Believe It or Not: The Decline of Violence Today - Encore

there's been another attack targeting civilians in afghanistan officials say a bomb went off in a market for people or police detonated an explosive device inside the apartment and the man suspected in the massive movie theater shooting earlier in yemen suspected militants linked to help kind of have attacked the government's intelligence headquarters in the southern american flags are flying at half staff today over the white house and elsewhere and if you read today's headlines you might well think the world is a dangerous place and you'd be right but only partially so i'm kate mcintyre and today on k pr preserves how violent has actually decreased over time in fact contrary to popular belief we may be living in one of the most peaceful areas yet that's the argument steven pinker makes in his book the better angels of our nature why violence has declined better pinker is a two time finalist for the pulitzer prize has been named one of time magazine's one hundred most influential people in the world today and one of foreign policy magazine's one hundred global thinkers he teaches

psychology at harvard university have your fingers at home when the home library in kansas city missouri on october twelfth two thousand eleven billion neurons and i know most people do not violence has been in decline for long stretches of time and today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence the decline of violence has not been steady it has not brought violence down to zero and it is not guaranteed to continue but it is a persistent historical development i hope to show you visible on scales from millennia two years from juarez and genocides to the spanking of children in the treatment of animals i want to i reviewed six major declines the violence in human history first discuss their immediate cause is in terms of particular historical events of the era and then their ultimate causes that is general historical forces

interacting with human nature the first decline i call the pacification process until about five thousand years ago humans everywhere lived in an iraqi without a central government what was life like in this state of nature this is a question that philosophers have speculated about for centuries thomas hobbes famously said that life in the state of nature is solitary poor nasty brutish and short a century later it shows up russo countered that nothing can be more gentle commander in his primitive state of all of these they were talking through their hats neither had any idea what life was like in a state of nature but today we can do better because there are two sources evidence about rates of death in non state societies the first is forensic archaeology even bigger that a csi paleo i think that is what proportion of prehistoric spellers have salinas a violent trauma such as a bashed and skulls decapitated

skeletons arrowheads and that added bonus up or monies down with ropes around their necks well there are approximately twenty analyses that i know of of a prehistoric skeletons they spend quite a range this is the percentage of deaths from warfare but the average is about fifteen percent let's compare that figure for those of the states in the lead in our recent air as starting with some of the most violent as in recent times of the twentieth century is the figure for europe and the united states in the twentieth century which is about how one percent if we throw in all of the genocides and man made famines and calculated across the entire world for the twentieth century we get about three percent here is the world in the year two thousand five about three tenths of one percent the second source of evidence

for rates of violence simply state societies comes from ethnographic five or statistics what is the rate of death by violence in people who'd recently lived outside of state control really hunter gatherers of horticultural us and other tribal people again there are about twenty seven estimates that i've been able to find that they spend quite a range the average using the common metric and found violent deaths is out five hundred and twenty four per hundred thousand people per year mainly one half of one percent of the population per year what's the thing your wits out those four more modern states and again we'll stack the deck against a majority by picking some of the most violent times and places in history for example germany in comparison in the twentieth century which i thought two world wars i have to rate five hundred and twenty four for non state societies has a rate of about a hundred

sixty likewise russia in the twentieth century two world wars a revolution and a civil war buff hundred and fifty japan in the twentieth century to i and world war ii including a couple of nuclear explosions sixty united states in the twentieth century about three the world and the twentieth century maybe i sixty and the world in the first decade of the twenty first century approximately three one hundredths of how one deaths per hundred thousand per year so not to put to find a point on it but when it comes to life in a state of nature hobbs was right to do so was wrong what was the immediate cause of the decline i had those high rates of death in warfare the obvious one is the rise in expansion of state's leading to the various taxes that history students read about the parks are a lineup that's a slam to cut taxes and so on and imperial warlords tend to clamp down on tribal reading and feuding

within their territory not because they have a benevolent interest in the welfare of their subjects but because it's a nuisance it settle scores among them and shuffles resources around at a dead last two the imperial overlord would rather keep the essence alive to supply him with soldiers and slaves and taxes so just as a farmer has an interest in preventing his livestock and killing each other and emperor would rather put an end to all of this squabbling that from his point of view is again a loss is there any evidence that the appearance of states is the cause of the difference between tribal peoples and water once went over to direct comparisons one of them looked at the percentage of battered skeletons from pre colombian are hunter gatherers versus pre colombian state societies that is all of them dating back to before forty ninety two in the americas the rate for a death among the hundred added in gathering of americans is about thirteen percent the rate among the residents residents of the

