Pulitzer prize finalist Dr. Steven Pinker's address to Convocation
2012-05-15 15:04:08
The morning address at Mount Allison University's Spring Convocation on Monday, May 14 was delivered by Dr. Steven Pinker, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and experimental psychology professor at Harvard University. Pinker was presented with an honorary degree during the Convocation ceremony. The text of Pinker's address follows.
President Campbell, members of the community, families and graduands of the Class of 2012:
It’s a great honor to be addressing the graduates of Mount Allison University, and to share in the satisfaction you are all feeling over the four years of hard work you have devoted to the noble pursuit of knowledge and reason. President Campbell kindly reiterated many of my fancy-schmancy titles, and I want to begin by reminding you that these and many other accomplishments are within your reach.
One of my valued colleagues at Harvard is a young researcher named Nonie Lesaux, an expert on the teaching of reading, who has recently been promoted to Full Professor in the Graduate School of Education. Thirteen years ago Professor Lesaux was sitting where you are sitting today, waiting to receive her Bachelor’s Degree from Mount Allison University. Perhaps in a decade one or more of you will join us as a professor at Harvard University or a similar institution.
I recognize, though, that this may not be the aspiration of the majority of you. There are many reasons that people pursue a university degree: to become scholars themselves; to pursue careers in the professions or business; to master skills of writing, speaking, and leadership; to become more effective parents, workers, and citizens.
But I hope to persuade you today that the pursuit of knowledge and reason delivers a benefit that is ultimately greater than the advantages that it will bring to your careers and personal lives. There are many reasons why democracies put such a high value on higher learning: why you have devoted years to education before beginning your adult lives; and why the taxpayers, your parents, and your future selves are willing to pay for it all. Today I hope to explain one of the reasons. It has to do with one momentous development in our history as a species, a development that, I believe, multiplies the value to humanity of your having completed this educational quest.
I’ll illustrate the trend I have in mind with an example. In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, “the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.”
Today such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of the underappreciated trend in the human saga that I wish to bring to your attention: namely, that violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and we may be living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that in many ways we have been getting kinder and gentler. Consider some of these practices, which were unexceptionable for most of human history:
-Cruelty as entertainment: the public torture of animals, or more commonly, humans.
-Human sacrifice: cutting the beating heart out of a living person, or immuring him in the foundation of a building or monument, to indulge the superstition that misfortunes in life were caused by angry gods, and that by slaking their thirst for blood with a deliberate sacrifice of a few sacrificial victims, the gods will be less likely to target the rest.
-Slavery as a labor-saving device – a practice that for most of human history was legal everywhere on earth. The Bible had no problem with it; nor did Athenian democracy or the American Bill of Rights.
-Conquest as the mission statement of government: The idea that a nation had every right to expand its territory by conquering its neighbors whenever it could get away with it.
-War as a mechanism of dispute resolution between nations: or as the famous military theorist Carl von Clausewitz put it, merely the “continuation of policy by other means.”
-Genocide as a means of acquiring real estate: the mass murder of men, women, and children when you covet the land they are occupying.
-Torture and mutilation as routine punishment in the criminal justice system: cutting off a person’s hand, ear, nose, tongue, or eyes; flogging his flesh into mincemeat.
-The death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, such as spreading gossip, stealing a cabbage, engaging in homosexual activities, or criticizing the king, the government, or the church.
-Assassination as the mechanism of political succession: the common expectation that if you wanted to become the leader of a country, you kill the current one, familiar to many of you from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth.
-Rape as the spoils of war: the expectation that conquering soldiers would be paid not in career training or salary but in opportunities to force themselves on women in captured territories.
-Pogroms as an outlet for frustration: When the economy isn’t going well, kill the nearest Jews, or Armenians, or lynch the nearest African Americans.
-Homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—if someone makes a joke at your expense, or smiles at your girlfriend, or argues with you over a debt, plunge a knife into his back.
History shows that all these horrors were simply the way that life was lived in many times and places. But today they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
At one time these historical changes were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man’s rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, though, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, to license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and to conceal the crimes of our own societies. Many intellectuals and romantics subscribe to the doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions. But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backwards: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one.
At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our hunting and gathering ancestors who lived in a state of anarchy. Recently anthropologists and archeologists have devised ways of estimating rates of violence in pre-state societies, such as by counting the proportion of prehistoric skeletons that have axemarks on their bones or arrowheads embedded in them, or counting the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men.
These body counts show that the romantics who celebrate the noble savage have it backwards. It is true that individual raids and battles killed a tiny fraction of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the fraction of fighters is greater, the prisoners are fewer, and the casualty rates are higher. According to many anthropologists, these factors combine to yield rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times, even when you include the casualties of both world wars.
The Noble Savage tends to be a mascot of leftists and greens, but political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people’s conception of violence in early civilizations—namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of our moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city, occasionally sparing the attractive virgins so the soldiers could keep them as sex slaves. The Bible also prescribes death by torture as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one’s parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other contemporary tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.
Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous cruel practices that became obsolete with the advent of the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. These include slavery, dueling, judicial mutilation such as blinding, amputation, or branding; and sadistic forms of capital punishment that were designed to inflict as much pain for as long as possible, such as disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and drawing and quartering.
What about violence among ordinary citizens? Historical criminologists have assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the present. In every country, murder rates declined steeply, so that a contemporary European has 1/35th the chance of being murdered as his medieval ancestors.
Now let’s zoom down to the scale of decades. Once again, comprehensive data paint a shockingly happy picture: Many forms of global violence have fallen steadily since the middle of the 20th century. According to the Human Security Report from Simon Fraser University in Canada, the number of deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century also saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Indeed, war between major nations, like France and Germany or Japan and China, appears to be going the way of slavery and dueling – a development that would have been unimaginable for most of human history.
Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. Since the end of the Cold War every part of the world has seen a steep drop-off in wars of all kinds, not just wars between states but wars between a state and an insurgency or guerilla movement. And those conflicts that do occur are shorter and more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end.
Other forms of high-volume killing have also declined: According to one political scientist, between 1989 and today the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by ninety percent.
Finally, in the West, the uptick in violent crime that occurred from the 1960s to the 1980s underwent a substantial reversal in the 1990s that has persisted to this day. Rates of rape, domestic violence, child abuse, hate crimes, and gay-bashing are also dramatically down. Even when it comes to the treatment of animals, we see a decline of hunting, a rise in vegetarianism, increasingly stringent regulations on the treatment of livestock and laboratory animals, and a sharp decline in the proportion of motion pictures in which animals were harmed.
The decline of killing and cruelty poses many challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly it’s because of a cognitive illusion. My own field, cognitive science, has repeatedly shown that people estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. For example, people think that flying is more dangerous than driving, though statistics show it’s the other way around, because everyone can remember a gory plane crash on the evening news, but the steady dribble of deaths from car crashes is buried on page 29 of the local newspaper. By the same token, scenes of carnage in Africa or Asia are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying peacefully in their beds of old age.
The other challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents, and scales of social organization defies our standard tools of causal explanation. It can’t possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist’s sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough.
In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists have asked large numbers of people whether they have ever fantasized about killing someone they don’t like. At least 75 percent say that they have – and the rest are probably lying. And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Road Runner cartoons, the Three Stooges, video games, movies starring a certain ex-governor of California, and the National Hockey League.
What has changed, of course, is people’s willingness to act on these fantasies. The human brain has several motives that tempt us toward violence, such as exploitation, revenge, and the quest for dominance and power. It also has motives that inhibit us from violence, such as self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, and the cognitive processes that allow us to reason—what Abraham Lincoln called The Better Angels of Our Nature. Why has our behavior increasingly come under the control of our better angels? No one knows for sure, but here are four possibilities.
The first is that Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear instilled in those neighbors will tempt them to strike first in pre-emptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them pre-emptively, and so on. Hobbes argued that this perpetual feuding can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression. They in turn can defuse people’s anxieties about pre-emptive attack, and obviate the need to maintain a hair-trigger for retaliation. Many trends in violence can be explained by Hobbes’s logic. The decline of tribal warfare took place when territories came under the control of a government, and the decline in European homicide sprang from the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized kingdoms of early modernity. Even today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.
A second theory is called “Gentle Commerce,” and it invokes the idea of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two parties can each come out ahead if they co-operate, for example, by trading goods or dividing up labor. Over the course of history, as people acquire know-how that they can cheaply share with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to co-operate steadily increases. That is because it becomes cheaper to buy stuff than to plunder it, and other people become more valuable alive than dead.
Then there is the scenario sketched by the philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of allies, blood relatives, and cute little fuzzy animals. Over the millennia, though, people’s moral circles have expanded and have encompassed larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, and it may have been expanded by the consumption of journalism, history, memoir, and even fiction, which lure us into the habit of occupying other people’s minds and seeing the world from their point of view.
And this brings me to a fourth cause of the decline of violence, the escalator of reason: the possibility that the growth of free speech, scholarship, literacy, and education have encouraged people to think more abstractly and universally. This encourages us to rise above our parochial vantage point, which in turn makes it harder to privilege our own interests just because I’m me and someone else is not. It allows people to stand back and recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to increasingly see violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.
Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is certainly not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time.
But the phenomenon does force us to think hard and long about our understanding of violence. And that brings us back to the events of today – the recognition that you have completed the first steps in what we all hope will be a lifetime of curiosity, of learning, and of reason. You have spent four years seeing what it is like to try to understand who we are, where we come from, what makes us tick, how the world works.
And among those parts of the human condition that we can seek to understand is the problem of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And we are collectively involved in a process to try to figure out what, exactly, it is.
There is another reason to nurture the educated mind. One of the reasons we have such a dumbfounded reaction to the viciousness of our ancestors is that we know so much more about the world.
-We don’t kill virgins on an altar, because we know that it would not, in fact, propitiate an angry god and alleviate misfortune on earth.
-We don’t expel or murder Jews, because we know that they do not, in fact, conspire to control the world economy.
-We don’t enslave Africans because we know that they are not, in fact, on a lower rung of some evolutionary ladder with whites at the top.
-We don’t burn witches because we know there is no such thing as a witch.
-We don’t cut the intestines out of living prisoners because we know that there are more effective and humane ways of deterring crime.
-We don’t — or at least shouldn’t — follow leaders who say that they are on a mission from God or are certain of the purity of their moral crusade, because we know that every vicious ruthless dictator of every fallen empire in history has made exactly those self-deluded claims.
-And we don’t burn cats because we know that pain comes from the operation of our nervous systems, and that since other animals have brains similar to ours, they must feel pain as acutely as we do.
As Voltaire wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
And it is not just the mindset of science that makes us better people but the mindset of the arts and humanities. The emotional, gut-level impulses that lead us to abjure cruelty may be rooted in the cosmopolitan literacy that a higher education ought to foster. History, journalism, anthropology, memoir, and realistic fiction can make the inner lives of other people more palpable. They encourage us to put ourselves in their shoes, to imagine what it is like to be them, to appreciate that our own station in life is contingent and accidental — to give us the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.” All of these make it harder to dehumanize, torture, or kill another human being.
Overcoming superstition, ignorance, and parochialism may not be sufficient to reduce violence, but it surely is necessary. And in the hope that the lifelong pursuit of knowledge will make all of us better as people, as a society, and as a species, I congratulate you for your accomplishments in the world of higher learning, and wish you great happiness and fulfillment in your lives as educated men and women.