Oct. 3, 2011
I have another confession. I am 85 years old and I have never experienced violence in my personal life. Zero. None.
Vicariously I have experienced a ton of violence in movies, on TV, and you can’t pick up a newspaper that is not chock-full of assaults, riots, wars, rapes, beheadings, murders, you name it.
The fact that my life has been so free of violence is not as unusual as you might think. True, I am a peaceable sort, don’t often frequent bars, don’t have a drug habit and am not given to aggressive encounters. Most muggings and murders happen in the early hours of the morning, like 2 or 3 am. In my youth I occasionally stayed up that late. Nowadays I rarely leave the house after dark except to walk our dog Frankie before bedtime. When we lived in New York back in the 1950s there was a murder right outside our apartment. We didn’t know about it until we read about it in the morning newspaper.
On the other hand I have not been a shrinking violet. I lived for more than a few years in poor, inner-city areas of New York and Pittsburgh. I have traveled in more than 30 foreign countries including many not known for their pacifism. Like Russia, Mexico, Germany, South Africa, Haiti, Turkey, Kenya and Cambodia.
I realize that some children in this country are violently disciplined. Most are not. I realize that some women are assaulted and raped. Most are not. I realize that many blacks, homosexuals and other minority members have been assaulted, beaten and killed. Most are not. I know from reading that the numbers of victims in all of these categories has gone down dramatically from what it was when I was a child, not to mention what it was in the hundreds of years past.
Some sports like football, hockey, and boxing are violent but controlled (most of the time). Many of us watch these sports but not that many actually play. Those that do rarely suffer permanent damage or death.
Few police officers ever fire a gun or wield a club, except in practice. The majority of men and women in our armed forces like my wife and me (in the Navy and Marines respectively during WW2) train with guns but never experience combat.
Statistics on violent crime in the U.S. have shown a consistent decline over past decades (huge declines over the past two centuries) and are today at or near all-time lows. So I was not surprised to read of a new book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: How Violence Has Decreased. Dr. Pinker, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, points out that violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we are living in the most peaceable era our species has ever known.
Pinker, along with historians like Azar Gat (see his book, War in Human Civilization) and anthropologist Carol A. Travis-Henikoff (Dinner with a Cannibal), claims that a common view of primitive people as “noble savages,” peaceful and environmentally correct (as in the recent blockbuster movie Avatar) is a myth. Archeologists study bones in ancient burial sites of hunting/gathering tribes. Anthropologists study tribes still living today in prehistoric lifestyles. Judging by the percentage of skulls and bones broken or pierced by arrows and blunt objects they calculate that about 15% of people in primitive societies die a violent death. With a similar rate of violent death in this country, 45 million of our youth would die of violence before they could graduate from high school or college.
When the Agricultural Age brought the first cities and civilizations violence was still common but not as widespread as in hunting/gathering days. Just as a farmer does not want his animals to kill each other, kings and lords took care that their slaves or serfs did not kill one another.
Agricultural kingdoms were very often at war with rival kingdoms. Pinker calculates that the rate of violent deaths in Agricultural Age societies, despite their constant wars, was reduced from 15% to around 3% a year. If we had violence at that rate each year, nine million of us would perish at the hands of a neighbor. (Last year around fifty thousand people in U.S. died of violence. Two-thirds were by suicide, one-third by murder.)
Pinker is correct. We live in a peaceable time.
What is it about our time that makes us more peaceful?
Here I go back to the big picture. The biggest changes came in the Western Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. True, in the early days of these happenings violence was still at Agricultural Age levels. Maybe worse. In the Thirty-Years War during the sixteenth century Reformation days more than third of the population in Northern Europe was wiped out in wars between Protestants and Catholics. In the days of Henry VIII in England people were tortured without mercy to get a confession. Then they were burned at the stake or maybe had their bodies ripped apart by galloping horses. Often these cruel and inhuman punishments were for crimes like heresy or poaching the lord’s deer.
This was in Europe. It was much the same—or worse—in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The cruel and inhuman violence was often followed by cannibalism.
Slowly though, slowly in terms of human history, progress began to be made—in the West. Three major factors led the way: science and technology, religious freedom, and free-market capitalism.
Science and technology supplied the energy and inventions that gave each individual in Western countries (and in recent years all countries of the world are catching on) the power of a hundred slaves each. This power has helped make all of us richer, healthier and longer-lived.
Freedom of religion, pioneered in this country, released individuals from the bondage of fundamentalist religions, supernatural and secular. When rulers could demand strict adherence to the dogmas of Paganism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Communism or Fascism, violence was the rule not the exception. See the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages in Europe, the Crusades, the almost constant tribal wars, revolutions and internal repressions in Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Americas. And in the 20th century—Nazism, Fascism, Communism, India/Pakistan, Iraq/Iran and 9/11.
The most important change of all was from zero-sum Agricultural Age memes to win-win Free-Market ones, also pioneered in this country. If you live in a zero-sum economic system, violence is inevitable. If there is only one pie, no matter how large or small, the only way to get a bigger piece is theft or war and both require violence. If you live in a free-market society you can trade what you make or provide with other makers and providers so both of you get richer. Theft or war may survive the changeover but eventually people realize (as they are slowly doing now) that all citizens can be winners.
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill
P.S. To bring you up to date, I thank the many readers who responded to my last blog with suggestions for titles for my new book. I haven’t made a final choice yet. At the moment the leading candidate is: FROM ANTIOCH TO COMMON STOCK: a Traveler’s Guide to Free-Market Liberal Democracy. In second place is: TWILIGHT OR DAWN? A Fresh Look at the Past, Present and Future of Free-Market Liberal Democracy. What do you think?