first states in the aztec an entire empires was less than three percent of the five four difference in terms of epigraph a vital statistics i know one direct comparison between rates of violent death among equals sign of the kalahari desert before and after the imposition of state control in the botswana and others reduction of about thirteen deaths per hundred thousand per year it in a span of less than a decade these second line of violence can be illustrated by this would actually day in the life of medieval europe and the process i do sometimes called a civilizing process results explain turns out that homicide records in europe go back in many places high hundreds of years of historical criminologists who dig around corners records in that town hall basements and

they're in a damn parish records can plot them on a graph yesterday a logarithmic rack because it spends such a rate of luxury range of mansions from one per hundred thousand a year to more than tenfold temper hundred thousand here hundred per hundred thousand a year as a set of ideas from england and it shows that the homicide rate fell from between twelve hundred and two thousand by a factor of about thirty five that is a contemporary english it's about twenty five times less likely to be murdered and his naval ancestors this is true not just in england but in every european country for which statistics are available italy netherlands germany switzerland and scandinavia also declined from the approximately the thirties to the fifties four hundred thousand a year down to a narrow range of about one hundred thousand per year on the immediate cause well they were first identified by the sociologist norbert

leo set his book the civilizing process mainly in the transition from the middle ages to majority there was a consolidation of central states and i kingdoms the patchwork of duffy's and balinese and principalities and other fees as a result criminal justice was nationalized and i constant turf battles between warlords not refer to them as knights and feuding and brig and it was replaced by the king's justice there's also growing infrastructure of commerce institutions of money and finance and enforceable contracts that were recognized within the boundaries of these new states and technologies of transportation and timekeeping rosen clocks as a result a zero some wonder are stealing your neighbor's land gave rise to positive some trade buying stuff from the next transition refers to obtain some of the ways in which the early states and forced justice within their

boundaries how barbaric punishments such as breaking on the wheel burning at the stake sawing in half and pellman through the rectum and clawing the flesh of the back with iron hops in a process that could be called a humanitarian revolution these practices were abolished in a fairly narrow slice of time caucus cop i'd concentrated in the eighteenth century the number of major states with judicial torture i have had bad moments between six pm nine sixteen hundreds and the mid eighteen hundreds including the abolition by the united states in the famous prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the eighth amendment to the constitution also during this time were abolition of other barbaric practices such as the death penalty for non lethal crimes in eighteenth century england there were two hundred and twenty two capital offenses on the books including poaching counterfeiting robbing a rabbit warren

being in the company of gypsies and quote strong evidence of malice in the trial of seven to fourteen years of age at sixty one he's been reduced to four the america and now colonial an early several times had the death penalty for thefts on the best reality adultery witchcraft concealing birth burglary slave revolt counterfeiting and horse that it was these were not just laws on the books but worldwide exuberant link in the colonial period a majority of executions were for crimes other than murder in recent decades the only crime that is punishable by death other than murder is conspiracy to commit murder the death penalty itself it has been abolished in just about all of europe the number of european countries with capital punishment is now close to zero but even before these countries abolished capital punishment they had

grown tired of carrying it out countries lost their taste for killing prisoners before they actually expunged from the books now in the united states it is something of an outlier among western democracies in retaining the death penalty at least thirty five of the fifty states but even then the american death penalty is a shadow of its former self this graph shows the number of executions per capita and as you can see it has opt wanted since colonial times sixteen twenty five to the point where i'm now for all its notoriety a book about fifty people were executed in the united states every year out of a approximately seventeen thousand are murders other obligations during humanitarian revolution include witch hunts religious persecution such as burning heretics alive doing live sports betters prisons and perhaps most famously slavery starting in the late eighteenth century there was a worldwide movement to abolish slavery in the united states with the emancipation proclamation is

kind of in the middle of the pack ah at the mostly from last and abolition of slavery took place in nineteen eighty in mauritania and for the first time in human history slavery is illegal everywhere on earth which is better than i the way it used to be where it was legal everywhere on earth what were the immediate cause of the humanitarian revelation when my guest that it was an increasing affluence perhaps as ones as people got richer they lived longer their lives were more pleasant they put a higher value on life in general it's a plausible theory but i don't think the timing works out right for afterwards only took up took off after that eighteen hundred with the industrial revolution yet most of the humanitarian reforms were concentrated in the eighteenth century art when people were still pretty poor identity more plausible causes printing and literacy it printing being the only technology that showed a precocious

