"War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations."
I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).
Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb.
The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinkably destructive, so the superpowers were already deterred plenty from provoking a third world war. Also, since the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so disproportionate to any strategic goal, its threat is for all practical purposes a bluff, which is why so many non-nuclear powers have defied nuclear ones since 1945. Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
In the past, such small-power wars generally began once the (at least failsafe) support of a larger power was obtained. This always had the risk that the conflict might escalating to a first-power war (such as the first Punic War which was sparked by a tiny-power conflict.) Nowadays, the downside of such escalation is obviously even sharper.
The U.S. was never going to chose between Spain and Canada in advance of actual fighting (or Canada and France re similar issues), because the larger nuclear-fueled conflict with Russia made dumping allies overboard foolish; whoever began shooting would have lost. I would argue that the nuclear standoff trickles down.
> Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
Frankly, this looks to me like Pinker is reasoning from a provably false premise. Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.
The Congo War killed ~4 million people, including 300,000+ via direct killings. The Yugoslav Wars killed 100,000+. The Second Gulf War, 400,000 deaths, 100,000+ from direct killings. The Syrian Civil War is 400k and counting.
The rejoinder, I suppose, is that Canada and Spain is a first-world example and none of my are. I don't buy it. First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict. Second, because Pinker's example is a silly one; both because war over flatfish would have been a money-loser and because Canada and Spain are NATO signatories operating under the nuclear shield of other nations. Shooting war between NATO member states is regularly described as a nightmare scenario that would escalate nuclear tensions worldwide; Pinker is naively or dishonestly equating "owning no nukes" with "lacking nuclear defense".
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
As for nuclear weapons being "disproportionate to any strategic goal" and "for all practical purposes a bluff"... I hope to god he's right, but tactical nuclear weapon use is back on the table in Russia and strategists don't seem to agree with him.
I agree re. 'Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.' Vietnam, Cambodia, Syrian War (as you stated) IMO have been primarily proxy wars that resulted in a lot of killings while helping the powers avoid killings of their own people. Who can say they would have fought/killed at the same rate anyways if they weren't pushed/armed to do so but it seems to me that the casualty rate would have been lower in Vietnam, for example, if the US and USSR/China had not been involved. EDIT: syntax.
> First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict.
Great powers have interests in every war ever, but when Yugoslavia broke up, the USSR and in 1999 Russia were too weak to be considered equal adversaries.
In the early 90s the country fell apart and a tyrant started three wars ending in ethnic cleansing and genocide. When he started a fourth one in 1999, a short and by modern warfare limited campaign finally stopped him.
Sorry, the conflation of Yugoslavia with "proxy war" was in error, you're totally correct.
The link to great power conflict I had in mind there was the pressure cooker effect of Tito's dictatorship, which suppressed the major conflicts of the region without solving them. But it's a rather different entity than wars with direct meddling, and I can't judge the counterfactual: would a lack of Communist dictatorship have caused an earlier and more peaceful dissolution, or simply hastened what happened anyway?
It's a bad example and I shouldn't have used it; thank you.
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
This is my main reservation about the Better Angels thesis: we may be replacing regular threats of (relatively)limited scope with existential threats. It seems like we are building a complex ratchet mechanism made up of entangled components. Many of these threats don't actually disappear, but are held in abeyance by continual technological progress, resource substitution, or our own fears of upsetting the ratchet.
I think Pinkerian thought is strong when it argues that we are currently in a much better time than, say, the Plagues of Justinian, where war, disease, and famine affected a huge part of the western hemisphere. But I wonder if our present condition is more fragile than our large population and social/technological advancement would lead us to believe.
The bomb is only a real deterrent amongst the superpowers. The cost of maintaining and deploying a modern military force is a bigger influence. Devoting a large portion of GDP to a standing army is only possible for demagogues and those few nations wealthy enough for the waste to not be felt by the populace. And even for the demagogues, their impressive manpower isn't all that well equipped or trained because it costs too much.
War is perhaps illegal, except in self-defence, but certain people interpret "self-defence" to mean "defence of (national) interests", but also, belt-and-braces, they don't actually declare war any more and claim that what they're doing, killing and maiming people, bombing hospitals, television studios, water purification plants, isn't a "war". Also, Geneva Convention does not apply because the victims are "unlawful combatants" or some such bullshit.
It still applies. It applies to the weapons we use, how we treat prisoners, and how we treat the injured. Bad things happen, but please don't ever think your solider's are willfully bombing hospitals or killing civilians.
Yeah. It seems to me that it's not so much that "war is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it." Or at least try to. That's probably a good thing, but it seems useful to me to approach it with a more accurate perspective.
"It seems to me that it's not so much that war "is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it.""
In some lines of thought, that's the definition of illegal...
OK, but even by that definition, it's not the UN that has made it illegal. The UN is pretty toothless.
I mean, yes, they have peacekeeping forces. Those forces are not keeping the peace by force. In fact, there have been times when they have stood aside while one side violated the peace, because the UN force's rules of engagement didn't allow them to use force to prevent one side from starting the war back up.
It can be pretty toothless, but the mere fact that it exists as a platform for discussion, expression if views and the firmation if consensus is a huge improvement compared to nothing. I think the experience nations get of working together on issues is also pretty valuable.
AnimalMuppet isn't making a general criticism of the UN, he's arguing that the UN isn't responsible for war being illegal under dfmooreqqq's operational definition.
Yes, but being explicit and acknowledging the concentration of power is better than saying pithily "war is illegal", as if it were shoplifting or loitering.
>Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45.
Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.
The 1/7 GDP figure is misleading. It is absolutely true that everyone had an incentive back then to overstate the USSR's position: Communists and sympathizers for ego gratification, American liberals to use as an argument for government intervention in the economy and internal reform, and the American Right to ramp up militarism and domestic repression. That said, the revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.
GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter.
For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO.
Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.
>revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think there are two factors at play here:
1. The USSR's power projection was really good because it's really hard to convince people to fight for capitalism. For communism, on the other hand, you always have a million volunteers.
2. The USSR's military credibility when it comes to a land war in Europe was based on the fact that they were preparing for a near-home or home defense scenario. So, instead of investing in expensive fleets, aircraft carriers, and bombers, they invested in tanks, close-support aircraft, and anti-air stuff. The Atlantic would prevent the US from effectively responding to massive columns of tanks, since tanks are very heavy and hard to transport and supply. However, it also means that the USSR wouldn't be going anywhere with its massive war machine. It wouldn't have any ability to threaten anything outside of euroope. So the obvious result of any conventional war would have been the US conventionally bombing every Russian city to dust.
The Soviets lost to the incredibly poor country of Afghanistan. Vietnam's GDP was/is a small fraction of Russia's, yet America still lost and communism spread through the region. If war came to Western Europe again, I find it unlikely that America could've won.
the cist of tye war to Russia was also ruinous and maintaining that level of conventional forces would have been a real priblem. Bear in mind they got a lot of material support from the Allies during the war and continuing without that would have been very painful.
One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.
"The Internationalists" makes the case that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact to outlaw war was what started the paradigm shift against war [1]. (Of course the thesis is controversial, as you say.) You might enjoy the book; here's an Op-Ed the authors wrote in summary [2], and a podcast interview with the authors [3].
> From 1816 until the Kellogg-Briand Pact was first signed in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one territorial conquest every 10 months. Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year... The average amount of territory seized between 1816 and 1928 was 114,088 square miles per year...
> Since World War II, conquest has almost come to a full stop. The average number of conquests per year fell drastically — to 0.26 per year, or one every four years. The average size of the territory taken declined to a mere 5,772 square miles per year. And the likelihood that any individual state would suffer a conquest in an average year plummeted — from 1.33 percent to 0.17 percent, or once or twice a millennium.
Neal Conan covered this in an episode of Truth, Politics and Power [1]. Can't say I completely agree with everything discussed but it's definitely a good listen. Both authors are on the episode and, as usual, Neal does a great job of giving them plenty of time to discuss their book and get their points across.
The Dresden firebombing is very well known outside of Germany. And if you've seen the 'before' and 'after' pictures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden you won't be surprised that people consider them to be on the same scale.
Bombing of Dresden is well known, of course, but it doesn't compare to a single bomb that can level cities when it comes to deterring your enemy. I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden, but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way (like Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo), so I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.
Robert McNamara points out that the firebombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 civilians. In "The Fog of War" he also says that if the Allies had lost, he and Curtis "Bombs Away!" LeMay would have been treated as War Criminals, because they were.
> No, there aren't. That's exactly why Dresden stands out.
I don't think it should be treated as a "most destroyed city" contest, but you should really research the scale of destruction in the cities I've mentioned. [1] looks quite comparable to [2], [3] looks arguably worse.
Those cities are larger. But the reason Dresden is used as an example in these conversations is not because such a huge number of people died (< 50K iirc) but because of the whole town very little was left standing. Those other cities are much larger, and even if in total more was destroyed also much more was left standing. Dresden was pretty much gone.
From [1]: "In total there were 222,000 apartments in the city. The bombing affected more than 80 percent of them with 75,000 of them being totally destroyed, 11,000 severely damaged, 7,000 damaged, and 81,000 slightly damaged."
From [2]: "By January 1945, between 85% and 90% of the buildings had been completely destroyed; this includes up to 10% as a result of the September 1939 campaign and following combat, up to 15% during the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 25% during the Uprising, and 40% due to systematic German demolition of city after the uprising"
It's not me underestimating the scale of destruction of Dresden, but rather you underestimating the scale of destruction in other cities.
It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids.
> It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids.
No. Dresden was bombed on 15 February 1945 [0]. The British continued night raids until the end of the war, peaking in March, and with the last raid on Berlin on the night of 21/22 April (76 Mosquitos) and the final raid on the night of 25/26 April [1]
Have you any source for that? It certainly raised questions but the war was winding down and destroying things the allies would need wasn’t in their interest.
Bigger raids happened after Dresden as well and Harris gave his opinion: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” Luckily he alone didn’t make describe I guess.
""War is illegal. This idea seems obvious."
Well, was has always been a privilege for countries. It is absurd that some German generals were executed after WW2 for "fighting an aggressive" war (not talking about war crimes).
Obviously the WW3 will make look WW2 like a piece of cake.
"Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation." 1983
I think the fact that liberal democracies don't go to war was the main reason - at least amongst western democracies. And even among non liberal democracies (eg China and Russia) as long as there is enough wealth and quality of lifestyle at risk amongst the ruling elite, there's not going to be much appetite for war.
Another factor making war less likely is the mass media. Remember how the Vietnam War was "the first television war"? Actually seeing what happens in war turns peoples' stomachs, and the propaganda of war's "glories" is revealed for what it is.
Which is why the Afghan and Iraq wars never made it to TV in the same way. Journalism was strangled in scope to conform to commanders' wants; else, no access.
If you consider war as (among other things) "a contest" (albeit a very grim one), do any of you think there'd ever be any traction in settling disputes via something more sportsmanlike and without such fatality and waste of human life on both sides? I am reminded of the pistol duels of ages ago (although those were often fatal). Something that could test the "will and skill" of opponents who agree to settle it in such a fashion...
I'm also reminded of the flavor of the Olympic Games during the Cold War as almost a "proxy war" between the Soviets and the U.S.
No, because a symbolic contest is not final in the way that the physical imposition of force is: a country who loses a symbolic contest has limited incentive to abide by the symbolic outcome if they believe they can nevertheless impose their will on the other country by force. Wars end when contestants lose the will or the ability to resist the will of the opponent.
There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.
Perhaps when it comes to sovereign states, but with individuals you have things like tort law, instead of simply killing the person you have a dispute with. Why couldn't there be something like that on the international level?
What incentivises individuals to obey the decisions of courts? In the end, again, it's force, as monopolized by the state. If you don't abide by the court's decision, the state will take measures against you: it will impose fines, garnish wages, take away various privileges, and ultimately imprison you. If there were no such unpleasant and inevitable consequences, many people would simply ignore a tort judgment against them.
There are examples of this principle[1], where each side would send a representative or representatives to fight on their behalf. Perhaps the most well known example of this is (at least in my cultural context) is David and Goliath in the Old Testament
This is similar to what you've said, but I'd say the issue is more that it becomes more advantageous to use them if the same people who would normally levy sanctions against you have all disarmed. Currently there's little risk of North Korea actually using nuclear weapons. If they could do so without nuclear retaliation, it becomes a much more likely scenario. Even if banning nuclear weapons makes it much more difficult to obtain them, the consequences of someone obtaining them become much worse.
> Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no?
Never thought about that. It's hard to tell, Everyone was in some sort of cold war with Germany before the two world wars. Nobody wanted to fight and this is what led Germany to conquer very quickly a number of countries.
How much of this is UN and how much is the new world structure and technology meaning any conflict can diverge into WW2 and nobody wants to end up being Germany again ?
I see this as the basis for cold wars and other international competitions, conflicts are converted into other outlets.
On top of that, I would argue that war was able to be made illegal because the major world powers found war among themselves to be incredibly ineffective. Many years, massive amounts of money, and hundreds of millions of working/reproducing aged citizens died for almost no gain by most countries. It makes a lot more sense to work things out through international policies and economics than by bombs and guns. All that being said, Russia still invades Crimea and Georgia, maybe because it's just easier and faster with absolute overwhelming force.
The US and Russia avoided conflict with each other before and after the atom bomb, and also before and after the UN made it illegal. I'm not sure either were essential or even effective deterrents.
In fairness, the US did come into conflict with Russia in a sense, by supporting the White Army in the civil war.
But setting that aside, when would they have come into conflict? Prior to WWI, the US did its best to stay out of international affairs, and Russia wasn't trying to export a political philosophy. In the gap between the wars, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with internal concerns.
It's very hard to compare the potential for conflict post-1945 between the two powers with any period of time before that. Russia and the US simply weren't all that relevant to each other (Alaska aside).
I wish the "War is illegal" thing would have more effect on stuff like Turkey's recent attacks on Arfin. Not much seems to happen on the legal front there.
We also had the horror of chemical weapons in WWI. It was becoming more and more clear that there were things men could do that men should never do, even in war.
Otherwise you could just crop-dust your downwind neighbors and be moved in before anyone could even report an attack.
I still don't understand why we're allowed to stockpile nerve gas given the past 100 years of warfare and treaties.
Actualy the reason the Germans didnt use nerve gas in WW2 was because they mistakenly assumed Britain and Russia also already had them. Hitler was otherwise pretty keen on them.
That's a popular theory, but not supported by the testimony of those involved at the time. For example Hitler ordered that tabun production be continued as the highest priority even though the precursor chemicals were in high demand and very short supply.
