> Linguist Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, arguing that despite the violence in regions like Iraq & Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species existence. “[W]hy has violence declined?… I have read four explanations, all of which, I think, have some grain of plausibility. The first is, maybe Thomas Hobbes got it right. He was the one who said that life in a state of nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, & short. Not because, he argued, humans have some primordial thirst for blood or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative, but because of the logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, theres a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively, before they invade you… The second explanation is that in many times and places, there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap. In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common in ones own life, one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. And as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant, one puts a higher value on life in general. This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne… A third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game, & was worked out in the book Nonzero by the journalist Robert Wright. Wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in, by allowing the trade of goods, services & ideas over longer distances & among larger groups of people. The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead, & violence declines for selfish reasons… The fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book called The Expanding Circle, by the philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy, an ability to treat other peoples interests as comparable to ones own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. People outside that circle are treated as sub-human, & can be exploited with impunity. But over history, the circle has expanded.”
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 22:06:49 +0000
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