increase in productivity before the industrial revolution before the eighteenth century the book publishing and become twenty times more efficient this resulted in a an exponential increase in the number of books that were published in particular during the eighteenth century and there were more literate people to read those books in the eighteenth century for the first time a majority of englishman could read what's interesting what would cover for this period as the enlightenment for a reason for one i think knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance if you were disabused of toxic notion such as legumes waste wells erik picks go to hell which is caused crop failures children are possessed by the devil africans are british and so on then a lot of rationales for violence have been undermined justified the acquisition of knowledge as voltaire said those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities also we're

seeing was part of a general kurt wore cosmopolitanism the mixing of peoples and the exposure to other ideas and ways of life and there's reason to think that the reading a fiction and history and journalism gets people into the habit of stepping into other people's shoes and seeing the world from their point of view which could lead to more empathy and less cruelty if you imagine what it's like to be someone else perhaps you could be a little less enthusiastic about seeing them gets about before transition has been called the world peace and it speaks to the commonly heard claim that the twentieth century was the most violent in history and interestingly no one who makes that claim ever sites any numbers from any century given the twentieth even if you actually look at the distribution of violence across the centuries one might call this cleavage and i'll take the

so called peaceful nineteenth century which often contrasted with the twentieth century well during those hundred years there where the napoleonic wars with four million deaths the typing rebellion in china the most destructive civil war of all time with twenty million that's the american civil war by far america's deadliest war with sixty six hundred fifty thousand the rangers shaka zulu at a south african hitler who kill between one and two million people the war of the triple alliance in paraguay which no one has ever heard of but it's not maybe the most destructive interstate more proportionally in the last few centuries killing sixty percent of the population of paraguay and african slavery wars imperial wars in africa asia and the south pacific whose death toll we can't even begin to estimate now it is true that the second world war was the most deadly event in human history in terms of absolute numbers and the world had a whole lot more people in the twentieth century and it's not clear that it's the deadliest event

in terms of the percentage of the world's population was killed i have taken the hundred worst things that people have ever done to each other that we know of taken from a forthcoming book by matthew white called a great big book horrible things are highly recommended by the way and it was scaled the death tolls by the population of the world at the time and as you can see world war two really comes in in ninth place world war one doesn't even make the top ten and the worst atrocities are pretty evenly distributed over twenty five hundred years they you know they noticed a final of a horrible things in the last half millennium that isn't because the asians only kill each other in massive numbers and we kill each other both in massive numbers and a few at a time but it's an obvious reflection of the historical record they lead the closer you get to the president the better your records are of all of the smaller wars and massacres

that were even worth of recording in ancient times but is now on the last five hundred years jack really wanted trends in great power war over the last half a millennium these are big wars that involved the eight hundred pound gorillas of the day be small number of states can project their power beyond their borders and they account for the lion's share of all of the deaths from all wars combined a final centuries ago the great powers were pretty much always at war now they hardly ever at war the last great power war was the korean war that ended in nineteen fifty three past centuries had things like the thirty years war the eighteen years' war the hundred years' war the twentieth century had the six day war at this graph shows the frequency of wars involving a great power that is the number of the worst record of the century and it too has been in decline

over the last five hundred years but this graph shows a different trend this is the deadly innocent wars involving a great power that is where the great powers didn't fight a war how many people would be able to kill or country premier here we see a trend that goes in the opposite direction between fifteen hundred and nineteen fifty the wars were better and better at killing people in a shorter and shorter period of time however after nineteen fifty even the statistic did a u turn back and this is a blogger at the coordinates by the way so this is actually an enormous up lunch because in the top half of the ground and out what how then do we estimate the total number of deaths there were fewer wars but the wars that didn't happen or deadly or if you combine them you see a bunch of zig zig zags but the most recent period of history is actually the most peaceful of the last five hundred years now we zoom in on the past century is that the past half a millennium and we see that there were

indeed in the twentieth century two enormous spikes of bloodletting be our correspondent between world wars but since then there has been an extended lowland of a historically low rate of death in warfare which is what i call the long piece since nineteen forty six there's been a historically unprecedented decline in interstate war that as wars between two sovereign states there were zero wars between the us in the ussr contrary to all expert projections those of you who are my age or older grew up with the certainty that the world were three was going to happen but i didn't know nuclear weapons have been used since neither sacking again confounded all expert projections there've been no interest between great power since nineteen fifty three the wars between western european countries which might seem like a boring than our observations like of course france and germany are going to go to war or iran poland to russia but i mean just to say

