Angels and Demons
A man finds out he has cancer. Depressed and feeling there is no point in watching his diet any more he goes on a massive eating binge. Some weeks later he comes back to the doctor’s for a check up. The doctor is thrilled. “Fantastic news” she says. “Am I cured?” he asks. “No, far from it, the cancer is considerably larger and will now definitely kill you, but you’ve gained so much weight that proportionately less of you is cancerous, so that’s a statistical win!”
A woman is building a house. Halfway through the process a fire breaks out in the basement. Unconcerned she sets to work adding a conservatory to the house. That night she goes to sleep, smelling smoke but feeling safe in the knowledge that as she worked fast and the fire spread slowly her house is now proportionately less on fire than it was that morning.
This is a summary of the main argument in Steven Pinker’s best-selling book “the better angels of our nature” and I can’t quite believe how stupid it is.
Pinker’s book is 6 years old now, and bashing it might be a bit old hat. It’s also been done, many times, by people far more knowledgeable than me. Academics have shown it’s bad history, and worse statistics. The “Pinker fallacy” has even entered the academic lexicon.
Bashing Pinker is also perhaps a little unfair. He belongs to the same cohort of well-meaning but slightly sloppy generalists as Jared Diamond and CGP Grey some of whose flaws I share. It’s not their fault that politicians and the media take them far far more seriously than they should, and indeed Pinker’s incredibly long book at least does a decent job of listing all the caveats and qualifiers that should be taken into account alongside his argument. Caveats and qualifiers that those same politicians and media immediately ignore.
So what follows shouldn’t really be construed as an attack on Pinker, who has written a very readable book full of lots of very interesting insights into psychology and human nature. It is instead an attack on the idiots that base their politics on Pinker’s clearly flawed fundamental assumption. And because those people have thus far proved themselves impervious to academic reason, it’s going to be a bit of a polemic.
Pinker’s premise is that society is getting less violent. He then spends the rest of the book investigating why that is. But society isn’t getting less violent. It’s getting proportionately less violent, but that’s because society is growing. If you look at violence in absolute terms then, even using Pinker’s problematic stat of battlefield deaths, there isn’t much of a clear trend or pattern.
This is a problem, because the world’s population is going to top out soon. Hans Rosling, a far better communicator and far better scientist than the Greys, Diamonds and Pinkers of this world, has argued that our world won’t ever exceed 11 billion people. We are about to reach our hard limit, at which point if we haven’t worked out how to live in peace, it’s going to become a huge problem which bad stats will no longer be able to disguise. Our house will be complete and it will still be on fire. The buffet will close and we will still have cancer.
And history gives us even more reason to worry. Pinker subtitles his book “a history of violence and humanity” but history only takes up one of his ten chapters, and it’s the only chapter that moves far too quickly. In just two pages he jumps from Ötzi, to Kennewick man, to Ancient Greece. By then he’s already gone too far, and has missed history’s biggest lesson. Because what the first evidence of war, and indeed the first evidence of war crimes — the Talheim Death Pit — strongly suggests is that war comes from settlement. That groups of people, like balloons in a net, are quite happy to expand and move around and bounce off each other with few ill effects until they are tethered down or run out of space. It is then, static, that they start to rub against each other, that friction starts to develop at the boundaries, and that’s when you start to hear loud bangs.
Even without climate change a world of 11 billion will have plenty of causes for such tension. But if a warmer world necessitates, as it well might, the evacuation and resettlement of large portions of the planet, then tension is only going to grow. Further, another thing history strongly suggests is that conflict is like cancer, is like a fire, and will spread and grow if not treated or contained.
So now is not the time for complacency. But worse than complacency many of Pinker’s acolytes use him, and Fukuyama who makes much the same argument, to justify investing more deeply into the system which is making matters worse. Pinker identifies Hobbes’ ‘leviathan’ — the modern nation state — as the first of his five historical forces that makes the world less violent. He states, “a state that uses a monopoly on force to protect its citizens from one another may be the most consistent violence reducer we have encountered”. He describes history as the march of the “civilising force” of the leviathan despite “pockets of anarchy” that “retained their violent cultures”.
