

Imaginary dictator

First a hypothetical. I’m imagining the reign of some ruthless dictator. In the beginning he has all his political enemies murdered, and instructs the military to show no mercy to protesters, or to broadly defined ‘enemies of the state’.

In the early months of his rule, the rate of domestic violence is very high — the police and military are inflicting it. As the surviving citizenry realise that opposition is futile or too costly, the rate of violence falls, possibly reaching even lower levels than were known during the rule of his predecessor.

Imagining this fearful, cowed population, who appear to live in relative peace, it’s not obvious to me that things have gotten better. I hope you agree.

It’s the threats

Why is that? I think it’s because — when we think about whether things have improved or not — we’re factoring in the threats of violence in the society, as well as the rate of actual violence. And I think that’s an appropriate way to analyse the situation. (I’ll deliberately avoid can-of-worms questions like how heavily should threats of violence weigh relative to actual violent incidents).

Back to the Better Angels. I believe that an important flaw in Pinker’s book is its neglect of the threats of violence that exist in a society. I’m thinking of the largest set:

The threats of violence maintained by the state against its subjects in the form of legislation.

To be sure, these threats are seen as legitimate by many of those who are on their sharp end. And the threatened violence rarely needs to be made actual (the letters and fines usually do the trick), but the threats are undeniably there all the same.

There is an implicit understanding that the machinery of the state will actualise violence against you sooner that allow you (a disobedient citizen) to escape punishment. This is why so many choose to pay taxes, for instance. Since if there was no threat of violence — if agents of the state would leave people alone who protested or defended themselves strongly enough — taxation couldn’t be carried out at all.

Threat proliferation under the state

So in a analysis of moral progress in the world, we should be paying attention at least to the threats of violence as well as the actual rate of violence. In the US things look pretty bad on this front. Below is a graph showing how the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations has changed over time.

The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is the codification of all rules and regulations promulgated by federal agencies.

For our purposes, we can consider pages published a proxy for mass threats of violence maintained.

Legitimate threats?

As mentioned above, a threat of violence can be seen as legitimate or illegitimate by the person it’s directed against. In our imaginary calculus there might be a case for decreasing the weight of threats perceived as legitimate by their objects.

On the other hand, I believe people are pretty good at telling themselves comforting stories about adverse situations they find themselves in, when they see them as beyond their power to change. Would Joe public still claim to approve of taxation laws if he were no longer subject to them?

I want to end by emphasising again that I do think things have been getting better, overall. And it is certainly good news that the rate of actual violence appears to be falling. I don’t think society progresses monotonically towards utopia, but instead that things get better while other things get worse. May the progress continue to outpace the regress.

Tomasz Kaye

Written by

Anti-political propaganda animations. Market anarchist. Netherlands.

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