this is a very unusual state of affairs before nineteen forty five the western european countries started to be worse a year for six hundred years and there have been no wars between developed countries that is the forty five countries with the highest gdp per capita well what about the rest of the world in a historical transition call the new piece i don't know there has been a change in the frequency of war involving the rest of the world as well as short summary of what's happened since nineteen forty six maybe is the following there are fewer interstate wars but there have been more civil wars as a newly independent states with inept governments defend themselves against insurgent movements and both sides were armed financed and done by the core superpowers however even the number of civil wars decline after nineteen ninety one with the end of the cold war and by this definition a war is something that kills as he was twenty five people here

this is the number of colonial wars and isis there are no more colonies there are no more colonial wars is the number of interstate morris and as you can see in the twenty first century there are hardly any of them however this is the number of civil war spoke you were civil wars in green that occur only within the boundaries of the country an international ice of wars were some power like the united states but us in on the usually in the side of the government solicited shall increase until nineteen ninety it was even the number of civil wars declined but the question now is much more skilled more people the small number of interstate wars or the large number of civil wars the increase in deaths of a number of international ice of wars and local saloon morris it does not merely make up for the decrease in the number of deaths in interstate wars so once again no i'm going to put together the data on how frequently wars break out with how much damage each

words each word as the number of deaths in colonial wars which is people get to zero the number of deaths in interstate wars with peaks for korea yet now and iran iraq each one more than the preceding one the number of deaths from civil wars and from international ice worse so the world has seen or all a bumpy but unmistakable decline from nineteen forty six to present decade and we're now living in an era of unprecedented rate of death in warfare so the dream of the nineteen sixties folk singers is almost coming true the world is almost putting an end to war what about genocide it's often said the genocides killed more people than worse and it's often said that the twentieth century was the age of genocide however if you look up any book on the history of genocide they are unanimous that this is not the case to take just one example frank

chalk and kirk johnson says the history of genocide says in the preface genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and sharing all periods in history we know that in ancient times and has disappeared and that cities were destroyed oh you don't know what happened to the bulk of the population is involved in these events their fate was simply too important when they were mentioned at all they were usually lumped together with the kurds of awesome sheep and other livestock looking at the available evidence from antiquity what might develop a hypothesis that most wars at that time with genocidal in character and the age of genocide is really the jewish people started to care about genocide word itself was only queen in nineteen forty four russell project genocides prior to the twentieth century wealthy take the old testament seriously if not as a chronicle of actual events as a lease the record of the expectations of the time then there were genocides of the amal kites and writes kim ades had lights that tide's genocides that unites

parasites and many others also by the way commanded by god the athenians and bailouts the romans in carthage the mongol invasions the crusades the european wars of religion and i've many genocides during the colonization of the americas in africa and australia well let's say that we don't have data that without lighter plot curves of genocide throughout history but we we could do for the twentieth century and here's what it looks like and it speaks to the colleague nate assertion that the genocides in bosnia rwanda dark or implied that the world has not learned the lessons from the holocaust that nothing has changed there indeed was a peak i genocide in the nineteen forties but that since then the rates have come a bubbly downward and the even the spikes for cambodia and rwanda don't change the overall trajectory were the immediate causes of this quantitative reduction in

violent deaths while some of them were outlined a couple of hundred years ago by an annual conference as a perpetual peace can propose that democracy trading and an international community were all pacify forces more recently the political scientist bruce russell and sean o'neill tested cots hypothesis i and show that indeed all three of these factors have increased in the second half of the twentieth century and all of them are statistical predictors of peace in nineteen ninety four the first time the number of democracies exceeded the number of autocracy as international trade has zoomed up words since the end of the second world war membership an intra governmental organizations has increased steadily throughout the twentieth century and accelerated after the second world war an international peacekeeping force is both a number of peacekeeping operations and more importantly the number of peacekeepers has zoomed up since nineteen ninety and