I’m not sure it is possible to be more wrong.
The modern nation state, and the ideology of nationalism which enables it is — I hope — a juvenile fad which arrived, at the earliest, as a consequence of the Treaty of Westphalia, and must have at most a few decades left to run. The alternative is that it will kill us all.
We are probably already doomed to end the century in a 1.5 degree warmer world. We will do very well if we can control warming to two degrees. That means billions of people are going to have to be resettled in new places. That’s either going to happen peacefully of through force of arms. As a species we are going to have to develop new and far more fluid and flexible attitudes to nationhood, identity and free movement. If we don’t then obviously that will be very very very bad for everyone.
Yet at the moment we are moving in the opposite direction, and while I hope the most recent upsurge of populist nationalism is no more than they baying of a dying animal, I fear it is not. Many parts of the world are doubling down on their myopic obsession with sovereignty; delving deeper into xenophobia, and investing in a more static, more brittle world. Such a world will shatter when shaken, and climate change is going to give us a shaky century.
And Nationalism doesn’t just kill through its inane notion that borders shouldn’t be porous. It also divides peoples into an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, into in and out groups, which is the first step towards deciding that the ‘them’ need to die. Statistical data from previous millennia is not that reliable, but it seems likely, and is surely not coincidental, that the vast majority of human killing took place after the Treaty of Westphalia. The logarithmic scale on this graph (also above) obscures that point a little, but not entirely. Pinker’s “pockets of anarchy” might not have been as violent as he thought but, even at their worst, pockets of anarchy lack the capacity for mass industrial killing on the scale of the Somme, Stalingrad, the Shoah, or the great African war.
Pinker rightly draws attention to the extent to which internal conflict is responsible for a far greater proportion battle related deaths than we might otherwise assume. But nationalism does not have clean hands when it comes to internal conflict either. Nationalism is frequently the cause: rebel nationalists want to establish a new state, loyalist nationalists want to defeat and destroy elements they don’t consider compatible with their notion of the nation.
We now live in a world of global trade, global communication, global diseases, global threats and global ideologies. Nationalism makes less and less sense, and is less and less relevant, except as a motivator of conflict and a vehicle for the protection of status quo vested interests. The leviathan is our oppressor not our saviour; it’s time to go whaling.
My, hardly original, opinion of Pinker and Diamond and Grey and Rosling (who for all his brilliance had some political blindspots) is that I don’t think they, personally, are shills for the political elite, but the reason they are so popular despite their, in some cases obvious, flaws is because they are telling us what the political elite want us to hear. If we believe the fairy story that everything is getting better and the world is going to be fine then we don’t need to worry about the fact that our leaders are self-serving, short-sighted and stupid.
We don’t need to worry about the fact that inequality has grown to record levels and social mobility has come crashing to a halt, that won’t lead to war. We don’t need to worry about the fact that our governments have resigned themselves to a warmer world but are fully committed to pulling up the drawbridge to keep out climate change’s first victims, that won’t lead to war. We don’t need to worry about the fact that here in the UK we have a government that stirs up Islamophobia with the one hand while using the other to sell £3.6 billion in weapons to the world’s leading convener and exporter of Islamic fascism, that won’t lead to war. We don’t need to worry about the fact that we have chosen to strongly support the markedly worst of two bad sides in the middle east proxy war, that won’t lead to war. We don’t need to worry about the arms industry spending ever higher amounts on political lobbying and our politicians spending record amounts on guns while threatening each other with war, that won’t lead to war.
Above all we don’t need to look more deeply at these problems, and try and seek out the structural and historical linkages behind conflict. Because if we did we might realise that we’ve been sold oligarchy and told it was democracy, that we’ve been sold cartelism and told it was capitalism, that sovereignty and nationalism are childish fantasies, that war is a racket and the military industrial complex does not exist to keep us safe, that the political elites do not have our best interests at heart and can only be persuaded to act in our interests at the point of a pitchfork.
We have cancer. Our house is on fire. We need a revolution and Steven Pinker is telling us to relax.