And any direct war that happened after 1945, had one belligerent that did not possess nuclear weapons, who turned out to be loser. That's the reason victor decided to wage war against him, citing some puny reason for the aggression.
Do you really think the Americans "won" Iraq or Afghanistan? 15+ years of war, many trillions of dollars spent, nearly a million civilian casualties in Iraq, and what is there to show for it?
I would argue that it’s just USA centric view of impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the damages where on par with “traditional” fire bombing.
So their role in ending the war is hugely overestimated for propaganda reasons.
I think the jist is that this was still successful because if the UN didn't exist we may have already had 7 additional multination wars (that is if the first 2 didn't kill everyone). Of course we don't know for sure if that would have happened.
The data shows a downward trend in interstate conflicts, colonial conflicts, and per capita battle deaths since the 40's. Civil conflicts peaked in the early 90's, but nukes aren't a factor in those.
There is other research[0] (also recently posted to HN, though it got a lot less traction than Gates and Pinker), that claims this trend may very likely not be there. It's very hard to prove.
Don't forget that the US has had a hand in very many of those wars, and have been responsible for massive amounts of deaths in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
The fact that a law is broken is not a counterexample of the law existing. War was once the default, and lauded. Now it is the exception, and is decried and worked against.
When a war happens we ask ourselves why, and the international community works to try to prevent it the next time. That would be truly alien to a world leader even a couple centuries ago.
Including by the countries supposed to enforce the rule (UN security council: Russia who annexed Crimea, China building illegal islands in the Pacific, US who started wars based on lies for oil..)
You could easily argue that most of the conflict the US is currently involved in - and there are many! with boots on the ground or otherwise[0] - have some motive involving petrodollar or other resources.
Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
You're saying it was about oil primarily. Yet the US didn't take Iraq's oil. The US didn't even secure an outsized share of contracts related to Iraq's oil. The US vaporized a trillion dollars, along with suffering tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, trying to stop the Iraqi civil war in which Iraqis killed hundreds of thousands of each other.
Simultaneously over that decade the US technologically unlocks its massive shale oil resources, making Middle Eastern oil almost entirely moot strategically. So much so, that the US is now merely about 10% of Saudi oil demand.
And the US got what out of all of that Iraq mess when it comes to oil? The US stuck its military where it shouldn't have been, and it did so for geo-political reasons, not economic reasons. The US was a massive loser economically from that effort to try to weaken Russia, it was an economic disaster. The net 'benefit' over two decades will be perhaps close to a negative two trillion dollars all-in.
> Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
> You're saying it was about oil primarily.
Those aren't conflicting explanations; the US is concerned about the friendliness of governments in the region largely because it cares about how they manage oil supplies (both for price and geostrategic reasons like making sure we have access and our enemies do not in a major crisis.)
Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today, and will overwhelmingly be tomorrow. Please explain to me how it was in the US interest to topple Saddam, lose a couple trillion dollars in national treasure, all so China could increase its power and influence by securing critical oil supplies and displace the US influence in the Middle East.
And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
> Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today
No, it's not, because the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy.
If we were in a major war with China now and that was true, it would suggest that the policy had been unsuccessful in achieving a key goal, but even then wouldn't refute that that had been the policy goal.
> And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
Perhaps (though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use) but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
> the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy
Of course it's about who buys (ie who can supply their economy with the energy it needs). The entire political value of oil is that it's critical to most economies. You keep saying that it's about controlling the oil, the point of that control is to use it for self-benefit. If the US were doing what you're claiming, it would be denying oil to China. You say that there is value in being able to deny oil supply to enemies - and then you pretend the US wouldn't have an interest in denying oil supply to China to slow its economic ascension (it obviously would benefit massively if it could partially suffocate China's growth via oil). These are contradictions in your theory, as China swims in Middle Eastern oil supply.
> though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use
Russian and Iranian oil production is drastically beyond their peacetime economic consumption. I can't imagine where you're trying to go with that.
> but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
You're refuting yourself there. Then why didn't the US deny Chinese access to Iraqi oil? China almost immediately began benefiting immensely from Iraq's oil as production ramped up after the worst of the shutdown. Saudi's primary customer is now China and that is going to get a lot more dramatic in the coming decade. Those two points collapse what you're claiming.
If the US wanted to press an advantage, it would destroy Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil supplies (use an ISIS-like mess), which would hammer China's economy by removing 1/4 to 1/3 of their oil supply. The US is now one of the few major nations that can fully support itself on energy. Instead, the US is actively protecting both Saudi and Iraq, while the largest US rival - China - benefits the most from that protection.
I agree that people probably overestimate the role of oil, but you have to keep in mind that the current world paradigm is not the world paradigm at the time of the Iraq war, and that there are very personal issues involving the Bush dynasty and its connections with the intelligence-executive infrastructure at play as well.
The US shale oil issue has also really flipped the script as well; it's something I don't think anyone was predicting at the time. The rapidity of solar and wind's rise is another surprising thing.
I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that. I just mean that, yes, China is dominant now, and there's a certain global socioeconomic-political dynamic. But at the time leading up to the Iraq war, the world was a very different place in terms of global politics and energy economics.
It is probably more fruitful to argue over whether or not the US government anticipated these geopolitical changes well enough. But to point to things that happened later as a rationale for what transpired before seems backward to me.
In some ways, the transition we've witnessed is from a oil-cold-war dynamic involving the US and Russia/USSR to a vacuum, made by renewable energy and Asian and European economic growth. As an American, I feel like we should sidestep issues about Euro-Asian supremacy and American-Russian decline, and take a hard look at what assumptions we often make, and what it increasingly looks like is that many of the old political blocs are starting to seem irrelevant to a prosperous future. I think America has a dominant role it can play, and will, if it just starts being forward-looking instead of backward-looking.
It didn't vaporize any money whatsoever, in fact, Halliburton (and many of the hundreds of military strategy companies in the MIC) did quite well with their new economy.
That's a false context setup. Show me Halliburton's chart where it collapsed down to $16 in 2008 after the commodity bubble burst.
All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26.
Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production.
If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.
That graph doesn't show an obvious uptick after the big red "WAR" dot. It's growing fast but seemingly was before just as much. What's it supposed to prove?
Nothing has had as large an impact on the maintenance of relative peace, at least between large/nuclear nations, as the atomic bomb. It's the MAD principle - mutually assured destruction. I think our discovery of nukes is actually pretty cool.
No question about it. Nukes accomplish something that no other deterrent can: they make world leaders personally afraid to go to war with each other.
Those who advocate nuclear disarmament are basically advocating a return to increasingly-bloody world wars every few years.
Of course, it's also true that the leaders who are afraid to confront each other directly are more likely to resort to proxy wars that cause massive pain and suffering in their own right. But that's a different problem that will have to be solved by different means.
I've read a lot of the discussions regarding Pinker's work in both books (but particularly his position in Better Angels), and I've always found his position to be slightly disconcerting.
Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time.
Violence is not a first order phenomenon at a social scale - it's presence is predicated upon the existence of other key criteria, largely the existence of conflict within or between societies.
Better Angels indicates that violence has gone down, but does not sufficiently set out the basis to indicate that conflict is being better managed over time. If anything, it indicates that conflicts are being 'won' as the winners are increasingly able to ignore the plight of the losers.
On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. In short, the courts are simply too expensive for normal people to avail themselves of, outside specialty practices like family or traffic issues. The result being that the majority of people do not actually have the ability to enforce their legal rights. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it.
We can pretend things are getting better but absent thinking about what 'better' means maybe the lid on the boiling pot is just getting heavier faster than the heat is being turned up.
You acknowledged that he made a specific argument about violence, which is a fairly straightforward and measurable metric. He didn’t claim that “conflict is being better managed” or that “things are getting better,” which are extremely subjective and hard to quantify.
Your point about the legal system, while valid, seems irrelevant to his argument. And you didn’t provide any argument that the situation has gotten worse than before. Was there a time when “normal people” had better access to justice and ability to enforce their rights?
1) The issue is that violence is a poor metric for progress. Pinker has made it clear that the description of declining violence is done in order to describe the improvement of the human plight, as most succinctly crystallized in the title of his first work on the point, and the overarching research thesis of his second. The structure of his first argument also points to this: violence has decreased, and all of the reasons have to do with humanity getting better, smarter and more empathetic. Here I suggest that in order to make that claim, broadly, we need to understand what violence is, and why its reduction may actually be a symptom of things getting worse for people. I am not the only one to make this distinction. Many groups advocating for historical 'have-nots' make the same counterpoint in reaction to Pinker's work.
2) With regards to the legal system, the issue is tremendously worse than it used to be. There was a time when "normal people" had better access to justice - the fact that you even need to ask this question should cause readers to pause and reflect upon what that means for the system.
The legal system, like measures of international violence, have social purposes - this is where Pinker's arguments fall flat to me. Think of them as pressure release valves. If the negative causal force (i.e. Conflict) causing those systems to need to act aren't actually being reduced, yet the system is systemically reacting less and less to the stimuli it is receiving, it is akin to a server reporting that it is A+ Okay and only under 25% load, but ignoring that it is discarding 99% of requests to it. No sane engineer would think things are getting better if the report drops to 24%, given the full context.
Costs, start there. In Rome, you'd have a better chance to seek justice if poor (if a citizen, and most people weren't.) But you'd have been better off decades ago as what counts as "small claims" has been totally trashed by inflation.
The most readily available state historical summary of small claims limits I could find is from CT, where the 1981 limit was $1,000 (approx. $2,623 in 2017 dollars) and is now $5,000.
> In Rome, you'd have a better chance to seek justice if poor (if a citizen, and most people weren't.)
Maybe I misunderstand what you are trying to say, but isn't that's equivalent to "before women's suffrage, if you were a man..." or "before the civil rights movement, if you were white..."?
I find it a bit hard to see how that is an argument suggesting that things used to be better?
EDIT: Wait, was that your whole point? That a woman or an ethnic minority seeking justice was much worse of a few generations ago?
This seems so open ended so as to be fruitless - We aren't going to peruse 300 page UNDP or 50 page CBA methodological reports to define the issue, then jump into the data sets themselves on this forum. But they exist, and they're easy to search for if you want to satisfy yourself.
This just isn't the place, nor is that the point of the assertion.
If you have a particular observation or set of data which contradicts what I'm saying maybe I can be more helpful.
Are you serious? If you're making the assertion here, it's on you to support it. Don't try to put the burden on others to disprove something you've shown zero evidence for, that's ridiculous.
Entirely. The burden is placed upon the objector to have even a passing argument against the initially held position, otherwise you can raise infinite substance-less objections against an otherwise strong point and 'win'. This tactic is used in court and in point-based debate systems to game the system (in the first to drive up expenses, and in the second to score uncontested points).
The bar doesn't need to be high, but at least something needs to be offered as a counterpoint beyond someone telling an expert in their own field that they don't believe them. It helps to establish that the counterargument is made in good faith and requires effort on the part of the objector, indicating that they have some skin in the game.
That's not how debate works. The initial burden of proof is on the person making the assertion, you're just shoving off your responsibility onto others.
You complain about substance-less objections, but so far you've just made a substance-less assertion. It's hypocritical.
I'm not going to get into a tit-for-tat with ABCLAW, but for the edification of readers who might otherwise be inclined to believe the assertion in the sibling comment, it is NOT on the objector to provide evidence. The moving party bears the burden of proof.
Sometimes the initial burden of proof is merely prima facie evidence, after which the burden shifts. For example, in some states, a defendant in a murder case need only make a prima facie case that the killing was done in self-defense, after which the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn't self-defense. But even in that case, the initial moving party bears the initial burden of proof.
1) It isn't hypocritical to ask someone to articulate why they don't agree with an assertion.
2) No, that's NOT how the burden of proof works. The initial presumption is that the moving party is speaking truthfully, and objections are raised afterwards. If the objection has enough proof, then the initial party is under the burden to refute the defense. This is literally how our court systems work in civil cases.
The alternate assumption, that every element of every statement needs to be laid out for any statement to be found to be valuable means that every post here would start with a discussion of epistemology.
Edit: torstenvl's post is incorrect - in the initial stages of dispute resolution, in summary judgment and the phases where the claims are evaluated for importance (whether the originating document should be struck, etc.), the claims as drafted in a statement of claim are assumed to be true. This is why default judgment is accepted - because the pleas are accepted truthful. Pleas are also evaluated as if they are true in summary judgment and a number of other pre-trial levels. Once a defense is filed and objection is noted does the burden switch and the evidentiary examination begins. But that requires a defense, and a defense will be struck if it says nothing.
Fortunately, this procedure lines up fairly well with Bayesian inference and the principle of charity.
In any event, this meta discussion seems to have generated ill will and little understanding, so I'll let it rest where it lies.
There is a Latin proverb, "Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur". Translated, this is "What is freely asserted is freely dismissed"; Hitchen paraphrased it as "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence".
Pinker does not argue that access to justice is increasing in Better Angels. He elaborates on the point of Rule of Law, which is related in concept but distinct.
There's a few weaknesses in his statements re: the Rule of Law, but that's outside of the scope of my critique.
You have yet to provide even a hint of a demonstration of how the have-nots have it worse than before. It should be pretty simple, just one example of backward progress that you think is more relevant than reduction of violence.
Your second paragraph is pure logical fallacy and fully uncompelling.
Yugoslavia under Tito is a great example of a cauldron of economic and sectarian violence being temporarily held in check by a violent warlord.
Given none of those issues actually got solved during his time, the complete disintegration of his country which followed his death is a great example of actual conflict not being accurately tracked by violence figures.
Feel free to check out the development figures for the bloc countries and read up on the history. Should be instructive.
>Your second paragraph is pure logical fallacy and fully uncompelling.
Well, I haven't seen your argument demonstrating that that's the case, but from the tone of this reply, I'll have to stop responding to your points as I don't think there's very much effort towards understanding and discussion.
I'm sorry, but your comment about Yugoslavia is extremely simplistic, if not outright wrong. While ethnic tensions certainly played a large role, the causes for the war were numerous, and also include outside influences (end of Cold War, geopolitical situation, etc.). BTW, Tito was dead for 11 years before the war started, and while he certainly was a dictator, albeit somewhat more lenient than other communist dictators, describing him as a "violent warlord" is a mischaracterization.
I don't understand the objection; if resolving ethnic tensions was actively impeded by Tito's dictatorship, then the argument that violence was suppressed rather than resolved is untouched.
The characterization of Tito himself isn't important (call him a benevolent strongman if you prefer - I don't have a horse in the race), other than to examine the role of a system which suppressed violence rather than resolved conflict.