contrary to a widespread belief that the united nations peacekeepers are an ineffectual in fact statistically they are highly likely to prevent a war from breaking out again finally there are the riots revolutions the targeting of violence on smaller scales against vulnerable populations such as racial minorities women children homosexuals and animals the civil rights movement to saut put an end to lynchings which in united states i'll occurred at a rate of about a hundred and fifty four year about a century ago and then plummeted to zero by the nineteen fifties the crime writers of blacks have started being recorded in the nineteen nineties they were never more than the single digits per year and now they had declined to about one per year non lethal hate crimes against blacks have declined since they committed crimes like intimidation and

assault and the attitudes that motivate violence against racial minorities racist attitudes have been in steady decline since the nineteen forties i'd say this is a worldwide movement were countries now try to boost their ethnic minorities and discriminate against them the women's rights movement has seen a decrease in rape by about eighty percent since statistics were first kept in the nineteen seventies a decline in domestic violence we are bleeding of wives and girlfriends i and to a lesser extent of husbands and boyfriends it's seen a decrease in the ultimate form of domestic violence mean we outsource it and riverside the decline has been far steeper by the wait for riverside than four bucks or aside the women's movement has been very very good to husbands the children's rights movement has seen a decline in the

number of american states that paddle their children's schools ah from almost a hundred percent to fewer than half since nineteen fifty five in every western country and in the event including the united states there has been a big declines in the poodle of spanking public opinion polls there's been a decrease in the rate of physical and sexual abuse of children and a decrease in violence against children at school number of fights in a non fatal crimes the gay rights movement has seen a increase in the number of states to decriminalize homosexuality but the number of countries worldwide and the number of american states which is now a hundred percent there's been a steady decrease in public opinion polling in anti gay attitude such as whether homosexuality is morally wrong should be made illegal or whether gay people should be denied equal opportunity there's been a decline at least one kind of anti gay hate crime namely intimidation the animal rights movement has seen

a decrease in hunting an increase in vegetarianism and a sharp decrease in the percentage of motion pictures which animals were high well this leads to the question why as violence declined on so many scales of time and magnitude one possibility is that somehow human nature has changed and that people are literally evolved to have lost their taste for for violence why consider this to be unlikely we have little boys still play fight the top two year old's continue to bite kick and yet we still take enormous pleasure in like harris violence such as murder mysteries greek tragedies shakespearean drama as videogames ice hockey and movies starring a certain ex governor of california and we still tend to harbor homicidal fantasies social psychologists have asked a number of samples

of people following question you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like while the results of these polls show that about fifteen percent of women and a third of men frequently think about killing people and more than sixty percent of women and three quarters of men least occasionally think about killing people they don't like and the rest of them are lying at more likely possibility is that human nature is extraordinarily complex and that comprises both inclinations toward violence and the inclinations that can attract them what abraham lincoln called the better angels of our nature and the historical circumstances have increasingly favored our peaceable inclinations are better angels what are the inclinations toward violence are our inner demons were they include rock calculating exploitation the use of violence to eliminate some obstacle to what you want the resulting in the rape wonder conquest and

b whacking of rivals dominance the verge of individuals to climb the pecking order to be alpha male or top dog and these similar among groups or ethnic racial national religious supremacy the thirst for revenge the moralistic violence that deems it right and proper two punishments someone resulting in the dead as rough justice and cruel punishments and perhaps most consequential our ideologies noted religious nationalism fascism not season and communism which can justify the vast old ways of violence because of a pernicious cost benefit calculus so you got a belief system that holds out the prospect of a utopia that is infinitely good for ever well how much violence could you trade in pursuit of this infinite god well any amount you want and you're still ahead of the

game you're still he means how are justified by the ads are also imagine that some of it learns about you were skied for a perfect world and they just don't buy and they say i'm sorry you can do it without me how or worse stand in the way of that how people are they love you do the math they are arbitrarily people and didn't deserve arbitrarily severe punishment which is one of the reasons that it is ideologies throughout history that often wracked up the most horrendous death tolls well what we have then to counteract these inner demons what are the better angels of our nature their self control the ability to anticipate the consequences of your actions and to inhibit but you're violent impulses there's empathy in the lead a few others pain there's the moral sense which is actually a family of intuitions some of which can actually increase violence such as the moralizing issue of tribalism authority and puritanism but some of which such as fairness

can minimize violence and then there's reason being cognitive faculties that allow us to engage and objective detached analysis well given this balance what has changed over time what historical developments have brought out our better angels the first possibility was that house got it right when he justified the leviathan a central government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence the state and i'd judicial system can eliminate the incentives for its weight of attack by punishing any aggressor thereby reducing the need for deterrence and vengeance you don't have to cultivate a reputation for toughness to deter your enemies of the state as it for you so the rents these self serving biases that make everyone think that they're on the side of the angels and that their enemies are internally treacherous are and i wonder why stopping cycles of revenge as each side figures that they're

