Are we a lot less violent than we used to be, or are we heading in that direction? Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, has a new book out about the history of human violence. It is called “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” In it, he suggests that we are indeed becoming less violent as a species. In a recent interview with Scientific American, he says;

“The statistics suggest that this may be the most peaceable time in our species’s existence.

Statistics aside, accounts of daily life in medieval and early modern Europe reveal a society soaked in blood and gore. Medieval knights—whom today we would call warlords—fought their numerous private wars with a single strategy: kill as many of the opposing knight’s peasants as possible. Religious instruction included prurient descriptions of how the saints of both sexes were tortured and mutilated in ingenious ways. Corpses broken on the wheel, hanging from gibbets, or rotting in iron cages where the sinner had been left to die of exposure and starvation were a common part of the landscape. For entertainment, one could nail a cat to a post and try to head-butt it to death, or watch a political prisoner get drawn and quartered, which is to say partly strangled, disemboweled, and castrated before being decapitated. So many people had their noses cut off in private disputes that medical textbooks had procedures that were alleged to grow them back.”

When asked about the neuroscience of violence and what it may show us in the future, Pinker says;

“Neuroscientists have long known that aggression in animals is not a unitary phenomenon driven by a single hormone or center. When they stimulate one part of the brain of a cat, it will lunge for the experimenter in a hissing, fangs-out rage; when they stimulate another, it will silently stalk a hallucinatory mouse. Still another circuit primes a male cat for a hostile confrontation with another male. Similar systems for rage, predatory seeking, and male-male aggression may be found in Homo sapiens, together with uniquely human, cognitively-driven  systems of aggression such as political and religious ideologies and moralistic punishment. Today, even the uniquely human systems can be investigated using functional neuroimaging. So neuroscience has given us the crucial starting point in understanding violence, namely that it is not a single thing. And it has helped us to discover biologically realistic taxonomies of the major motives for violence.”

Now, for my own thoughts… I hope Pinker is correct, but I wonder about the statistical measures. They could be skewed this way or that relatively quickly by a period of peace or a major war (like one involving nuclear weapons). In other words it is tricky to say we are less violent based on statistics alone. In a moral sense or a biological one a man is just as violent if he tries to kill 30 people and succeeds in killing one as if he tries and kills all 30, right?

Now, as Pinker and other point out, we actually do approach violent situations differently now. We try harder than ever to avoid killing innocents during wars, for example. We protect animals from abuse. These changes, given how short a time they have occurred in, are clearly social changes, not evolutionary. It is wonderful if we come to have more respect for human rights and find ways other than violence to resolve conflicts. But I suspect this could quickly change if we enter harder times (despite all the justifiable worries about the economy, we are at or within a generation of the best times in the history of the world in terms of income levels, medical care, and so on).

The positive changes we see are a matter of culture and context, and so could be undone. Fear alone can make peaceful people into dangerous and bigoted ones very quickly. Add to this the simple fact that with the same violent impulses and decisions we are now able to kill on a scale not possible even a hundred years ago, and we have reason to be concerned and reason to hope Pinker is right and that that changes will be in some way sustained.

We think in better ways, and are less violent at the moment according to statistics. Let’s hope we can keep that mindset, and even improve those statistical measures. But we are smart animals, and the first half of that description is easily lost.