"The issue is that violence is a poor metric for progress." Just to echo the commenter, I don't think Pinker is stating that humans are progressing in general - he is just stating that violence is decreasing. I also agree this is a measurable metric, that Pinker does well to argue for.
If he claims things "are getting better", I think he says that "violence is decreasing", where "violence" is a measure of worseness.
If we want to talk about progress, though, we would have to define what progress really means. Will Durant (from "The Lessons of History") says progress is more like the increasing ability of mankind to control his environment. If so, I would think there is some evidence for that.
In terms of social injustice, Will Durant also makes an argument that there will always be this. Power is always concentrated to the few (that's just how it works in order to have organization), and those not in power will always have some level of injustice. The amount of people in power and their motives can change depending on the era/civilization/society.
> He didn’t claim that “conflict is being better managed” or that “things are getting better,”
Hang on, my reading of Pinker is that he claims exactly that. Certainly Gates thinks so: this post on Enlightenment Now is about "how and why the world is getting better"!
If I disagree with OP, it's only because Pinker directly addresses the growth of the legal system in Better Angels with his discussion of Leviathan. I certainly don't think it's irrelevant to Pinker's argument, since he explicitly lauds Hobbes and the rise of state power as a major factor in the decline of violence.
As for better access to justice, that's a vastly harder question, and largely one of definition. But yes, I'd be inclined to argue that the evolution of social structures has frequently traded off declining violence against rising injustice.
I am legitimately interested in understanding the arguments that support a view of rising injustice. My understanding is that, historically, justice has been pretty abysmal, and as bad as it may be right now, I am not aware of when and how it was any better. It’s certainly plausible but in the arguments here it does seem like “things are bad now” is being conflated with “things were better before.”
If you imprison people (violent or non-violent or even innocent) you may get less measurable violence. But perhaps only if you exclude imprisonment from your definitions of violence.
That's one of the things ABCLAW is hinting at I think.
I don't think it is the case, but it's worth considering.
> All in all, 15 percent of African-American men in the United States have been to prison (compared to about 6 percent of all adult men). But those figures reflect all men alive, including older men lucky enough to have escaped the great incarceration drive. For younger cohorts the risks are far higher. For boys born in 2001, the lifetime probability of incarceration is estimated to be 32 percent for young black men, 17 percent for Latinos, and 6 percent for whites.
Pinker explicitly removes these from his analysis, stating that including them is confusing and only serves to allow people to attach 'violence' to things they dislike, and that physical violence is a large enough topic for a book.
He may be right logistically regarding book writing, but he does not account for the effect of his narrowed scope in his conclusions, nor does he account for the extraction of morality in his definition with the attempt of his project in lauding the progress of humans as good.
Ummm, "confusing"? I'd say more like "inconvenient" for his thesis. I mean, how is having my neighbor beat the crap out of me, and hold me hostage, any more violent than some cop doing the same?
All that is true, but its important to define the comparison. Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence. The fact that our current system is imperfect does not mean it isn't better than it was.
That being said, I find Nassim Taleb's criticism of Pinker's ideas much more relevant: That you can't know what kind of distribution you're in until it's over. Violence may simply be becoming more fat tailed. The common case is low-violence, but with low probability periods of hyper-violence (e.g. nuclear war). There are decent a priori reasons to think this may be the case, and it's not something Pinker can effectively rule out.
>The fact that our current system is imperfect does not mean it isn't better than it was.
Sure, but that's my point. Pinker makes an argument for "it is better" without actually delving into confounding measures of "better".
>Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence.
First: If you were systemically dispossessed, you might take chaos over certainty of a negative outcome.
But before we get there, why compare it to 'perpetual' violence? I don't see a basis for that in historical data or arising out of first principles.
Third, lack of access to conflict resolution was a micro example on the citizen to citizen level; it isn't the only potential cause for a reduction in violence. If we look at the citizen to state level, the increasing (accelerating, even!) capability, scope and organization of the state to stamp out dissent seems like a great confounder. Would we argue that a reduction in violence directly caused by the state's mounting ability to cause death or incarceration against dissenters is a good thing and that as violence decreases due to fear increasing that things are 'better'? The same argument applied to interstate conflict very quickly circles back to how catastrophic nuclear and conventional weaponry has become, which is what Taleb's argument is based upon.
> Why compare it to 'perpetual' violence? I don't see a basis for that in historical data or arising out of first principles.
Most of human history has been a state of relatively perpetual violent conflict. Compared to that, modern times are certainly more 'peaceful'. As you rightly point out, that peace may come through state domination, which we may qualitatively assess as good or bad (or perhaps more appropriately, 'worth it' or 'not worth it'). But in general, I think justice is dispensed more fairly than it ever has been at any time in history. People are more fairly represented by their governments. There's less violence, and generally speaking less suffering. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that feudal pre-democratic societies offered better lives to their citizens than modern first world democracies. I certainly wouldn't trade places with them.
>Most of human history has been a state of relatively perpetual violent conflict.
No it hasn't. Even the worst figured in Pinker's own cherry picked data show that's the case.
Next, even if we jump fully onto the Hobbesian boat, conflict resolution and alignment is literally the raison d'etre of the state.
Finally, we can compare judicial effectiveness (albeit somewhat crudely) across societies (and within differential groups/industries )and the delta between them doesn't lead us from 'everlasting peace' to 'perpetual violence' either.
I'm not sure what point you're making. Calling something 'perpetual violence' is fairly relative, I suppose. So we could quibble about that. But the point that society is substantially less violent than it was seems pretty clearly true.
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make about judicial effectiveness either.
Forgive me for needling here, but i'd like to contest
> Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence
This is only true if being imprisoned for many years is always better than being physically attacked. Obviously there are edge cases since certain types of violence are worse then other types of imprisonment but I bring this up only to say: don't get caught up in what is easy to view instantaneously. Imprisonment, especially in america, can sometimes be far more violent than the crime a person did to get there.
Also, I realize that this is adjacent to the point you're trying to make but it is a shade of a sentiment i see expressed often.
True but I think it's pretty clear that that's not what's going on in most of the world. To be explicit, that does happen. And it happens much more than it should. But it happens quite a bit less than it used to, and that's the important point.
> On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it.
This is a personal frustration of mine, and it happens in nearly every field. "Loudly talk about how terrible problem X is" and then go back to work everyday making X worse.
Software Developers decry the immense complexity of software, and then walk into work and load up five package managers on top of one another and npm install left-pad or whatever. Urbanists / Urban Planners decry the cost of housing and lack of transit, then go to work everyday and rapidly increase the cost of housing and eliminate transportation access. Education that used to cost $4k/yr now costs $40k/yr. Healthcare costs are rising exponentially and life expectancy is dropping. People complain about corrupt politicians doing bad things, and then go and vote for the corrupt person with the party affiliation of their choice.
"Things may be getting better" in the most general sense or at the most base levels. I don't dispute that. But 100% solved (or mostly solved) problems are becoming rapidly unsolved at a scary rate, and it's affecting a lot of regular people in bad ways.
I share your frustration. Sometimes I feel like one of the few people who tries to act consistently. Most people are defecting in a massive prisoner's dilemma despite complaining about how defecting is bad!
The suggestion that these apparently strongly held beliefs are actually about signaling doesn't seem to entirely square with my experience. Talk is cheap. One doesn't gain much credibility with me by just claiming to believe something I think is good. I need to see evidence that they've implemented it in practice. I don't know if I'm unusual.
I'm not confident enough to say that most think they do.
Consider global warming as an example. Almost no one I know who believes global warming to be a dire threat changes anything about their lifestyle in response. When I ask them about this they might say something about how it's really hard, people like Elon Musk will solve it, etc. Basically, it's not their responsibility. They often seem to want to get off this line of conversation as quickly as possible. And it's not that hard to do something. Eating less meat is easy. I commute by bike for other reasons already and I don't think doing this regularly would be a major problem for a large fraction of people in the US.
To continue on the global warming example, you will have people who will drive a hybrid or electric car today "for the environment", though these options are not carbon neutral at the moment (perhaps electric will be in the future). No major change to their lifestyle has been made. I can see how this is mostly about signaling, as many people do believe such things will make a difference right now, though I'm skeptical.
> Urbanists / Urban Planners decry the cost of housing and lack of transit, then go to work everyday and rapidly increase the cost of housing and eliminate transportation access.
I'm not following here. Lack of urbanism in American cities seems largely the result of various government decisions, especially at the local level. I'm guessing those urbanists and urban planners are voting for politicians friendly to transit and walking and housing supply (or at least more friendly than the opposition), so what exactly are you blaming them for?
I'm referring to the hyper-libertarian "gentrification is the solution to gentrification", "trickle down economics is the only affordable housing", "governments should be for-profit corporations" type philosophy that folks working in that space typically have (at least, in the US).
A lot of these people will say things like "what a shame that poor neighborhoods always lose their affordable housing and economically diverse populations". And then they go to work everyday for architects or property developers or city hall or construction companies, and explicitly target 'undervalued' poor neighborhoods for 'investment' to intentionally drive the property values up, despite knowing that those actions will directly displace many/most of the existing residents due to price.
It's one modern day version of saying "such a shame that smoking kills" while working for Phillip Morris. Or saying "digital advertising is so intrusive, annoying, and invasive" while working for Google.
-----
And while this is just one of many different examples of that problem -- the contraction itself is what really bugs me. People who claim "X is such a bad problem, we should fix X" while going to work every day to make X worse.
I generally agree, but I'm a bit confused by your framing.
Better Angels offers a range of causes for declining violence, and one of them is explicitly 'Leviathan' - the rise of state power pushing out all other forms of violence. His other forces are far more optimistic, but the "monopoly on force" argument is certainly not absent.
Having said that, I agree that people discussing and interpreting Pinker's work (Pinker himself included) tend to provide vastly more optimistic readings than I think are actually supported by the evidence. Across Pinker's "five causes" it's quite possible that Leviathan is the main player, and that others like 'Commerce' and 'Reason' are operating less to reduce conflict than to redirect it from violent dispute to fait accompli victories.
My qualm is a bit more involved than just the centralization of force. It has to do with whether or not the causes of violence are decreasing, or whether or not we're observing a temporary reduction in the overt displays of violence while the causes are left to grow in the background. In chemical terms, have we created buffering conditions for violence equilibria? If so, what happens the moment we cross the threshold.
That said, Pinker himself heavily downplays the 'Leviathan' effect in interviews, debates and responses to criticisms, and bothers very little to examine what it means, especially because if the Leviathan is the primary force in quashing violence, then the rest of his project - in demonstrating the progress of mankind - is actively hampered.
My general take on Pinker's work is that to the extent that he's accurate, he's largely describing the impact of state power plus the benefits of prosperity.
When he asks why murder is now so rare, the answer is a combination of "because if you murder you go to jail reliably" and "if someone wrongs you you call on the state".
When he asks why Canada and Spain don't start a war over fishing rights, the answer is not "civilization and reason" but "because it would cost a million times what the fish are worth". Increased trade means most peaceful relationships are mutually beneficial, increased GDP per capita means that a life lost to violence is increasingly expensive in monetary terms, and the increasing mechanical capacity for war means that any small conflict can be easily escalated to a prohibitively expensive one.
All of which is to say that I think we've solved some violence with sheer wealth, some with fear of the state, and perhaps very little with our "better angels". That worries me, and I think Pinker does us all a disservice by conflating a decreasing appetite for violence with decreasing use of violence. Leviathan is there in the book, but not so much in the public conception.
> All of which is to say that I think we've solved some violence with sheer wealth, some with fear of the state, and perhaps very little with our "better angels".
I think moral standards, at large, have certainly improved. The very concept of human rights, as understood today, was alien not so long ago. Same applies to concepts like presumption of innocence, equality before the law, equality of genders and ethinicities, freedom of the press, international laws regarding war/plunder/noncombatants, etc.
Peter Singer's concept of The Expanding Circle is relevant here.
> Peter Singer's concept of The Expanding Circle is relevant here.
That's a work I can support, definitely.
I don't mean to sound too cynical; it's easy to get caught up in presentism and forget that basic ideas like "what if racism is bad?" and "should we maybe stop doing torture?" are relatively recent.
My concern with Pinker is less that nothing has gotten better, and more that he seems overly rosy about the decline of violence (I worry we've largely displaced it and rendered it intermittent) and that he appears to frame moral progress as some kind of fundamental improvement in the moral nature of humans or society.
I'm much more inclined to Singer's argument, that we're the same semi-moral creatures we've always been, but have done steadily better at acknowledging the moral weight of groups other than our own.
I agree that it's not clear that conflict is being better managed overtime. However, there is a lot of merit acknowledging the reduction in violence. There is so much fear for physical violence that there has been a significant reduction in kids walking home from school or playing outside by themselves. It would be better to acknowledge how physically safe we are regardless of what happens in the court systems.
I work on criminal justice reform and this is SO true. I cringe every time I hear these kinds of stats being brandished without context as evidence of our society 'working'. Ben Thompson is a particularly bad example of this, but it certainly seems like it's the folks 'winning' the conflicts that love to cite 'reduced conflict'.
I rarely here them expressed as examples of society "working", but rather as examples of society progressing. And like most things, progress is rarely equally distributed, but that doesn't mean it's not being made overall.
I'm a Ben Thompson reader / listener, and I'm not sure which of his arguments you're referring to, but I'm intrigued by the premise. Would you mind throwing out some links and further commentary on this?
Last week's (Friday, Jan 26) Exponent has a lot of this kind of conversation after his article about Amazon Go. Toward the end of the article is this gem [0]:
> In fact, they are all gone, replaced by automation. And, in the meantime, nearly all of humanity has been lifted out of abject poverty.
I think Ben is an incredibly intelligent and accurate commentator who constantly ignores the very real side-effects of tech on poverty and justice in favor of handwaving about potential side-effects of regulation that doesn't currently exist.
> Still, what of those companies that can’t afford to pay for zero rating — the future startups for which net neutrality advocates are willing to risk the costs of heavy-handed regulations? [1]
Meanwhile, 48% of America have only one broadband provider and 30% have no access to broadband at all [2]. Ben is scared of title II but strangely silent on the same cable companies he's so desperate to protect from scary scary 'regulation' spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make municipal broadband in underserved locations illegal. [3]
All this being said, I am a frequent reader of stratechery, an exponent subscriber. I think Ben gets it right more often than not, but I often find that he goes out of his way to defend 'capitalism' in ways that seem antithetical to his other espoused beliefs.
All of his articles and their associated exponents on anti-trust take great pains to make the point that 'real capitalism' has competition [4,5,6]. He fails to address what, if 'real capitalism' means competition, our current economic situation is. Personally I'd describe myself as a socialist so perhaps this is just a pure idealogical divergence on our parts, but it seems like Ben is make the same arguments about capitalism that are so popular among people criticizing communism: "Sure, it works great on paper, but in practice it is an abject failure". I fail to see how Ben's points about capitalism and competition, which I agree with, are not the exact same critique of our current economic system.
Sorry for the long and late reply, this sort of just became a bit of an unstructured rant about all the things I yell at exponent in my car on the way home Friday evenings...
This is a great reply! I consider myself far from a socialist, but have often had the same reaction to that argument about capitalism implying competition. Perhaps we draw different conclusions though: I conclude that this seems like a good framework for regulators to work within, ie. by writing regulations with an eye strongly toward fostering competition.
@ABCLAW, you make a very good argument that on a micro-scale we have an unprecedented crisis on our hands. However that lack of precedent comes from a volumetric perspective of the issue. I believe you're failing to take into account a per-capita perspective vs the total-volume-of-humans perspective.
There have never been this many humans on the planet before today. <== this statement will be the case tomorrow, and the day after, and has definitely been the case since we've gained the ability to estimate the global population.
To try and be more concise: Is the per-capita decrease in violent-crime a better or worse measure of its reduction than the overall volume of violent-crime? I believe the former is, you appear to believe the latter is.
If it's the latter, I'm right there with you. More people ==> more crime ==> more fringe-cases ==> more of a burden on defense-attourneys in the US, unless employment growth in that sector is keeping pace with population-growth, minus whatever the influence of the PER-CAPITA decrease in violent crime is.
I want to contest two points you've made:
> "We can pretend things are getting better..."
- violent crime per-capita IS decreasing...that's just a statistical fact unless there's a problem in the way data has been collected. The overwhelming consensus is that easier access to educational materials (think wikipedia) is the big causal factor there.
This next one isn't related to any of this^, but I still disagree, and pretty strongly:
> "Violence is not a first order phenomenon at social scale"
- By "not first order" I'm assuming you're saying violence is an emergent property of human interaction(if I'm misunderstanding you, please correct me.) However, I can be violent to myself or say...animals without anyone else around. By your definition, A delusional autocrat who starts a war out of paranoia of something fictitious (like...idk...ghosts) isn't being violent.
My response is not based upon the 'relative violence' objection which some other writers have used. Put simply they have stated that violence does not scale linearly with population size, and that the types and methods of violence across different scopes looks different, but Pinker's argument ignores this level of abstraction - I think there's some merit to this position, but my critique comes from a different angle.
My argument is that rates of violence themselves are not a good metric to determine if society is progressing and humans are becoming better. I support this by stating that there are confounding variables which lower rates of violence, but also represent a regression in progress, none of which are controlled for by Pinker's analysis.
Violence is not an uncaused cause. First order in this respect refers to how far down the causal chain violence is. I am stating that at a social level, violence does not spontaneously manifest itself- there are contributory factors which function as the cause of violence. The primary factor which I identify is conflict. Reduction and resolution of conflict by peaceful means is a more valuable method of analyzing the progress of society.
From there, I indicate that at the micro level, access to justice is in peril - some countries have largely lost the ability for their middle class to access their official forum for conflict resolution. Elsewhere, I've indicated that citizen-state and state-state dispute resolution are impacted by surveillance and nuclear armaments. Accordingly, from the perspective of conflict resolution the full story is more complicated and whether or not any of these trends are positive is highly debatable.
Depends how you define violence. If you define it as ending of innocent human life, then violence has skyrocketed astronomically around the globe since the advent of legalized abortion.
If you instead say our violence has become less messy and more controlled, then that seems true. But then Auschwitz would meet this definition. The gas chambers were invented because gunning civilians down en mass was considered too "barbaric".
Heinrich Himmler visited the outskirts of Minsk in 1941 to witness a mass shooting. He was told by the commanding officer there that the shootings were proving psychologically damaging to those being asked to pull the triggers. Thus Himmler knew another method of mass killing was required.[51] After the war, the diary of the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Höss, revealed that psychologically "unable to endure wading through blood any longer", many Einsatzkommandos – the killers – either went mad or killed themselves.
> I've read a lot of the discussions regarding Pinker's work in both books (but particularly his position in Better Angels), and I've always found his position to be slightly disconcerting.
I really think that this is one occasion where you should base your opinion on what an author has written rather than on what discussions the author's work has engendered.
> Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time.
No. Pinker makes a specific argument (he does not attempt to make the argument) that contrary to popular opinion the world is not in fact going to hell in a handcart but rather the lot of the average person is improving over time when measuring social factors against times gone by. He takes a number of metrics and plots them over the course of centuries and millennia. What he is _attempting_ to do is convince us.
> Violence is not a first order phenomenon at a social scale - it's presence is predicated upon the existence of other key criteria, largely the existence of conflict within or between societies.
To be honest, I'm not sure that what you're saying makes sense sociologically speaking. And anyway, it's probably neither hear nor there for our purposes if violence is a first-order or second-order phenomenon (whatever that would mean) in the context of social systems. What matters is if we agree that certain types of violence are decent metrics for measuring the human condition over time. We could take suicide, state conflicts, civil unrest, incarceration rates, state torture, severity of punishment, and on and on. And in fact this is what Pinker does. And for practically every form of human-on-human misery you can think of the stats show that violence is decreasing. If you agree that this is a good proxy for the human condition then you then agree that society is getting 'better'.
> Better Angels indicates that violence has gone down, but does not sufficiently set out the basis to indicate that conflict is being better managed over time. If anything, it indicates that conflicts are being 'won' as the winners are increasingly able to ignore the plight of the losers.
? No. It does not indicate, it demonstrates that many many forms of violence have decreased. It does not show that "conflict is being better managed" over time (how would one measure that?) and it certainly does not need to use whatever that as a proxy for its main demonstration. That's your assertion, not Pinker's. It is up to you to convince us of that. (I am not convinced.) And even if you did it does not invalidate Pinker's claims!
> On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. In short, the courts are simply too expensive for normal people to avail themselves of, outside specialty practices like family or traffic issues. The result being that the majority of people do not actually have the ability to enforce their legal rights. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it.
I agree with everything you say here (though you have no stats to back it up I do believe that it would be possible to demonstrate some of your assertions here) but the fact that it is increasingly difficult for the average person to enforce their rights is no counter-argument to the claims in Better Angels. You do realise that Pinker is talking about practices like being hung, drawn and quartered and being burnt at the stake and any number of unimaginable horrors which we no longer do, don't you?
> We can pretend things are getting better but absent thinking about what 'better' means maybe the lid on the boiling pot is just getting heavier faster than the heat is being turned up.
No. To make a claim is not to pretend. Pinker _has_ thought about how you can measure 'better'. The funny thing is, it actually seems like people want the world to be getting worse for some perverse reason. I cannot otherwise explain the ridiculous arguments (including by the likes of Taleb) against Better Angels.
That's one route, but if you look at, say, western Europe, countries there largely have both much lower incarceration rates and lower homicide rates than the US.
The British philosopher John Gray is a good counterpart to Pinker's idea of progress. He focuses on the myths of progress, civilisation and freedom.
This is his response to Pinker: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev... "A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray – and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong"
One example: Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world. Something that was once thought to have been made illegal everywhere was made legal (waterboarding) but not in a backward dictatorship, but in the vanguard of progress and liberty - the USA. Now, Obama made it illegal again (mostly), so that shows that you have to fight to keep your progressions. Progress does not occur automatically, and once achieved, it doesn't stay, Gray argues. I think Gray also argues that wars are mostly many and small proxy wars that occur all the time instead of larger grander affairs.
I think his current ideas on Freedom area also similar. We assume that western democracies are the best ever and getting more freer, but there are examples of a decline in freedoms, in a decline in enlightenment values etc. In a previous book, Gray even highlights that the Enlightenment itself was flawed (with leading figures being overtly racist to say the least) and that we shouldn't put a halo around it by default - rather that there is nuance, and that it's a fragile thing. He also points that whilst the Enlightenment and Freedom is an old idea, ISIS and Islamic terrorism is actually a modern thing. Modern != Progress.
He encourages us to assume that progress is fragile, is not automatically improving and that we need to be active in defending our freedoms, our progress and the things we take for granted.
"He encourages us to assume that progress is fragile, is not automatically improving and that we need to be active in defending our freedoms, our progress and the things we take for granted."
But would Pinker or Bill Gates disagree with that statement? I don't think so. Bill Gates is devoting his fortune to doing so, and is doing so very effectively.
And even if Pinker is wrong, I believe his message is much more likely to get people to defend freedoms and advance progress than Gray's would be: it's much easier to act if you believe that your actions will be effective.
Pinker explicitly addresses this argument, both in Better Angels and in the free chapter of the new book linked from OP. Quote:
So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take
care of itself.
Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it
does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed
the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the
social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions
persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they
don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are,
so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure
that the decline of violence continues.
As Pinker said in the video, progress is not a popular concept among academics anymore. This is the concept that underpins his book, which is glossed over in attempts to characterize it as "everything is good now" instead of "everything is getting better thanks to perpetual human progress".
Which leads to the obvious question of how can we maintain or advance this progress?
Dismissing the progress that was made also dismisses how the progress was made. And I fear many academics are not comfortable crediting the longer term ROI from industry and technology, and would rather obsess over pet political or social issues of the day and their own ideologies.
Yes, I don't think that view was expressed in Gray's article about Pinker. But I imagine that there could be an implication that "if the data shows the world is improving, it always will do, progress happens one way and is always going up" which Gray takes issue to. Why act if everything is getting better anyhow?
Though I can't find a reference right now, I am pretty sure Pinker repeatedly and emphatically disavows any claim that progress will inevitably continue. There is no doubt we have to work for it.
Pinker's work is a rebuttal to people who want to paint the world as hopelessly bad right now.
The world gets better because people have been demonstrably trying to make it better. If the efforts of everyone trying to improve the world had come to naught then that would be an argument for lazy cynicism.
It's getting better for some measures of 'better', and it's getting worse for others. It's also getting 'better' for some people, and less so for others. For example I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years, and is fabulously better for the super-rich.
"I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years"
Really? 40 years ago we didn't have the internet, didn't have videogames, had far far far fewer TV shows/movies/entertainment options. Worse health outcomes, though to a less significant degree I think. Far more access to education and educational content (you can effectively get the equivalent of a degree in almost anything, online, for free). More access to healthier foods.
Middle class families in the US have access to all of the above. Would most of them really go back to a time when they didn't?
It is getting better for some people by some measures, and worse for others by other measures. What Pinker and Gates are attempting to impose is a tyranny of faux rationality--"an 800 pg book with sources up the wazoo say that the world is getting better, all these whiny poor folk must just be delusional".
> What Pinker and Gates are attempting to impose is a tyranny of faux rationality--"an 800 pg book with sources up the wazoo say that the world is getting better, all these whiny poor folk must just be delusional".
That is a pretty extreme reading of what Pinker and Gates are saying. I don't think they are saying that at all.
Would faux rationality that the world is getting better constantly not keep us in silent optimism, as opposed to - urm - violently keep fighting for it being made much worse?
What cruel bastard would even do such a thing, anyway?
Only very strong motivated reasoning would lead someone like Gates -- who would presumably consider himself 'rational' -- to take seriously a book written by an amateur historian in full-scale emeritus mode. Outside of his own field, Pinker's just a crank. He doesn't understand his sources, and isn't taken seriously by anyone that I've read so far who has the slightest interest in or understanding of historiography.
The source of Gates' wonky motivation can only be known to him (if he possesses enough self-awareness). We might guess that justification of the changes his corrupt dealings have been a part of (and made him in the process a leading megaconsumer) might have something to do with it.
> One example: Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world.
True, but a) highly controversially b) condemned by much of the rest of the world c) only allowed outside US territory and d) claimed to be legal only due to the allegations that it was carried out on people falling outside the protections of the Geneva Convention.
Compare to much of history, where torture was widespread, uncontroversial, and legally sanctioned.
I don't think Pinker's thesis that overall violence is decreasing dramatically can be disproved by counter-examples, any more than climate change can be doubted due to occasional colder days. For a solid rebuttal to Pinker I'd want to see disagreement with his extensive statistics, and I don't see much of that in Gray's article.
It'd be one thing if the use of torture was increasing over time across our society, or all societies.
But using "torture was recently brought back" as a data point to rebut an overall statistical decline makes no sense. It's like saying "Apple's stock price fell today, therefore people are wrong to say the economy is improving".
I watched the video of Pinker & Gates, and I confess my prejudice was 'two comfortably rich elitists pushing a centralized globalization agenda'. I'll read the book but with a large pinch of salt...
What is "centralized globalization?" The top google result for this term is a paper talking about the Vatican; results quickly seem to become less relevant (for example, talking about "globalization, centralization, ...").
Thank you. I couldn't help but feel like Pinker is peddling feel-good nonsense to sell books, and give people hope to cling to.
Progress or betterment is entirely subjective, and when considering the human condition, relies on too many variables to even count. Of course, the variables the Pinker focuses on have gotten better overall.
The way I see it is a chaotic scatterplot that is trending slightly upwards towards "better." There are many local minima and maxima however, and I presume those ebbs and flows of prosperity and poverty can last 60 years at a time.
Pinker is much more nefarious (and you can know that by going to his talks, as I have, where he's more loose-tongued than in his books). He places such emphasis on the fact that the world is getting better as a rebuttal to "complainers" and political activists. The problem is not with his premise but with his conclusion. The world has been getting better (to the extent that it has) because people complain and are dissatisfied, and because they take political action to make the world better. The world has not been getting better on its own; people have made it better through political struggle.
I think you're not being charitable to Pinker here - he's not in my view "nefarious," and he's arguing his points in good faith.
That said, I agree with you. I read Better Angels in its entirety and thought parts of it were very convincing. Others were deeply, provably wrong to anyone who is a professional historian (for instance, he let a bunch of Harvard RA's loose on some non-peer reviewed books purporting to statistically describe fatalities in wars that are very poorly documented, then used this faulty data to draw huge, misguided conclusions, like WW1/WW2 being less damaging in aggregate than the An Lushan rebellion).
I actually really enjoy Pinker's writing style and he is clearly brilliant (as I learned when I tried to spar with him a bit in a Q&A and he casually parried what I thought was a devastating counter-example!)
But IMO his intelligence is actually his downfall when it comes to this particular argument. He's convinced himself that everything is getting better, and he is indeed very convincing on certain aspects of this point. The problem, as you say, is with the scale of his conclusions. Certain things like the use of the death penalty and rates of infant mortality really are going down, demonstrably. Other things, like the risk of massive destruction due to a stolen nuclear weapon or EMP or a Nick Bostrom-style evil AI, or even just a generalized societal decline due to economic inequality and environmental degradation, are almost certainly getting worse. Pinker is so self-assured as a writer and thinker that he runs the risk of giving us all a false sense of complacency and a license to ignore these very real problems.
Maybe he's arguing in good faith, but his conservative views are so deeply entrenched that even he fails to see how conservative he is. Such an extreme ideology that you yourself cannot distinguish from what you perceive to be neutral reasoning is the primary sign of a weak critical mind. I find Pinker to be one of the weakest public minds of our times for that reason, and for that I find him terribly boring. A writer who is so far behind the reader in understanding his own text makes the reading boring rather than interesting.
> Could you expand on what do you mean conservative here?
Someone who believes or acts towards (either consciously or not) the preservation of the current distribution of power in society and against changing it. Often extreme conservatives (though not Pinker) even desire to return the social order to some (almost always imagined) past.
> Also, could you recommend some public minds whom you consider strong?
Max Weber, Marc Bloch, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman. Strong does not necessarily mean "right". It means either having truly profound and interesting insight and/or the ability to apply critical thinking to yourself.
There is a certain rather loud, rather fashionable kind of "activist" who are if not directly claiming that everything is awful, then strongly evoking symbolism and imagery to that effect. To fix this, they want to take broad, radical action, basically to affect revolution. This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipulating their followers for personal power. If they get their way, things will get worse, quickly. These are the people Pinker is rebutting.
There is also a kind of activist that work towards fixing specific problems, including Gates, but certainly also a great many people of lesser means and public profile, and does indeed improve the world in the way you describe. I have no doubt that Pinker respects these.
> This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipulating their followers for personal power.
Except that, as any student of history knows, the current state of the world is what it is thanks almost entirely to people just like that (although historians generally view them in a better light than you do because of what they've achieved, despite always being presented by conservative forces in the same light as you view them).
My technophile bias is showing, but I'm not convinced that any, all, and every past and present student of history thinks that progress is due to violent/radical revolutionaries, and that they are/were the good guys (gals) - even if revolutions were necessary for change.
However, it's seems very evident that to extract even some minuscule progress from a conservative power structure a very strong anti-conservative force is usually a must, and that is usually not a moderate progressive force, but a very blunt radical one.
Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.
But, it can be argued that a moderate force simply bounces back without much effect, but even the recent events of the last decade make that argument very unconvincing. (As big changes are easily usurped by blind populism, leaving no room to critical evaluation of possible policy proposals.)
> and that they are/were the good guys (gals) - even if revolutions were necessary for change.
While my training as a professional historian was cut short, I know enough to say that historians are very much trained not to judge or categorize people into good or bad. That has nothing to do with the fact that most social change has been achieved through political struggle.
> Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.
I try not to prescribe a course of action based on the past. I note that Pinker's assessment is judgmental, i.e., he considers the main trend to be positive, yet at the same time he's judgmental against activists. My point is that you can't hold both views at once.
Sure. From the plebeians of ancient Rome, through the French revolutionaries and American abolitionists and feminists of the 19th century, to the feminist suffragists[1] of the early 20th century.
[1]: One of the things I always find hilarious is the constant refrain among conservatives is "well, the old generation was right but this one has gone too far!" despite the constant decline in the fervor of feminist activism for over a century now. :)
Yep, for centuries (millennia, actually) the pattern is the same. A social change movement is invariably viewed as having "gone too far", but in order to be perceived as reasonable, the critics invariably say that the previous generation was right. Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as having gone too far (the American revolution and the abolitionist movement included).
In general, conservatives (like Pinker) pretty much always get the history wrong (the facts, the interpretation, and usually both), while liberals are usually wrong about the future (and I say this as a radical leftist). That's why it's easy to poke fun at conservatives who write history (certainly those who, like Pinker, are not professional historians), while liberals are always surprised of the turn of events (for good or bad; when liberals -- including myself -- are optimistic I'm worried, and when they're pessimistic I know I can relax).
[1]: Feminists not so much; there's been a constant decline in the fervor feminist activism over the past century, but certainly, say, the French revolutionaries. Feminism has always been special for many understandable reasons. It is almost always the most timid form of social activism, yet almost always perceived as the most radical.
> Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as having gone too far (the American revolution and the abolitionist movement included).
Sure, by some. It's also true that in about 100% of cases where people have argued for legitimately bad social change (eugenics, communism, prohibition, etc.), those people (and their allies) cast their opponents as immoral and regressive.
It's like Carl Sagan said: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Today on Twitter I saw a conservative arguing that people who deny the personhood of a fetus are like slaveowners who denied the personhood of slaves. As a radical leftist, I doubt you'd agree with that. But this person is just as convinced as you that they are the progressive on this issue.
So we need a better heuristic than "people arguing social change are probably right." Some are right, others are not.
Right, but the point that Pinker is missing that we are what we are because people fought to get us here -- the very same kind of people he dismisses.
Just a nitpick: communism has certainly not been "legitimately bad" everywhere. In my country (Israel), we have practiced communism (on a local scale, in the Kibbutzim) for much longer than the USSR (over 100 years now), and it's a more extreme form of communism (makes the USSR seem like a capitalist country by comparison), and while it has certainly not been an unqualified success (especially the communal raising of children), and it is certainly crumbling now (due to powerful external and internal pressures), it has been the complete opposite of failure. It has been entirely democratic for 100 years (with problems, but not unlike in any democratic system), and one of Israel's proudest achievements. So communism was an overall great success in Israel for a century.
When it come to history I find most political movements to be wrong on both facts and interpretation. Take women's suffrage in the US for example and the relation to shortage in conscription at the end of world war 1. Following liberal writing there exist no relation. According to those writing the right to vote came through demonstrating and women empowering themselves. True or false? Should we interpret it as a victory for self empowerment or as a result of lack of soldiers during the last year of the biggest war the world had seen (also called the war to end all wars)?
An other example: witch hunts. According to liberal writing those where all campaigns targeting the weak, poor and vulnerable in society. Historians points towards campaigns that transfered land and money from the accused families into the pocket of the church. True or false? Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?
Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history. Facts don't fit the nice narrative that is needed to gain mass adaption. Usually the truth is a bit from column A and column B and involve multiple events which together create an environment where famous historical facts happened. It is in the realization of those events and the interpretation that we can grasp what actually happened in the past and why.
> Should we interpret it as a victory for self empowerment or as a result of lack of soldiers during the last year of the biggest war the world had seen?
Clearly as the first. Women would not have gotten the vote without the suffrage movement, just as they didn't get it after the Civil War. However, the war had an effect on the timing, as is often the case with social change movements. They can go on for decades, and finally succeed when an external event forces the dominating powers' hands. No one would say that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the cause of WWI. The alliance system was rigged to blow at the first spark, and that spark happened to be the assassination.
> Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?
As medieval and early modern history was my focus in grad school, I must say that I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically by any professional historian that I've read, and they were relatively uncommon. Like most things in history, they were a result of a complex interaction of factors, but as is often the case, the powerful are rarely the victims of events of that sort, regardless of their complex causes.
> Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history.
I wasn't talking about political writing but about scholarly or pseudo-scholarly works, and all writers have political leanings. Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.
One could as easily interpret that the abolishment movements relation with the civil war has about as much validity as the relation between the first world war and the suffrage movement. I am not saying you are wrong, but that political writers tend to disregard facts and make interpretations that fits their views regardless if they are left or right, usually to the detriment of the truth.
> I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically
Out of all writing I have read, only two books that I recall described the witch hunts as complex causes rather than a simplistic prosecution of defenseless women. I see it so often in political texts I usually tick of a mental box when i see it.
When it comes to plundering, history don't seem to often show that its the most powerful in society that becomes victims. They can employ armies to defend themselves or buy enough influence to not become a target. Usually those that are targeted is those with resources to defend but that relies on social constructs for defense.
But to go back to the claim about liberal writers, I can recommend a book called Debt: The First 5000 Years. The author was involved with the occupy movement so not sure if that defines him as a liberal writer or not. What I found interesting in that book (outside of the overall focus on debt) is the description of bridge gifts, slavery and veils, each having a very different interpretation to common liberal views. Since the author is a professor of anthropology he also supports those interpretations with facts that usually missing when those subjects are being discussed in a historical perspective.
> Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.
It is very possible that liberal writers lie less and tend to be less intentional dishonest than conservative ones. Its a very different claim that liberal writers are usually right and conservative writers usually wrong.
> but that political writers tend to disregard facts and make interpretations that fits their views regardless if they are left or right, usually to the detriment of the truth.
All writers are political (I would hope all people) and there are many brilliant historians, some writing analyses that would appear contradictory to their stated views (my best professor was like that).
> simplistic prosecution of defenseless women
I find that hard to believe, as women were abused on a much larger scale before, during and after the witch trials. Defenseless women make easy targets, but I find it hard to believe that any historian would consider that an explanation. Women are so marginalized from all positions of power and are completely at the mercy of their fathers, brothers or husbands, but let's try just a few for being witches to drive the point home!?
I don't think Pinker is against activists making the world better. But activists need to convince people that their ideas actually will improve things. Lots of activists have made the world better, but some have made it worse, despite having good intentions (see: eugenics, communism).
If you're trying to sell people on the idea that status quo institutions like capitalism are bad, you have to compare it to the alternatives. You can't just say "bad things happen under capitalism, therefore we need to do away with it." That's comparing capitalism vs. utopia, but utopia doesn't exist, for all kinds of practical reasons.
Pinker makes the case for what the world as we know it has achieved. An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.
> An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.
Not necessarily according to Pinker's cherry picked statistics. Plantation owners were not going to achieve more by freeing their slaves, at least according to their own accounting.
Sure, if someone else thinks other statistics are relevant, they can cite those. I agree that a plantation owner would probably have cited statistics that didn't capture the harms of the fact that they are enslaving people.
"The world" hasn't achieved anything on its own. People of precisely the kind Pinker dislikes and dismisses are those who have achieved those things for our world. They achieved it not by convincing others through theory, but through their strong beliefs. You're right, sometimes they failed miserably, but even those who've brought us to where we are today were ridiculed just as those who've failed.
What problem do people in this conversation have distinguishing current state from current rate?
Complain that things are bad and fight to improve them? Sure. Complain that things are getting worse over time? It's false in a global sense, and in most specific senses too.
It's telling that one of the richest, most well off men on Earth is helping to peddle this narrative. It behooves those in positions of power and wealth to hoodwink the masses into being satisfied with their given stations. Research and statistics say the world is a better place than ever, put down your protest signs.
Could you please not post unsubstantive rants to HN? Even if you're right, it's a quality-lowering comment genre. There's no point worth making here that can't be made thoughtfully, as indeed other users have been doing in this thread.
> Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world.
Isn't this cherry-picking data? I don't see how the extent of torture could be said to be a valid measure of progress unless happening on a massive scale. Besides, on a global scale, I would not be too wrong in saying that torture has declined. During the investigation of 1993 Bombay blasts, the police didn't balk at interrogating and torturing even the suspect's relatives[1] who didn't have any role in the act. The probability of this happening again has certainly declined.
Picking a narrow trend doesn't refute the global one that the world is getting better in every aspect.
People talked optimistically about the end of war in the early 20th century when it looked like war had gone the way of the dodo. The last major international conflict was a century earlier when the Powers deposed the second rise of Napoleon. There were a number of internal civil wars in the meantime mainly dealing with the transition from monoarchy to republics and the consolidation of related city states intomcountries. The early 20th century had much progress in industrialisation, invention and global trade.
Then WWI happened, following soon by WWII, partly based on a poor resolution of WWI. Then a 45 year Cold War with several close nuclear wars.
Thats why I am skeptical the concept of world war is really over.
None of the examples I got to read in this article are in any logical contradiction with the original enlightenment. It is shown that Locke didn't originally fully understand his own new school of thought - maybe because it's naive to think you fully understand a new idea when you're having it? It was attempted that 20th century atrocities happened as a direct result of enlightenment thinking.
I honestly grew tired of reading this very quickly. The sum of all words these philosophers said is not enlightenment. Reason means you don't frigging trust every frigging word of what people say, even if they said "don't trust every word of what people say". How is that not obvious?
What is John Gray's message here? I get he is trying to challenge Pinker's seemingly optimistic views, but I don't get what is the pattern he tries to convey by throwing all that sand into the gears of Pinker's progression thing?
Are we seriously giving up on seeing patterns here and insist in our mental image of the world as a white noise tv screen?
I think it's easy for the likes of HN readers, most probably sitting in their comfortable western strongholds to feel like we are bringing progress in the world with our fancy tech. I believe the reality feels very different to a lot of people in a lot of other places - where things as basic as even food or clean water might still be hard to come by - and it's kind of insulting for fussy old rich men living in comparative luxury to be telling these people otherwise.
Ya this resonates with me more. We are seeing the rolling back under the current US presidential administration of so many things we thought were done deals. Things like Bears Ears National Monument getting turned over to private corporations for uranium mining. And a thousand more issues just like that, of weighing the value of the priceless against the profitable. Or misdirection in the cause of various forms of human suffering away from the very people and institutions that caused it.
I think what a lot of people (especially modern day conservatives) don't realize is that this stuff requires never-ending vigilance. The natural tendency of human progress is towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the eventual complete exploitation of people and resources.
Where some people today see a spoiled youth glued to their smartphones and spending all of their money on flatscreen TVs, I see a generation disenfranchised with literally no say in any aspect of their regulatory system. No say over how much money they make, no recourse when multinational corporate monopolies charge them excessively for education, health, even things as basic as untainted food. Earning a fraction of the income their parents had when adjusted for inflation.
So no, this is nothing even remotely close to the future we're capable of. We're just comfortable enough to miss the injustices being carried out against us and the planet, often in our own names.
> Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014. This might sound trivial in the grand scheme of progress. But the rise of the washing machine has improved quality of life by freeing up time for people—mostly women—to enjoy other pursuits.
This. I remember following Reddit AMAs of two centenarian women, women who remembered SS troops arriving at their village, who watched live as men landed on the Moon, and witnessed the spread of electric light, cars, planes, radio, TV, phones, mobile phones, internet, etc. and other technologies that in the 1900s were only in the realm of fiction.
And yet, when some redditors asked them which, among all these technological marvels developed in their time they had loved the most, both answered that the washing machine, because suddenly they had much more time to devote to other, more interesting things.
About ten years ago, my washing machine went kaputt, and due to complicated circumstances, I ended washing my clothes manually, for about two weeks, until I had a new washing machine. And my clothes were not very dirty, and I did not put all the effort into it that I could have.
And still I understand these women. It is exhausting, boring, repetitive. Way worse than doing the dishes manually (which I already do not like to do).
Washing dishes is rather easy -- dishes are glazed ceramic, designed to be dirt-proof. Underclothing is designed to draw sweat from clothing, and outerclothing can't practically be made soil-proof since you don't want to wear ceramic armor all day.
Also, a dishwasher doesn't feel like it saves that much time vs. manual washing, so it doesn't feel like quite as miraculous an invention. Especially if you leave your hand-wash dishes to dry on the rack. Whereas a washing machine saves lots of time because as you say, clothes take longer to wash.
It’s worth noting that the act of sorting, inserting, removing, and putting away clothing is not very labor intensive.
Having to manually wash each article of clothing takes actual effort, which can be quite tiring. It’s not easy to engage in other pursuits when one is tired out from physical labor. One could argue that the savings in exertion even outweigh the savings in time.
Washing clothes for your family was hard enough, those who would do this professionally would suffer from the phsyical labour so much as to have a reduced lifespan.
And here I am complaining about working at a desk all day :)
I saw this first-hand in the Philippines. The women had to spend so much time washing clothes by hand. It's also a reminder that it's not over, there are still huge amounts of people around the world yet to benefit from these inventions.
In my case I wash outer garments once per month (button down shirts, pants, etc). But I wash under garments weekly: white t-shirts, underwear, long underwear (esp in winter). They protect my outer clothes so get washed more frequently. I hang up my button-downs immediately when I get home. I don't like having to wash and iron a shirt every week, which does not get dirty anyway. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who does this but I would imagine they did huge batches of clothes back then that got dirtier more often, to save time, and didn't really wash their "Sunday best" as frequently.
Plus the refrigeration and industrialized food like processed dinners and fast food. These cut food preparation from tens of hours a week tomjust a few hours. Further automation like food deliveryband cooking systems could this even further.
You see how wealth and health have changed over time. In particular you see that there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago. When you digest the truth of that, and look at it in terms of family stories, impact on society and so on, my impression is that we are like a world recovering from an insane collective trauma that most people have amnesia about. And the more you pay attention, the more ways in which this is obvious.
This is not to say that there isn't plenty of trauma today. As the saying goes, "The future is here. It just isn't evenly distributed." But for all the problems we have reason to worry about, there has never been a time when there was a better case for optimism for our future.
> we are like a world recovering from an insane collective trauma that most people have amnesia about
This is the conclusion I have reached as well.
There is a scene in a David Lynch movie where the main characters arrive at the scene of a car accident moments after it has occurred. There is a car upside-down, with a wheel still spinning, and a girl is wandering around dazed and bleeding from a head injury, with no idea what has happened to her.
I think humanity has been in the situation of that girl.
In particular you see that there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago.
I tend to believe that this argument is generally true, but some researchers have argued that it is very sensitive to the specific endpoints chosen. In his preface to A Farewell to Arms, economist Greg Clark argues (about the world circa 2007):
> "Prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the preindustrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological cornucopia of the past two hundred years—have succeeded there in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced. These African societies have remained trapped in the Malthusian era, where technological advances merely produce more people and living standards are driven down to subsistence. But modern medicine has reduced the material minimum required for subsistence to a level far below that of the Stone Age."
Clark also argues that:
>"Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their remote ancestors. The lucky denizens of wealthy societies such as eighteenth-century England or the Netherlands managed a material lifestyle equivalent to that of the Stone Age. But the vast swath of humanity in East and South Asia, particularly in China and Japan, eked out a living under conditions probably significantly poorer than those of cavemen.
The quality of life also failed to improve on any other observable dimension. Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery. Nor did the variety of material consumption improve. The average forager had a diet, and a work life, much more varied than the typical English worker of 1800, even though the English table by then included such exotics as tea, pepper, and sugar"
A lot of present arguments seem to center on the shape and AUC of the progress curve, and whether that has any implications for predictions based on historical data.
With relatively fixed technology, the human population tends to expand to the carrying capacity of the land.
Agriculture did not make life better. What it did is make that carrying capacity a LOT higher. At the cost of great increases in how much work was needed, risk of plague, and so on. This topic is covered in some detail in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
When, as in the 1200s, the climate moved to increase that carrying capacity, life improved. When, as in the 1300s, climate made life harder, we had mass famine after mass famine (and by coincidence, also the Black Death).
Technology has increased the carrying capacity many-fold. And also changed the incentives for large families. We can look back and laugh about how wrong Malthus was, and say that it is clear in hindsight that the English should have ignored his analysis and intervened in the Irish Potato Famine back in the 1800s. But his theories were grounded in the universal truth of what life had been like in agricultural societies for thousands of years.
"there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago" - I can name a few middle east countries that are worse off...and some African countries as well.
I think something else that needs to be considered is that all these years since 1945 Germany was held in check. This is increasingly not the case anymore and no matter how modern and progressive we think we are Germany always seems to have a penchant for starting wars. This time around, with them in control of the entire EU, it won't be so pretty and it is likely we will not last through it.
Really? Watch the video. Note where the top-right corner started 200 years back, and where the bottom-left corner ended when the video was taken. And yes, the world has continued to improve since.
The world has improved more than most realize. More than I did until I watched that video more closely.
I'm also a fan of Pinker's books, but stopping to consider valuable when he writes the preface or recommends a book. I've got 2 terrible flops reading his recommendations. It looks like he'd recommend any friend that ask him.
So torn. I'm generally a Pinker fan, but almost detest Peter Singer's thought to the core. Singer recommending that book makes me really second guess the recommendation. But I respect Bill Gates immensely too.
Maybe the idea that Pinker could write a book so loved by both Gates and Singer is a testament to how good it is?
Pew research did a survey where it asked 42,000 people in 38 different nations how their day was. Respondents could answer 'particularly good', 'typical', or 'particulary bad'. Nigerians are having the best time, with 73% of respondents saying they were having a particularly good day. In Japan on 11% were having a particularly good day. The outcomes of this pew study correlate inversely with studies that objectively measure quality of life.
Interesting! Amartya Sen's theory of justice had a similar passage about quality of live of Indian women: Originally they self-assessed as healthy and without problems (while objectively being in very poor condition and having very low life expectancy), then, years later, as both education (esp. health-related) and access to healthcare improved, self-assessed as unhealthier than before! Turns out they didn't know/ couldn't imagine their health problems as something optimizable. Life just was how it was, alternatives not imaginable.
If a typical Nigerian faces a calamity every 14 days and a Japanese citizen every 140 days, you will get a much more relieved and appreciative average answer for daily life from the Nigerians to this question. Especially if those who faced a calamity in the last couple of days are less likely to participate in the survey.
Another factor is that there exists a massive advertising industry in developed nations whose goal is to convince everyone they can't be happy unless they are X or have Y.
This article/video explains why so many people have completely lost faith in our technocratic elite.
The idea that "You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century" makes a large difference in the happiness of people is ridiculous.
Why are people pessimistic about the future?
Maybe its because the rates of addiction (including to smart phones and other screens), of psychiatric disease, and of suicide are all on the rise.
Maybe its because rates of marriage and church attendance are on the decline.
Maybe its because of the debasement of our culture and education.
Technological progress is not the same as progress of the human condition. Our technocratic leaders would like to believe it is, but it is not.
> The idea that "You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century" makes a large difference in the happiness of people is ridiculous.
I believe he put that in as an interesting, somewhat unexpected benefit of modern life. His next few arguments are what really backs up his points.
> Maybe its because rates of marriage and church attendance are on the decline.
As someone from a country where the church held far too much sway and still tries to hold back the rights of gay people and forbid abortions I take a lot of hope from the fact that people are attending church less.
> Maybe its because of the debasement of our culture and education.
I don't think western culture or education has been debased at all. Can you elaborate?
Plenty of people complain about their culture disappearing, and being replaced by the universal culture (usually, but wrongly, called "Western culture" or "American culture"). It's one of the many factors contributing to the present rise of nationalism in Europe.
Personally, I don't mind the universal culture. But then, I'm just comfortable in it; many people are not, and cling to their local traditions.
>usually, but wrongly, called "Western culture" or "American culture"
Usually, but not wrongly. Not only because bona fide American culture (even morals and soapiness) are the majority of what's replacing local cultures, but also because the little of regional cultures that becomes international does so after it passes from an American filter/lens.
>Personally, I don't mind the universal culture. But then, I'm just comfortable in it; many people are not, and cling to their local traditions.
In other words, you don't mind a base monoculture and the loss of untold regional treasures and ways of human expression.
Let me clarify what I meant: it's not wrong that it's Western/American because it's where it happens to be coming from, which is just the function of US being currently the biggest economic and cultural influencer. But I say it's wrongly called because at its core it's not American - it's older than America, and lots of its part have nothing to do with the US or the Western world.
The universal culture is, simply, what wins on the cultural market.
Looking through this lens, McDonald's and Coca Cola, and cars and Internet shopping, are present worldwide not because of American imperialism, but because they are better, in many aspects, to what they replace locally. People find utility in fast food restaurants, sweet beverages, urbanization, "western" healthcare, etc. The US isn't parking its aircraft carriers in the Baltic to tell Poland that we have to open Starbucks (and similarly structured competition), nor does Sweden threaten us with another Thirty Years War if we don't start buying prefab furniture. All of those won on the cultural market, and they're only associated with the West because the West is leading in economy and innovation, contributing the most to the universal culture at this time.
> In other words, you don't mind a base monoculture and the loss of untold regional treasures and ways of human expression.
Actually, I don't. Or put another way - I'm not particularly fond of trying to artificially protect existing local cultures and old traditions. Cultures are mostly arbitrary anyways; I don't care much for what kind of folklore dance I am supposed to engage in at weddings. But I accept that other people do, so I'm also against forcing the choice. But not forcing the choice is also precisely what makes universal culture universal - it's the set of things people adopt on their own over what they did previously.
Artificial? As opposed to the natural mechanic that paints billboards with coca cola commercials, or undercut things like tap water in terms of price through hostile negotiations for water rights?
Previously, human groups were like two separate containers, one containing coffee and one containing milk. Now, through technological advancements and many other developments, they have been brought together into a single cup. The laws of physics demand that the two liquids in the cup combine into a homogeneous mixture.
This is an imperfect metaphor -- in reality, the separate containers have only been partially brought together, and human individuals are more complex than beverage molecules. But I think the idea expresses noteworthy amounts of truth.
Dickens was the most popular entertainer of his time. Shakespeare was widely popular as well. Both are considered too difficult for most audiences now days. Can you imagine a writer like Dickens being the most popular in contemporary America or in the UK? Our most popular figure is Kim Kardashian.
And my point about the Church was not to say that religion is all good, but to point to the fact that people are disconnected from communities. UK just hired a Minister of Loneliness. Its a serious issue.
> Dickens was the most popular entertainer of his time. Shakespeare was widely popular as well. Both are considered too difficult for most audiences now days.
Difficult largely because of the relatively rapid rate of drift in English idiom (which is a unique feature of English); but less popular largely not because of difficulty but drift in taste for entertainment media which is more about shifting fashion than any issue with capacity.
I think you are disregarding the degradation of the human attention span that modern media has brought to our minds. If you really think there is no difference in capacity between the minds of that time and now, just google "technology and attention span" and spend some time with the results. If you can manage to hold your attention long enough to read through them :) I know hardly anyone anymore who can sit on a couch and read for even 5 minutes without a break in attention to do something on their phone. The capacity absolutely is not there.
Dickens was serialized - there was only so long you could spend reading new Dickens before you ran out of it. (I haven't been able to find the typical length of a portion, though.)
On the other hand, plenty of people will spend a weekend on the new Harry Potter.
> I know hardly anyone anymore who can sit on a couch and read for even 5 minutes without a break in attention to do something on their phone.
I definitely don't align with this sentiment, sounds more like who you are surrounding yourself with. Many of my friends and coworkers are avid readers, and books are a common discussion topic.
There is also a flip side to how technology has affected our attention span. Consider how many people now "read" while driving, working out, doing chores. Yes we may crave more stimulation, but it means while doing laundry or dishes we are going to seek out audiobooks and podcasts. I read more than ever now that I can get just about any book instantly, and read on the go
As always, when critiquing someone, the Principle of Charity should apply.
> The idea that "You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century" makes a large difference in the happiness of people is ridiculous.
Obviously, no one but an idiot would claim quantity of lightning strikes is a key asked of human happiness. The fact that you presume Pinker is stupid enough to make this claim may say more about you (or the thoughtfulness of your argument) than Pinker.
Instead, the charitable interpretation is that lightning strikes are a great proxy for "random bad thing that can happen to people". If we're better able to survive lightning strikes, we're likely better able to survive lots of other unpredictable misfortunes.
I suspect pessimism toward the future is rising because more people are not finding life to be satisfyingly meaningful.
I think many people have been moving away from traditional sources of personal meaning (religion, civic duty, nuclear family, etc), but we haven't been replacing these age old 'guiding principles' with anything that's equally compelling. Instead we seem to be focusing our lives ever more around unshared point sources of life experience like social media and entertainment streams, which are largely passive and unshareable. This passivity increases separation and pushes us away from awareness and involvement in the needs of other people who are important to us, much less inhibits us in serving those needs.
That seems like the perfect recipe for loneliness.
Disclaimer: all of this is entirely unscientific, just observations.
From the perspective of a South African, we didn't have people walking into a public place (church, concert or otherwise) and shoot up a crowd. In general, undeveloped countries seem to have fewer problems with psychopaths (disregarding the ones in charge). I find this immensely curious.
One thing that Facebook has taught me is that problems are like biodiversity. It seems as though every time we solve a problem a previously minor problem becomes a major one. One example that many here should be familiar with is Facebook: it solved many quality-of-life problems, but in the process has allowed other unforeseen problems grow out of control. I seriously wonder whether rampant psychopathy (relationally speaking) is a symptom of development (technological, economic, social and otherwise). It's logically possible to see how: you no longer have to worry about where your next meal is coming from so, provided predisposition, you can start obsessively worrying about your fabricated issues.
Up until relatively recently, the entire human race was involved in a desperate struggle to survive. Now, while still a minority, a decent percentage of the human race no longer has to worry about where their next meal is coming from. These elite are typically concentrated in specific geographic regions, which is where I've noticed that most of these "novel problems" exist.
> BillG: The world is getting better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
I'll add to that: until our evolution reaches a point that we are no longer in a fight for survival (by ways of nature or science), we won't feel as though the world is getting better. We are incessant worriers by nature.
> church
The church kept us in line and now that it is being rejected, we are acting like rebellious children away from their overbearing parents for the first time - doing everything we weren't allowed to do. This will pass, and we'll have a slew of new problems to replace it.
> In general, undeveloped countries seem to have fewer problems with psychopaths (disregarding the ones in charge). I find this immensely curious.
My pet hypothesis on this is that humans are wired to cope with extreme stress, scarcity, and violence. In an environment of relative peace and abundance we develop a whole host of neuroses. Most cope through entertainment, drugs, and other outlets, but some just totally flip out.
It's like what happens to hunting and working dog breeds when cooped up in a little apartment. They start eating the furniture, digging holes in the walls, chewing lesions into their skin, etc. Watch a large predator animal walk nervously in circles in a zoo.
Uh? Your point about the church is weird: I live in France which has rejected (mostly) church a long time ago and this hasn't really created a 'slew of new problems'.
Not all churches require monogamy, but I will use that as an example. This remains a global problem irrespective of how it affects you: institutionalized monogamy did prevent, or at least limit, the STD epidemic. That's one objective problem off the top of my head, there are other subjective problems.
That's not to say that institutionalized religion didn't have problems, it had many, we simply now have to find other ways to solve the problems that it did.
> Maybe its because rates of marriage and church attendance are on the decline.
The importance of both are relative to your culture. Going to church doesn't make for a better society; have you forgotten all the wars started via leadership from religious institutions? Have you ignored how much more statisitically peaceful your atheistic counterparts are?
Plenty of cultures have been just fine and happy for hundreds of years without having marriages weighted as heavily as ours. Hell, male exclusively led marriages used to be a thing that was on the decline that conservatives used to lambast also. Do you think we should return to that?
> Maybe its because of the debasement of our culture
Good; there are plenty of people that were killed and marginalised because of modern western cultures. LGBTQ violence is still a major issue because of certain western cultures.
Frankly it's not too hard to envision a recursive philosophy where you don't worry about what others are doing so long as they are not interfering with the pursuit of happiness of others. It shouldn't be that difficult to realize that western cultures are not the only means to be happiness and that other cultures have been just as happy for hundreds of years with institutions that directly contradict ours.
Your culture is as welcome and significant to outsiders as much as some mormon's religion is to you on a weekend morning. Don't force it on us because you've grown fond of it; if it was such a great idea for us, we would have bought into it at some point during the first 10,000 times it was mentioned during our childhoods.
I suggest its the poltical news cycle which emphasizes bad news at the expense of good. The US democratic party did not trumpet the progress of recovery from the Great Recession. Instead it focused on the inequalities that remained. True the opposition also focused on the problems of the middle class. But turned 180 degrees once in power claiming to own the economic recovery.
Maybe it's because of widening economic inequality and the fact that peoples’s sure jective feeling about their life condition is driven more by relative than absolute material position.
"Better Angels"—and presumably this book—cuts against the grain of popular discourse, since claiming the world is in decline and a state of moral depredation has always been an effective way to agitate for change. Which is understandable on one level, because so much in the world is still obviously suboptimal. The reaction tends to be: "How can you claim the world is getting better when [insert bad current event stuff here]?!?"
The problem is that so much of this lessening of horribleness came about via imperfect systems. We become focused in our opposition to the system's flaws, and (in some circles) that opposition morphs into opposition to the system as a whole, which is a dangerous kind of thinking if it becomes mainstream.
Not sure I agree. It seems to me that "claiming the world is in decline and a state of moral depredation" has always been primarily a cheap way of bringing attention to yourself, your cause, and gaining popular support. Which is why, for example, journalists love writing doom&gloom articles.
Also, if anything, everyone preaching doomsday makes people depressed, disinterested and detached. If the world is falling apart, what could possibly an individual do? IMO we need the exact opposite now - an optimistic tone that tells people that while there are problems, things are looking up, we're winning, and yes, you can help too.
I haven't read the book but I wonder.. as a billionaire he clearly stands to gain a lot from spreading a message of optimism and collective progress over the last century presumably to maintain status quo when an equally factual but completely opposite perspective on the world (unprecedented levels of inequality, our global lack of response to climate change, etc.) is also there for us to see.
I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.
A lot depends on your viewpoint. What you call "unprecedented levels of inequality" is, at the same time, unprecedented rise in quality of life for pretty much everyone - yes, for some people the improvement was greater than for others, but it's still a big improvement for everyone.
(I don't want to dismiss this issue, but reading about it, sometimes it sounds to me like a case of pretty much the most pathetic human behaviour - getting $10 for free and, instead of being grateful, getting angry that someone else got $1000.)
Hell, WRT climate change, we need some optimism, and we need to devote less time to usual social bickering, and more time to fixing what's important.
> I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.
Everything he's doing nowadays fits perfectly the theory that his motives are pure, and about the well-being of humanity. Is there anything in particular you're aware of that is evidence to the contrary?
> A lot depends on your viewpoint. What you call "unprecedented levels of inequality" is, at the same time, unprecedented rise in quality of life for pretty much everyone
That kind of assumes “quality of life” is a simple function of absolute material wealth and not strongly influenced by relative position. While certainly many people have moral beliefs that that should be the case, there is plenty of reason in all of human history to believe that it is not in fact the case.
Why is inequality a problem? It seems like what people should care about is how well off they are absolutely, not how well off they are relative to other people.
Let me put it this way: if everyone in the human race was so rich that they owned an entire planet full of machines that cater to their every whim, then there might still be people who are "rich" and own thousands of planets. Does that wealth inequality matter? No, it doesn't, because you're still so rich you own a goddamn planet! People who own planets have no reason to be indignant.
The same is true in our world. The only thing that should really matter to people is how well off they are absolutely. Anything more than that is simply coveting other people's wealth. In America, it turns out that even people who are considered "poor" by the government are well off by material possessions:
> As scholar James Q. Wilson has stated, “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.” In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.
> The home of the typical poor family was not overcrowded and was in good repair. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. The typical poor American family was also able to obtain medical care when needed. By its own report, the typical family was not hungry and had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.
The problem is that greater relative wealth turns into greater absolute power, a power which preferentially hoards limited resources whether you need them to survive or not.
If everyone was rich enough to own a planet.. but the richest owned all the planets with food on them, then you are screwed the next time a famine happens and they are not.
Besides: the majority of people would be much better off absolutely if there were less inequality given a fixed amount of wealth. So at no point will people not have a reason to consider inequality a problem unless they are wealthier than average.
I appreciated Sapiens because while it also examines similar measures for how our lives are "improving," it also stops to ask how we decide what those measures should be. Progress is subjective.
How do you feel like Homo Deus compares to Sapiens w.r.t. being hand wavy and having a solid grasp on what the potential futures are that we are facing?
Not OP, but as a reader of both Sapiens and Homo Deus, I feel like the latter is a bit of fluff already covered by the end of Sapiens.
Not a bad book, but more baseless theorizing while Sapiens was a really rich examination of history where he author definitely applied a lifetime of study and research.
I'm surprised that you would describe it as baseless, because the theories he presents are built upon the lifetime of study & research of the examination of human history and motivations.
Good point. I don’t mean baseless as worthless, just that it was largely out of the author’s wheelhouse and was more of his projection of ideas without much in the way of evidence. This differed from Sapiens as it was really rich in historical and anthropological sources.
It’s not bad, just not very valuable as an entire book to read. It’s mostly already covered in the final segment of Sapiens.
Homo Deus is certainly based on the author’s general wisdom and draws upon his study of history. It’s always hard to vet “futurists” to see who is worthwhile.
I guess I can only give my opinion from my own limited world, but I feel to an extent that "reason, science, and humanism" are at need of advocacy today, more than usual. This book might be well timed.
I (like other commenters) am cautious to attribute the lack of Post-WW2 global war to the UN. The development of nuclear weapons seems a far more likely culprit since we now live in the age of MAD (mutually assured destruction).
So I can of course get behind the idea that War is Bad [tm]. The problem is that in evolutionary and social terms it served a purpose. And that purpose was (and is) the ultimate resolution to resource allocation problems.
If you think about how wealth is being concentrated into the hands of very, very few, you can attribute at least some of this to globalisation. Look at historical figures [1] and you see that in inflation-adjusted terms some would be far more wealthy than the wealthiest people of today. What about the likes of Julius or Augustus Caesar? 2000 years of compound interest!
Now it's true that wealth doesn't tend to survive many generations but there are exceptions.
Then look at conflicts like the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution or any number of European conflicts. War really seems like it served the purpose of being the ultimate means of wealth redistribution.
Of course it's ghastly but my question is this: in a stable world without conflict, how is it that the wealthy don't end up owning everything?
And with an ever-rising population bordering on arguably more than the planet can support with ever-dwindling resources, how does this not end with catastrophic conflict since we've virtually eliminated every form of population pressure?
Before the UN, two countries could go to war and nobody else would care. "If they want to go to each other's throats, let them." War was seen as a legitimate extension of politics, not as an absolute last resort only valid for self-defense.
This could probably still be true at least for non-nuclear powers. Instead, we at least try to intervene and stop the fighting. So this argument is not so much about the UN as an institution but about this paradigm shift to see war as something bad that must be stopped ASAP, even if your own country is not involved or in any danger of getting involved.
"The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade. Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter."
However, it's important to note that there is no consensus on why this effect is being observed. There are multiple theories and us having to interpret symbols on smartphones is just one of the proposed ones.
I've had the same experience whenever I go to his page. It seems odd that a guy that needs no money from his website would have one that doesn't display on everything. There are few sites where my blockers block all of the content. This is one of them.
The statement about rising IQ is the Flynn Effect[1]. The fact that IQ has risen over the past 80 years or so is well accepted. Exactly why this is happening is open to debate.
The fourmilab link you mentioned seem to be based on the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations"[2]. They explicitly normalized all IQ data to have Briton as 100. The author then assumes that IQ hasn't changed any in the past 50 years. The author mentions the Flynn effect and then ignores it. Once you do that, you really can't say anything about how IQ is changing over time. Instead he basically ends up measuring the relative growth rates of countries.
The Daily Mail link has a whole bunch of things, the graph they have of lowering world IQ looks pretty much like the one in the fourmilab article, so I suspect it's based on the same data.
I listened to "Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens" by Eddie Izzard base on the last time Bill Gates book recommendations were on HN and it is superb so this is now an automatic buy for me.
Izzard is someone with quite astounding levels of determination - I had no idea until I read the book that his childhood ambition was to join the SAS, which he may well have been quite suited for.
The IQ rise of 3 points per decade has stopped and even reversed in many countries, like UK and Norway. That seems like a very big point to leave out, hopefully it's mentioned in the book.
> War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations.
While this may have kept the 'superpowers' from engaging in direct warfare with each other, it has done nothing to deter them from engaging in proxy wars with eachother. And in the process, devestating the proxy countries. It seems Bill Gates, through all of his philanthropist work, would have realized this first hand.
My point is that war is not "illegal", and the current "deterrent" has done nothing to deter proxy wars in places like (as recent examples) Syria and Yemen. It has also done nothing to deter Russia's invasion of Crimea, the US's boondoggle in Iraq and Afghanistan (nor the extremely vague 'war on terror' that enables the US to arbitrarily attack anyone it perceives as a 'terrorist').
The number of folks experiencing war may be shrinking [citation needed], but it's far from being 'illegal.'
The UN and it's declaration have had nothing to do with the peace we have seen since 1945 - it has been becasue of Pax Americana...and with that on the way out we will see another major war in short order.
Not a comment on the book obviously, but just seizing on the five points enumerated in the review, 1 is pure fluff, 2 is not a very strong point, 2 and 3 are both more first-world applicable, 4 is again more first-world centric I'd imagine, and 5 is entirely irrelevant given that most countries still manage to go to war (unjustified) with total impunity, especially the biggest of them all. What is the use of declaring war illegal? The only thing world nations are afraid of is nuclear war, but never-ending conventional war can still retard humanity's progress significantly. It is not something we can just dismiss.
I'm not sure how any American can read a call to return to Enlightenment values as a feel-good, no-worries pallative. It rather seems to me that such an appeal is a radical declaration of war against the prevailing political winds in America today – on both the left and the right. I would read it as a kick in the pants, not a soothing lullaby.
While I think all this might be true and I am definitely going to read the book, it's also true that humans on average have one testicle. In other words, global statistics aren't actually looking at more local phenomena.
What I really would love to see is it broken down into more detail with regards to geography. I don't think it's evenly spread and I do believe that there are some fundamental problems in the west because of globalization namely being that the cost of living is going up but not everyone is making more.
Anyway, interesting stuff, can't wait to get my fingers in the book.
A comment of his previous book that whitewashed in the most absurd way modern era's industrialized warfare and other horrors, through data selection about thunders and other less important metrics:
This breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please post higher-quality comments, or no comments. Ones like this are actually worse if your underlying view is correct, since in that case they discredit the truth as well.
meh, seems to me like the richest are biased into seeing a 'better' world because that reflects well on their influence.
But is the world really better relative to the progress we've made? I don't think you can use the sort of facts mentioned in the blurb as a case for the increase in Humanism.
The thing that I don't like about books and articles like this is that they promote complacency. They obscure shitty living conditions that billions of people are still living under by pointing to statistical averages and fun concepts like "war is illegal" (which is highly arguable in and of itself).
I am all for recognizing that humanity is maturing, but I think books like this actually slow the pace at which it does so.
I understand your concern but I disagree that Pinker's book will lead to complacency. I believe the opposite: Pinker's book will prevent us from sliding into nihilism and despondency. We have plenty of media and politicians reminding us how terrible the world is; Trump gained the presidency in part by convincing a sizable population that America is declining. We need Pinker to tell us that we are actually making the world a better place.
If the media ever switches to telling us how great the world is all the time then I'll agree with you. :)
I get the exact opposite feeling. Things aren't hopeless and there's no reason to stop pushing for improvement because what we've been doing for the past 100 years is working! Maybe it depends on if you are an optimist or a pessimist.
The vast, vast majority of people in the world have to work most of the best hours of the day in order to pay for shelter from the weather and food for their family. In return they get the dubious privilege of allowing their brain to decompress in front of corporate-manufactured garbage on television.
Although we are not currently in a World War or its aftermath, and therefore our lives could reasonably be said to be better than in, say, 1917, I think this is taking a remarkably short view. There's a solid argument to be had that the life of an average human (well, admittedly a man) in the 17th century was immeasurably richer than the life of an average man in the late 20th / early 21st century, and that this downturn is because of the Enlightenment Pinker worships. Sure, life was shorter, but it's at least arguable that the quantification of life ushered in by the Enlightenment is responsible for the impoverishment of quality as a measure.
A man in the 17th century would likely have to bury at least one of his children because of disease. The man himself might succumb early to painful illness or infection. If he needed to travel for business he would be away from his family for months. If he lived on a farm (as many did) his days would be filled with hard labor and his standard of living would be much lower.
To say nothing of men of color, or gay men, or women, or men who were not landed gentry.
For many, many people, the 17th century was not a good time.
None of us have lived in any other generation, and we don't know what it would be like.
Gates asks "Why do we gloss over positive news stories and fixate on the negative ones?"
I dare you to asks someone on the subway what the DNC scandal was, who Snowden is, why media doesn't report record-breaking protests around the world, what happened at the Dakota pipeline protests, why Americans lack access to affordable healthcare, etc. In my experience, less than 50% of people even know what the DNC scandal is, or who Snowden is. It's not that we're drawn to pessimism.
Civil and constitutional rights are on the decline. The world is getting richer, but psychologists know that money doesn't make us happier (in absolute terms).
It's easy to say we have the greatest society every, and the leaders of such society would be pleased with such.
It's harder to be a skeptic and a critic, but that's how progress is always made.
I feel like people in this thread would also enjoy the excellent podcast How it Began, which is an optimistic take on the history of technologies by Dr. Brad Harris
> The overall theme? Celebration! We are privileged to be descended from men and women who dared to dream big and even die for the cause of progress. Their work is unfinished, and some parts of modernity are even worse than before. But most are better, much better. And we have more tools than ever to fix what’s still broken. How It Began celebrates that progress, and presents a history of the modern world to help inspire its long lasting continuation.
The Blank Slate, another great book by Pinker, is a thorough and fascinating read that lays out the many misconceptions of human nature and its implications. He performs an exorcism on those who confuse morality with nature – myself included.
Every time I hear someone say "The world is getting better" or "We're living in amazing times", it's always a super rich person. Not saying they're wrong or anything, just an observation.
In Rainbows End, vinge argues that a more educated masses allows for the more random, asymmetric terrorism, which gets even much worse when you think of CRISPR, etc.
When i loaded this page i just saw a photo of Gates and a large white space with nothing beneath (screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/vBb99). I saw "Enlightenment Now" in the URL and thought maybe Gates had converted to Buddhism or something. Then i tried reloading the page with my adblocker turned off and the text finally loaded...
If you live in an area with reasonably priced electricity and access to plentiful water. I lived in Honduras for 3 years (2009 - 2012) and laundry consumed far too much of my time because water in the community came twice per week, and electricity was expensive. I had a cistern which was connected to the water main, and I installed a floating shut off valve so that I could leave the valve open to fill with water when it came without notice and invariably I was out working. I couldn't afford a dryer due to high cost of electricity and I was volunteering without any spare income during that period so I had to wash and dry clothes on sunny days. There were people in the community that still washed clothes by hand using a scrub board and I know that they spent many hours weekly on it.
..on laundry, that hour and a half is spent washing a lot more clothes than the eleven before. If we had the limited wardrobes of those people, it'd probably be down to twenty minutes.
On the flip side, 11 hours seems high. I've washed clothes by hand before; it doesn't take that long and in fact it's faster than washing by machine (though you can't do something else at the same time).
If you're only washing your clothes maybe but 11 hours a week sounds reasonable if one person is washing clothes for a family + hanging/collecting/folding
Something more interesting would be learn how to more quickly improve the world. The world of 2100 could arrive in 2050, for example.
Gates has around $100 billion to improve the world. How to most effectively leverage his money, for example?
Build a better pharmaceutical company and cure some of the diseases on his list? Help to create better economies in Africa?
[UPDATE]
This comment got downvoted fast. I guess I’ll be happy with the improvements and learn to live with the current rate of progress.
Any other feel good comments from the book that I could use at a party?
[UPDATE]
Don’t want to waste fu karma today. So, answer is half the world’s population lives in cities. Perhaps we could increase by making them more liveable. I’m all for reducing the human footprint on the world. Wildlife crossings, fewer roads and cars, less plastic, etc. How about a billion people move one planet over? A lot depends on increasing knowledge and reducing costs. Let’s increase the rate of innovation!
My two cents on population: cars are a cancer on modernity. For a hundred years we have structured cities and societies around the automobile. As a result we as a species are largely bound to an expensive machine and a design of society that cannot function without that expensive machine. Many cities (especially in America, which is an enormous country with lots of space) are so sprawled out and gutted from public transit (thanks GM!) that transportation is impossible without the automobile. It’s even worse when you factor in the fact that a lot of freight is also required to be moved by automobile.
Sprawl increases costs of transportation and infrastructure (roads, water, gas, electric, sewage) by an enormous degree. This in turn raises the cost of everything else to everybody.
Even a perfect Jason Statham self-driving car would serve as a band-aid over a diseased organ.
The very difficult question we must ask if we expect to maintain our standard of living with a growing population and a planet rotting from overconsumption is how do we redesign ALL cities to operate at the lowest possible cost per person. Otherwise we continue to pass along the cost to the planet and the next generations...assuming there will be any...
Absolutely - even if everyone read this and suddenly feels complacent about our progress - what's next? Everyone is scared to talk about population growth - I mean at what point do we decide that we don't want to erase all unpopulated land simple because its there and fill it with humans. What about populations of wild animals - don't they get to share the earth with us? I feel like the movies about aliens coming and killing all humans is exactly how we treat animals on this planet. Just because they don't use verbal communication doesn't mean they should be slaughtered for our food. Why does progress always have to be pro-human?
I have yet to meet anyone who gave a good answer to this question. It is obvious that we (as a species) behave like this because we can get away with it. Plain & simple. Whether it is a good long-term strategy is unclear to our brains that refuse to look at far-off effects. Time will tell.
Besides moral relativism helps us to justify much of our destructive behaviour and inability to accept hard changes that might be necessary to make the world better for all living things.
Good on Bill Gates to not just choose a feel-good book for sake of "virtue signaling", but a book with real substance in it. (The fact that this book happens to be optimistic is incidental)
I dunno how strong it is, but I have a feeling that the virtue signalling you mention is at least tangentially at odds with the "reason, science, and humanism" he mentions.
Based on the URL of the OP, I think it's Steven Pinker's new book shipping on February 27: "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress"
Charles Kuralt has an old documentary about the shopping mall. He mourns outdoor shopping downtown, worries about progress, then eventually gives up and announces, "Well, this is the way we live now."
I think Pinker's right. I hope he is. But it's hard to evaluate claims that extend so far beyond human lifespans. The empires in Persia bounced between progressive tolerance and tyrannical repression for stretches of over two hundred years. From Gobleki Tepe's perspective, our entire known history is a blip... too little data for any coherent long run analysis.
Love Pinker but thought this was too funny not to share: "Steven Pinker jinxes the world" on how a lot of the trends that he spoke about started to stall and even reverse since the publication of the book.
Pinker wants to establish metrics to evaluate the state of the world. Once he establishes the metrics, he wants to show that the state of the world is improving over time. Showing improvement by these metrics, he wants us to celebrate this. This is easy to appreciate. He is right. There really are large differences in living and these differences are commonly experienced as better. There is real cause for celebration and continued efforts at improvement. If this were all he was doing, his book might be universally praised.
But despite the truth of his cited facts, Pinker makes many common errors in reasoning when he attempts to claim sweeping philosophical conclusions from his series of empirical observations.
You can see Pinker's faulty thinking in his attempt to define progress:
"What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable… Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness… All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress."
Progress may exist. It is not established by whether most people agree on something or not. That the majority believes something to be the case, does not make the thing the case. It does inform us, namely of how humans experience the something but it does not establish the something to be the case.
He repeats this error moments later:
"Granted, not every one would agree on the exact list."
Whether every one did agree on the exact list wouldn't change the situation. That 100% of Earth believed X would not make X the case.
He follows this with a fallacy:
"If you’re reading this, you are not dead, starving, destitute, moribund, terrified, enslaved, or illiterate, which means that you’re in no position to turn your nose up at these values."
This is a cute display of polemic but not a valid argument. The fact that I can read, does not establish that reading is good. Reading may be good but whether reading is good or not is not at all determined by whether I can read or not. His sentence here is something that seems that way but is not true (my freedom does not establish what I must value).
He continues with his previous rule-of-majority error:
"As it happens, the world does agree on these values. In the year 2000, all 189 members of the United Nations, together with two dozen international organizations, agreed on eight Millennium Development Goals for the year 2015 that blend right into this list."
Again, even if all 7 billion people expressed that they believe "murder is wrong" this would not establish that murder is wrong.
This isn't to say that murder is not wrong. It's just to say that pointing out what humans do cannot establish what is wrong. Murder is wrong objectively (independent of human minds and their opinions and perceptions) or it is not wrong at all. Anything else is merely observation of what humans happen to hold or happen to practice. Pinker, Sam Harris, and others on the TED stage attempt to ignore this troublesome hindrance to the worldview they promote, dismissing it with a wave of their hand when it is raised and moving along with their presentation. The widely-held feelings and sentiments of humans everywhere do tell us something, just not what Pinker and Harris suggest: there is an intrinsic understanding of right and wrong in every human and we should pay attention that this is present. But this doesn't change the situation that values are objective realities or they are merely subjective whims/emotions/opinions (and may be treated like all other whims/emotions/opinions: ignored).
Pinker as a discussion of what is happening–fine, useful, needed. Pinker suggesting both that many values many humans happen to hold should be held and on this basis and that those who notice this is not philosophically sound are simply pessimists–laughable.
Options vary. The first option is to admit defeat and adopt Moral Nonrealism. Most of academia and global intelligentsia have done this; Pinker finds them frustrating as fuddy-duddy spoilsports for insisting on logically-sound conclusions.
The other option is to adopt Moral Realism (ie, Theism). This won't please Pinker either.
Lawyer and political commentator Ben Shapiro also explains this on the libertarian-themed and ethics-focused show The Rubin Report here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9IwamztdqA
Somehow I knew you were going to lean on theism, I should have put that in my comment, oh well.
Nuts to that. I live in the real world.
The actual action of morality can have no basis except consensus. Biology is morality free as is physics. Even if you insist there's a "pure" moral law somewhere you still have to enforce it or it's a toothless theory. Then to enforce it you really have to get down to brass tacks and democracy.
>The actual action of morality can have no basis except consensus.
If we said this, what we'd be saying is roughly "what a society does in aggregate is based on what the majority of individuals in a society agree to do" (a tautology).
>Biology is morality free as is physics.
Exactly! Moral facts cannot be determined by empirical observation. If you limited yourself to empirical observation ("Empiricism") as you seem to do, you are left with Moral Nonrealism.
>Even if you insist there's a "pure" moral law somewhere you still have to enforce it or it's a toothless theory.
What's in question is "do morals facts exist". You're saying "Alright, if moral facts exist they'd need to be enforced by a society in order to ensure the society complied with them". This is true; but in the same way that the society's acknowledgement that the moral facts exist doesn't change their existence, the society's enforcement of them also doesn't affect if they exist or what they are.
>Then to enforce it you really have to get down to brass tacks and democracy.
Democracy is one way that certain societies have chosen to organise themselves. They are often very effective at enforcing what a society believes to be correct. But this isn't disputed. What humans do –what they believe, what they say, what ethics they choose to conduct themselves by, how they organise with each other to enforce agreed upon norms– and whether these behaviors help them survive or thrive–is not in contention. These are just observations of what humans do (anthropology, etc).
For Ben Shapiro's explanation, you can see the video starting at 45:44 through 59:20. As he puts it, "you don't get to burn down my house and then use the planks from my house to build your own philosophy". Here's a link to just that section: https://www.youtube.com/embed/s9IwamztdqA?start=2744&end=356...
> Exactly! Moral facts cannot be determined by empirical observation.
I didn't say that at all. Moral facts can be (can only be) found by empirical observation. The observation of what PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO. Anything else is academic masturbation. Sure, you can ask people and take their answers with a grain of salt, but you'll be running around in tautological circle diving morals from ancient books or poetic 'truths'.
> I didn't say that at all. Moral facts can be (can only be) found by empirical observation. The observation of what PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO.
That renders the “moral” part meaningless. What is moral is what people ought to do, irrespective of what they actually do. Now, you can argue that morality is a null concept, and thus “morsl facts” is necessarily an empty set (and if you start with a premise of strict materialism, this conclusion is inevitable; there is only “is”, no “ought”), but you can't coherently argue that moral facts both exist and can be determined by empirical observation of behavior.
Morality is how people react to what is done, how they enforce the rules and such. That's the "doing" I'm pointing at. I'm sorry if that was unclear in my initial statement. It seems you may have thought I was assuming perfect moral behavior from all people. No, that's silly. People are cheating trash, lol. Not all the time, of course, but it's in the grain.
Morality is as fractal as truth is, entirely dependent on the depth of questions being asked, the edge of inside and outside determined on the number of iterations. And morality is certainly not something to be determined in the vacuum of thought, it's a gritty, dirty, and nasty thing with edges in the slow slime and quick muck, it's ornate and like the rest of reality.
> but you can't coherently argue that physical facts both exist and can be determined by empirical observation...
That is a loose description of one sense of the word, but not the sense associated with “moral facts” in its usual use. “Morality” can refer to either “what ought to be done” or to “beliefs about what ought to be done”; the elements of the former (if they exist as facts, a point which is a matter of substantial dispute) are “moral facts”; the elements of the latter are “facts about morality” or, more clearly, “facts about moral sentiments”. The latter indisputably exist and are normal material facts subject to empirical inquiry, but they aren't the same thing as the former, nor (even assuming the former exist) do they have any necessary relationship to the former.
> How else do you propose we establish morality if not by consensus?
Just accept that whether or not morality has any universal external existence, neither that existence nor, a fortiori, its actual content can actually be objectively established.
Admittedly, that allows less opportunity for definitive point-scoring, but I'm willing to accept that point-scoring isn't the central purpose of life.
"...we are living in the most peaceful time in human history..."
Tell that to the people in Iraq. Under phony pretext their country was invaded, over a million people died. Destabilizing the whole middle east is still in full swing arming non-state entities, even groups which are in the terror organizations list (YPG, PKK, etc.)
A bomb blasts and kills 100 people in Afghanistan and it is not even news anymore.
I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).
Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."