still at school or leftists apple while the other side thinks that the balance has been either doubt it was a historical evidence that the leviathan has brought down violence well there would be two transitions that i began to talk with the pacified and civilizing effects of the group of states in fact you can watch this movie in the reverse when states fail and zones of anarchy opened up such as the american wild west where big cliche of the old cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is ninety miles away failed states collapsed empires and mafias and street gangs the deal in contraband and hence can't press a lawsuit or called nine one one to help resolve their disputes that have to use their own rough justice also another kind of evidence is the closest thing we have to an international law by attending the international peacekeepers who demonstrably though not always keep the peace the second classifying forces been called gentle commerce the

idea is that there is a zero sum game the conquerors game is the victims last whereas trade is a positive sunday one in which everyone wins there has over the centuries technology improves that allows the trade of goodnight goods and ideas over longer distances among larger groups of people and lower cost other people become more valuable life in bed it becomes cheaper to buy stuff and to steal and the united states and china for example don't have i would not say at any particular love for one another these days but i think it's unlikely that they will go to war they make too much of our staff wheeled in too much money some historical evidence is that the number of statistical analyses that show the countries would open economies in greater international trade get embroiled in fewer wars host fewer civil wars and host hugh in genocides thirteen pacified forces what peter singer the philosopher calls

the expanding circle but it's an idea that really goes back to charles darwin in the descent of man according to this theory evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy but by default we apply only to a narrow circle of friends and family but over history what can see the circle expanding from the family to the village to the plant to the tribe to the nation to other races to both sexes to children and eventually to other species but this begs the question of what expand the circle and the technologies that increased costs mcallen isn't that i mentioned earlier one candidate and appreciation of history of literature of mass media journalism opportunities for travel encourage people spend next encourage people to see the world from other people's eyes and we know from laboratory studies by social psychologists that if you get people to adopt the perspective of a some other person really were fictitious they become more sympathetic toward that person and more

sympathetic to the group that that person represents some historical evidence come from the fact that the seventeen the eighteenth century were sometimes called the era of the republic of letters because of the advancement of literacy and correspondence and book publishing and they at least temporarily preceded the humanitarian revolution the second half of the twentieth century which saudi long piece the new piece and the riots revolutions was the era of the telecom global village because of electronic mass media and it's been speculated that the twenty first century the rise of the internet and social media perhaps to dip too soon to tell will behind the color revolutions and the arab springs finally there's the escalator of reason the possibility that literacy education and public discourse has encouraged people to think more abstractly and more universally less parochial way let's try bully it will rise above their own party the vantage point that makes it harder to privilege your own interests over

others it replaces a morality based on tribalism authority and puritanism with the morality based on fairness and universal rules encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence and increasingly to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be one some historical evidence linking the remarkable finding that abstract reasoning abilities as measured by iq tests increased over the course of the twentieth century that iq has increased by about three iq points a decade were in the second half of the twentieth century in particular in the tests of abstract reasoning like analogies and similarities and other studies have shown that people in societies with higher levels of education and measured intelligence holding all else constant commit fewer violent crimes cooperate more in experimental games have more classically liberal attitude such as opposition to racism and sexism and are more receptive to

democracy the final question that all speculate on is why do so many forces push in the same direction out why has history moved both toward eliminating say human sacrifice and burning at the stake but also the spanking of children and also the reduction of deaths in war and also the elimination of debtor's prisons and foot binding unit is in and out fighting and everything seems to be pointing in the last violent correction our looks like some kind of conspiracy what's behind it all it was behind it all is that violence is inherently what the nearest call it social dilemma it's always tempting to an aggressive to be the first to grass and therefore get the benefits of exploitation but of course its rulers to protect him all parties are better off if everyone avoids violence to begin with it's better to be an aggressive than a victim but it's better asked for

everyone is no addresses so the human dilemma is how to get the other guy to refrain from violence at the same time as you do or history i'd like to suggest you experience in human ingenuity have gradually been chipping away at this problem just like we been chipping away at others gorgeous like pestilence and hunger and all of their historical forces that i have involved in one way or another increase the material emotional and cognitive incentives of all parties to avoid violence at the same time well regardless of its causes i think the historical decline of violence has profound implications for one thing it calls for a reorientation of our efforts toward violence reduction from a moralistic mindset to an incurable mindset that is instead of asking why is there war perhaps we should ask why is there peace instead of what we're doing wrong perhaps we should ask what we've been doing right because we have been doing something right and it gets rather important to figure out what it

is also the decline of violence calls for a reassessment of the majority of the centuries long process involving the evolution of family tried tradition and religion it forces an individual wasn't cosmopolitanism reason and science and everyone acknowledges that in some ways of interest payments given us longer healthier lives it's reduced ignorance and superstition its enriched our lives in many ways but many nostalgic and romantic critics question the price whether it's worth it to have a few extra years of life on average if the prices muggings and terrorism and holocausts world wars and i had nuclear weapons despite impressions the long term trend the halting incompleteness of violence at all i use is decreasing i think it calls for the rehabilitation of the concept of modernity and progress and it's a cause for gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible

that you very much you're listening to dr steven pinker author of the better angels of our nature why violence has declined bigger spoke of the lynda whole library on october twelfth two thousand weapon he now answers questions from the audience out what to turn a comment on some of the current icann sustained world and to see rates on our nation by nation violence yes this means a lot of money even as in rates of violence across the world i have a color coded map in that the book how where the nations of the world are shaded according to their homicide rates the most peaceful countries are those of western europe scandinavia france germany italy spain and so on were all the rage about one hundred thousand per year the most violent in our sub saharan african countries and some of the

drug lord infested countries of latin america colombia and jamaica and guinea i think is up there are i also have to write is not in league it's not covered in solid black but it's a great cost and among american states there are r two gradients i also have a color coded map of the united states with a state by state shady according to the murder rate and it's not a coincidence that new england is called new england it's a lot like old england that it has a very low rate of violence as do most of the northern states there's ingredient in violence in the united states the southern states have far higher rates of violence than the northern states there's also big black white difference african americans have a higher rate of violence than our european americans out these are independent trends that is northern blacks are less violent in southern blacks more than whites are less violent southern whites and this is even holding poverty constant the bee's both of

these differences remain so it's not just a consequence of poverty also by the way in the world map eileen authoritarian countries tend to have low rates of homicide partly it might be that they don't let anyone and no's around in their statistics so we have to take it without world health organization figures seriously but it's also that often tends to be the advanced democracies like western europe and the dictatorships that have lower rates of violence that's what we call dictatorships police states this law police and everyone's things that being watched and it tends to keep people i have intimidated by the government does hold rates of violent crime down it's awfully new and messy democracies in the middle often with inept governments corrupt police forces where the rates of violence are much higher in between and that relate to make it is certainly a democracy for example the there are many

reasons i think that the main one is the effectiveness of policing and government yet halfway decent government got a police force that is to corrupt that doesn't realize its own citizens that protects them if you don't have zones of anarchy where mafias and drug lords and diamond warlords flourished but they had the government exerts control within its territories that if i would identify one factor i think that would be the dna but a bigger worrier yes and the information allies world for lack of a better term we got a perception because of the news current covering material that is you know oh look at what's happening next or it really isn't they think that it may affect on the trends you know that the perception that there is a lot more violence and danger in the world and there is actually something we need to truly be concerned about housing assistance in to pull back still further from yes i think that there's a an increased awareness of violence which is both

knowledge of violence where and when it happens because we consent camera crews by helicopter getting caught the second part of the world that are really i was just up violence there was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it right now we know about it and indeed we care more about it and maybe a virtuous circle where the more we know the more we care more we cared more we sentence camera crews out there but more and more parts of the world that before were just so tribal people they kill each other that's what they do now we're more concerned with the genocides in wars that do take place which of course is an enormously positive development even if it skews our perception i was wondering if you could define violence in other ways that physical just as damaging as physical products yes i actually disagree that it's just as damaging as physical violence because of that is metaphorical violence because most

extreme form of the school violence namely murder it makes all the other kinds of violence himself that if you kill someone i think that's the worst thing you can do you know and i'm nothing else matters even if you don't tell them if you injure than if you rate that's much much worse than unkind remarks cyber bullying and so i think it's actually assign enormous positive sign that i actually get that question a lot well is there still a lot of metaphorical violence my responses if that's where we've come and where a hive people are mr harling pitching remarks i don't define income isn't perfectly equal that's a whole lot better than people being herded into gas chambers or i felt by swarms of arrows sounds very simple but as the world's climate have any relevance

at all yet the evening we don't know whether the un changes in climate and from almost certainly won't happen are also only get worse since now it's i think pretty certain urges can lead to a lot of human misery and waste where only to violence though is not automatically true and because most wars are not fought over contested vital resources like our water or arable land but they fought over their mission ideology perfect justice territorial ambitions in rectifying historic injustices and statistical studies that try to look for a correlation between environmental stress of time one and more time to are pretty mixed unlock them find no correlation to take some examples close to home during the great american dust bowl of the nineteen thirties which was perhaps a little taste of what's

become needed not a civil war when we did have a civil war it wasn't over crops or watering holes that was over something very different so i think that that while it i wouldn't know the possibility that quite stressful how lead to violence it's not an automatic thing would you comment on what's happening in mexico it seems like they're totally out of control or is that it appears to my plea there'll be some regions of mexico that are totally out of control border but down but the overall rate of violence in mexico is all over all gone down although other parts like a juarez to continue to be extremely violent i think what you have there is because of the drug trade we have the contraband which both brings in enormous amounts of money in a system where disputes cannot be resolved by lawsuits and that and the police and lawyers but i resolved by corleone is for the

sopranos and that threat drives rates of violence i through the roof is particularly when it becomes a self i feeding cycle where are the very wealthy drug lords then kill or corrupt the judges and police i trapping them in ever increasing amounts of violence that they wouldn't use the judicial system to begin with and then the efforts of the judicial system to bring them under control it undermined as the judges themselves are our un worker or pour out pride so that's the kind of vicious cycle but parts of mexico though by no means all of mexico fall into a better bakery or the thinker i was curious if you have had any research done on your own or trac out based on sex religion or secularization societies and decline and religiosity you have alluded to that but has there been actual hour is your chapter in your book that you're actually talking about what's in northern europe that has lost religiosity completely virtually and let's say where

the high rates of murder in norway so we have had a recently a very significant new individual act of terrorism if you wanna call about what we're really a moderate saw per capita i think at ten times more then the united states is or a correlation slash causation controversy and secures a show of today's world and learn about a question from a thoughtful a free thinker yes i don't know as a un i bet he did the correlation across countries of homicide rates and i'd agree religious belief you'd probably find that the least developed states that the countries with greater religious beliefs have high rates of violence and the more it is to countries have lower rates of violence i'm well i don't know of anyone who's done the proper statistical studies to show it is a causal relationship i think there is over the long term over the span of centuries there's something of a causal relationship because many of the forms of violence many the main forms of violence in

the middle ages of the early modern period were obviously religiously motivated the european wars of religion out which resulted in death rates that were proportionally similar to those of the world two world wars the crusades which resulted in genocides that were proportionally similar to the nazi holocaust these words as i read the witch hunts which killed at several hundred thousand women in europe as the extreme forms of religion i declined in religion itself became a winter version of its former self where people no longer believe that if you reject jesus you can spend eternity in healthcare for our do you a favor torturing and how to accept jesus because there are few hours now an attorney later for someone questions the doctor the salvation well i it's not a public health measure to make an example of him by roasting a life before he converts other people wait

for the firing definition so that kind of thinking has declined even among people who are atheists most of course most of the united states is heavily religious but i would bet that it even the most religious americans would not think that such a good idea to burn heretics at the stake hot water force people to convert and sore point so the reason one of the reasons it's a hard question to answer as the religion itself was a moving target i have that as the humanitarian crisis of the enlightenment have infiltrated society they've beaten down religion to a different and to be that used to be it's not a coincidence that parts of the world that still haven't unreconstructed i met noted religious namely large parts of the islamic world still do happen are barack practices latest buildings and amputations still are are less likely to have democracy still are more likely to have violence against women still are more likely to get involved in wars than the rest of the world so that's the these are very rough who'd correlations

that good social science analysis that controls all the variables and sophisticated statistics to pinpoint cause and effect has not been done as far as i know and thank you dr baker you've just heard dr steven pinker author of the better angels of our nature why violence has declined dr painter spoke at the lindo whole library in kansas city missouri on october twelfth two thousand eleven thanks to jerry cullen of the video works incorporated for providing audio of this event for a complete list of upcoming events at home and a whole library including their upcoming exhibit and lectures on tiny visit their website that you did you did you got linda hall that i'm kate mcintyre pierre presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas