That’s not obvious to me. I understand that there is considerable debate over the secular trend of violence over timeline measured in centuries.
Steven Pinker has put forward the most comprehensive argument I’m aware of in The Better Angels of our Nature in favor of the position that violence is declining over time, no matter how you reasonably measure it. Among the people I know working on this (I’ve met a few), the uncertainty is over the causes, not the trend itself. But I suppose there could be biases at play still, given that they self-selected to work on these issues.
That all said, I don’t think it contradicts the point you are making. There are many reasons that violence is subsiding, as Mr. PInker goes over. But ultimately we are moving over time towards stronger states, and the state’s position is based on having a monopoly on violence. When the state has assured its own security, it no longer needs to exercise that power, just threaten it. And after a generation of conditioning, that threat need no longer be brandished—people just know their roles and fulfill them, with only the deviants being labelled as ‘criminals’ and having state violence applied against them. So we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up.
Yes, I think he is the primary proponent of the violence-is-declining argument and his book served as the focus for these discussions.
So we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up.
That’s a valid point, but it applies only to the violence between the state and its subjects. There is also inter-state violence which tends to account for most of the corpses plus raiding/predation by the state outside of its own borders (see the recent American adventures in the Middle East after the Iraq war).
Plus there is also the commonly-ignored distinction between showing that a historical trend existed and making a forecast: saying that this trend will continue in the future. Given that we live in interesting times, I would be wary of assuming that historical trends will just extrapolate.
I suggest reading the book or watching his master course lecture. He deals with exactly these objections in more detail than I’m willing to regurgitate.
I have seen it suggested that Pinker’s alleged observation of declining violence is something of a statistical artefact—violent death has a heavy-tailed distribution, so the usual methods of estimating trends may fail badly.
we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up
That may be true, but the context here is a discussion of whether we should see joy in crushing one’s enemies as an essential and stable part of human nature. I think there’s an important difference between joy in crushing one’s enemies and the practical expedience of threatening to crush one’s enemies, from that perspective.
That may be true, but the context here is a discussion of whether we should see joy in crushing one’s enemies as an essential and stable part of human nature.
Taking joy in vengeance / revenge is pretty darn universal. It seems really strange to have to justify this, given the preponderance of evidence in the form of literature, plays, and myth from all cultures.
Some degree of joy-in-vengeance appears to be built into human biology, yes. Zack suggests that it isn’t “stable under reflection”: that is, if we were able to modify our values, then even though at present we have some tendency to rejoice in the suffering of our enemies we would (if smart enough) choose to stop doing so.
I think there is some evidence to support this, and in particular to support the idea that we have, on a timescale of centuries, modified our values to involve less rejoicing in the suffering of enemies.
This is one of those discussions where it seems like each comment is addressing a question just slightly different from the previous comment’s, and after a while there’s severe divergence, so let’s take it from the top for context’s sake.
Zack originally claimed that ” the forces of memetic evolution are somewhat benevolent” on the grounds that ideas that spread “have to be genuinely appealing to some feature of human psychology”.
Lumifer objected that appealing to human psychology and benevelonce are very different things, offering the example of crushing one’s enemies.
I think this is a reasonable objection.
Zack countered that the joy of crushing one’s enemies is probably not stable under reflection.
I’m not sure this is relevant to the foregoing discussion, but I think it’s right. As evidence I remark that most people thinking about values seem to conclude that taking joy in crushing one’s enemies is mostly a bad thing. Most systems of ethics either condemn it explicitly or embrace principles that imply condemning it.
Lumifer said: no, the joy of crushing one’s enemies should be very stable because it or something very like it is biologically hardwired.
This looks to me like a very different notion of stability from Zack’s: something strongly enough hardwired will be Lumifer-stable even if it’s so clearly opposed to our other explicitly-held values as to be definitely not Zack-stable.
Whether that’s a problem depends on why Zack considered the notion of stability-under-reflection relevant in the first place, which I am not certain of.
It also looks empirically wrong to me. For sure, joy-in-crushing-enemies hasn’t completely disappeared from human nature (no doubt for exactly the reasons Lumifer gave) -- but it seems to me to have become much less pronounced and much less important in how societies work, over (say) the last couple of thousand years. At least in the societies LW people are almost all part of.
Lumifer claimed, more specifically, that literal enemy-crushing—smashing skulls, and all that—is still commonplace. (Again, as an objection to Zack’s claim that joy-in-crushing-enemies isn’t stable under reflection.)
This is again clearly concerned with Lumifer-stability (does it in fact persist given human nature?) rather than Zack-stability (would we keep it if we had the choice?).
And it also looks empirically doubtful at best. Most of “Western civilization”, which of course is far from being the whole world but is a big chunk of it, has treated joy in literal skullcrushing as socially unacceptable in almost all circumstances for quite some time, and this doesn’t seem to have done us any particular harm. The existence of skullcrushing in (overt and less-overt) wars far away, and the theoretical threat of skullcrushing for those too obdurately unwilling to obey the law, are irrelevant, since they don’t offer most of us any opportunities for actual joyful skullcrushing.
So: sure, we’re hardwired for some degree of vengefulness; sure, some amount of (actual or threatened) skullcrushing is necessary for practical reasons. Yet, despite those things, we in the allegedly-civilized West mostly manage to get by with no literal skullcrushing at all and not all that much metaphorical skullcrushing, and our societies are pretty successful by any reasonable measure, more so I think than societies that still embrace skullcrushing as a source of joy.
That is, joy in crushing our enemies, in “our” societies,
is generally condemned by people and institutions that have thought hard about values
has been quite successfully suppressed
without obvious adverse consequences
despite biological hardwiring and occasional pragmatic necessity
all of which seems to me to support Zack’s contention that it’s not stable under reflection.
That is, joy in crushing our enemies, in “our” societies (*) is generally condemned by people and institutions that have thought hard about values; (*) has been quite successfully suppressed; (*) without obvious adverse consequences; (*) despite biological hardwiring and occasional pragmatic necessity.
Let’s try a couple of examples: (a) WW2; (b) Islamic terrorism.
Plus, there is the usual problem of what to do when Joyous Skullcrushers come swinging their clubs.
Would you care to make some actual argument explicit enough to be debated? I mean, if I’d claimed that violence has been completely eradicated from the world then those examples would refute me very nicely, but I haven’t said anything of the sort.
what to do when Joyous Skullcrushers come swinging their clubs
Die. Or, if you get more advance warning, send in the police or army, institutions developed so that a largely non-skullcrushing society can survive despite the existence of other skullcrushers.
What proposition is it that you think you’re arguing against?
Would you care to make some actual argument explicit enough to be debated?
You don’t think keeping your guessing is more fun? :-)
I would probably argue that a society’s attitude to the biological aggressiveness and lust for power is variable and depends on the society’s current needs. In peacetime, without major threats, you want the population to sit down, shut up, and emulate a flock of sheep. Rocking the boat is baaaad. There is an exception for police/army types since you need to maintain a credible threat of violence.
However the world is not a safe place. One a serious threat materializes, you want your population, notably your young men, to be raring to go crush some skulls of the hated enemies. And suddenly it becomes a desireable feature—go kill the Huns! kill the Japs! No angst, kill them to feel good about yourself.
If your population becomes sufficiently sheepified and you happen to have a big bad wolf as a neighbour, though, you have problems. Certainly, it’s neither necessary nor sufficient to be a sheep in order to find yourself eaten, but lacking the willingness to fight eases the way into someone’s stomach.
So I think that the underlying brutishness is a valuable feature that societies (“elties”, maybe) want to switch on and off at will, depending on the circumstances. I’m guessing you’re mostly focused on the long period of peace in Europe post-WW2 and I’m taking a bit wider and a bit longer view.
I’m guessing you’re mostly focused on the long period of peace in Europe post-WW2 and I’m taking a bit wider and a bit longer view.
I’m saying that given that we’ve managed several decades of non-skullcrushing, and they seem to have been on the whole pretty good decades by most measures, it seems clear that skullcrushing-lust is not an unavoidable feature of human psychology, nor in “reasonable” times is it a sorely-needed one.
That’s perfectly consistent with saying, as you did and I think I would agree, that sometimes The Powers That Be find it convenient to encourage a substantial part of the population to feel skullcrushing-lust directed a particular way. Or even with saying, as you did though I think I probably disagree, that sometimes it’s actually necessary for the benefit of the people as a whole for them to feel skullcrushing-lust. (I think a country can have pretty effective armed forces even if they aren’t in it for the joy of seeing people crushed, blown up, sliced to bits, etc.)
Incidentally, I think your sheep metaphor conflates peacefulness with obedience. Those who rule want obedient people all the time; sometimes they want obediently peaceful people, sometimes obediently bloodthirsty ones. As far as obedience goes, in skullcrushing mode the people aren’t any less sheep-like.
we’ve managed several decades of non-skullcrushing
By “we” you mean the rich developed countries, right? I don’t think Sub-Saharan Africa ever stopped and Middle East isn’t too far behind...
I’m not sure that your point demonstrates that skullcrushing-lust is “avoidable”. What it shows is that it can be successfully controlled and channeled.
I think your sheep metaphor conflates peacefulness with obedience
Good point about obedience, but I mean not just that. Since population control is still quite imperfect :-/ the mood of the population matters. Being obedient is correlated with the position on the docile—bloodthirsty axis. I disagree that in the skullcrushing mode people are just as obedient—I think they are less obedient. You might be able compensate for that because they are more easily manipulated and redirected, but that’s a slightly different thing.
By “we” you mean the rich developed countries, right?
Near enough, yes.
What it shows is that it can be successfully controlled and channeled.
I think this may just be a disagreement about definitions.
I ask again: What proposition is it that you think you’re arguing against?
Being obedient is correlated with the position on the docile-bloodthirsty axis.
I beg leave to doubt this, or at least to doubt whether it has the significance it seems you’re suggesting. If you consider only times of peace when TPTB want docile (I note in passing that yet again you’re choosing terminology that encourages equivocation between “peaceful” and “obedient”) sheep, then of course obedience will be correlated with docility. But if you consider only times of war when TPTB want bloodthirsty sheep, you’ll find obedience correlated with bloodthirstiness. Lately peace is more common than war, and it’s mostly only the youngish men that TPTB want to be bloodthirsty, so no doubt overall the correlation with peacefulness is positive. I think that reflects the fact that peacefulness is usually more useful than bloodthirstiness, not a fundamental link between peacefulness and obedience.
I’m maybe overstating my case a bit. People have moods in which they want to burn the world down, and those tend to be less obedient and more bloodthirsty. So there probably is some genuine correlation between obedience and peacefulness that isn’t just a matter of peace being, well, mostly better than war. But I think your choices of metaphor are liable to push readers towards thinking there’s much such correlation than there is.
What proposition is it that you think you’re arguing against?
That we can get rid of bloodthirstiness in humans easily enough.
But if you consider only times of war when TPTB want bloodthirsty sheep, you’ll find obedience correlated with bloodthirstiness.
I don’t think so. Let me make a caricature of my position so that it becomes clearer: humans have a violent beast inside them which civilization contains and tries to tame. This beast is not obedient by its nature. In peacetime TPTB make the containment cage as strong as possible, but in wartime the cage is open and the beast is let loose. There is less obedience, but that’s the price you pay for the ability to smash. Think berserkers.
I shudder to imagine what kind of thinking on the part of my readers will this metaphor push them towards :-P
That we can get rid of bloodthirstiness in humans easily enough.
Well, depending on what you mean by “we”, “get rid of” and “in humans” my answer is somewhere between “yes we can, and we have, and we can see that all around us” and “well, duh, of course we can’t, and no one claimed otherwise” :-).
Let me make a caricature of my position [...] violent beast [...] not obedient by its nature [...] containment cage.
OK, so the corresponding caricature of my position goes like this: humans do indeed have such a beast, but it can in fact be tamed as well as contained, and in many humans it is well enough tamed that its existence is scarcely detectable, and taming it doesn’t appear to do anyone any harm. If released, the beast doesn’t obey its human very well, but that’s largely orthogonal to the (dis)obedience of individual humans to the society they’re in and its leaders. In particular, the idea that individuals will become more free if they release the beast is an error, often deliberately fostered by people of malign intentions; the actual main effects of releasing the beast are (1) that you are more at the mercy of the beast, which you do not control well, and (2) that you are more at the mercy of TPTB, if they happen to be the sort of PTB that are good at manipulating people by throwing red meat to their beasts.
Under the assumption that this segregated part of the society, the Beast Riders (commonly called the armed forces), will be adequate to stop the Joyous Skullcrushers if and when they appear.
the idea that individuals will become more free if they release the beast is an error
Steven Pinker has put forward the most comprehensive argument I’m aware of in The Better Angels of our Nature in favor of the position that violence is declining over time, no matter how you reasonably measure it. Among the people I know working on this (I’ve met a few), the uncertainty is over the causes, not the trend itself. But I suppose there could be biases at play still, given that they self-selected to work on these issues.
That all said, I don’t think it contradicts the point you are making. There are many reasons that violence is subsiding, as Mr. PInker goes over. But ultimately we are moving over time towards stronger states, and the state’s position is based on having a monopoly on violence. When the state has assured its own security, it no longer needs to exercise that power, just threaten it. And after a generation of conditioning, that threat need no longer be brandished—people just know their roles and fulfill them, with only the deviants being labelled as ‘criminals’ and having state violence applied against them. So we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up.
Yes, I think he is the primary proponent of the violence-is-declining argument and his book served as the focus for these discussions.
That’s a valid point, but it applies only to the violence between the state and its subjects. There is also inter-state violence which tends to account for most of the corpses plus raiding/predation by the state outside of its own borders (see the recent American adventures in the Middle East after the Iraq war).
Plus there is also the commonly-ignored distinction between showing that a historical trend existed and making a forecast: saying that this trend will continue in the future. Given that we live in interesting times, I would be wary of assuming that historical trends will just extrapolate.
I suggest reading the book or watching his master course lecture. He deals with exactly these objections in more detail than I’m willing to regurgitate.
I have seen it suggested that Pinker’s alleged observation of declining violence is something of a statistical artefact—violent death has a heavy-tailed distribution, so the usual methods of estimating trends may fail badly.
That may be true, but the context here is a discussion of whether we should see joy in crushing one’s enemies as an essential and stable part of human nature. I think there’s an important difference between joy in crushing one’s enemies and the practical expedience of threatening to crush one’s enemies, from that perspective.
Taking joy in vengeance / revenge is pretty darn universal. It seems really strange to have to justify this, given the preponderance of evidence in the form of literature, plays, and myth from all cultures.
Some degree of joy-in-vengeance appears to be built into human biology, yes. Zack suggests that it isn’t “stable under reflection”: that is, if we were able to modify our values, then even though at present we have some tendency to rejoice in the suffering of our enemies we would (if smart enough) choose to stop doing so.
I think there is some evidence to support this, and in particular to support the idea that we have, on a timescale of centuries, modified our values to involve less rejoicing in the suffering of enemies.
This is one of those discussions where it seems like each comment is addressing a question just slightly different from the previous comment’s, and after a while there’s severe divergence, so let’s take it from the top for context’s sake.
Zack originally claimed that ” the forces of memetic evolution are somewhat benevolent” on the grounds that ideas that spread “have to be genuinely appealing to some feature of human psychology”.
Lumifer objected that appealing to human psychology and benevelonce are very different things, offering the example of crushing one’s enemies.
I think this is a reasonable objection.
Zack countered that the joy of crushing one’s enemies is probably not stable under reflection.
I’m not sure this is relevant to the foregoing discussion, but I think it’s right. As evidence I remark that most people thinking about values seem to conclude that taking joy in crushing one’s enemies is mostly a bad thing. Most systems of ethics either condemn it explicitly or embrace principles that imply condemning it.
Lumifer said: no, the joy of crushing one’s enemies should be very stable because it or something very like it is biologically hardwired.
This looks to me like a very different notion of stability from Zack’s: something strongly enough hardwired will be Lumifer-stable even if it’s so clearly opposed to our other explicitly-held values as to be definitely not Zack-stable.
Whether that’s a problem depends on why Zack considered the notion of stability-under-reflection relevant in the first place, which I am not certain of.
It also looks empirically wrong to me. For sure, joy-in-crushing-enemies hasn’t completely disappeared from human nature (no doubt for exactly the reasons Lumifer gave) -- but it seems to me to have become much less pronounced and much less important in how societies work, over (say) the last couple of thousand years. At least in the societies LW people are almost all part of.
Lumifer claimed, more specifically, that literal enemy-crushing—smashing skulls, and all that—is still commonplace. (Again, as an objection to Zack’s claim that joy-in-crushing-enemies isn’t stable under reflection.)
This is again clearly concerned with Lumifer-stability (does it in fact persist given human nature?) rather than Zack-stability (would we keep it if we had the choice?).
And it also looks empirically doubtful at best. Most of “Western civilization”, which of course is far from being the whole world but is a big chunk of it, has treated joy in literal skullcrushing as socially unacceptable in almost all circumstances for quite some time, and this doesn’t seem to have done us any particular harm. The existence of skullcrushing in (overt and less-overt) wars far away, and the theoretical threat of skullcrushing for those too obdurately unwilling to obey the law, are irrelevant, since they don’t offer most of us any opportunities for actual joyful skullcrushing.
So: sure, we’re hardwired for some degree of vengefulness; sure, some amount of (actual or threatened) skullcrushing is necessary for practical reasons. Yet, despite those things, we in the allegedly-civilized West mostly manage to get by with no literal skullcrushing at all and not all that much metaphorical skullcrushing, and our societies are pretty successful by any reasonable measure, more so I think than societies that still embrace skullcrushing as a source of joy.
That is, joy in crushing our enemies, in “our” societies,
is generally condemned by people and institutions that have thought hard about values
has been quite successfully suppressed
without obvious adverse consequences
despite biological hardwiring and occasional pragmatic necessity
all of which seems to me to support Zack’s contention that it’s not stable under reflection.
Let’s try a couple of examples: (a) WW2; (b) Islamic terrorism.
Plus, there is the usual problem of what to do when Joyous Skullcrushers come swinging their clubs.
Would you care to make some actual argument explicit enough to be debated? I mean, if I’d claimed that violence has been completely eradicated from the world then those examples would refute me very nicely, but I haven’t said anything of the sort.
Die. Or, if you get more advance warning, send in the police or army, institutions developed so that a largely non-skullcrushing society can survive despite the existence of other skullcrushers.
What proposition is it that you think you’re arguing against?
You don’t think keeping your guessing is more fun? :-)
I would probably argue that a society’s attitude to the biological aggressiveness and lust for power is variable and depends on the society’s current needs. In peacetime, without major threats, you want the population to sit down, shut up, and emulate a flock of sheep. Rocking the boat is baaaad. There is an exception for police/army types since you need to maintain a credible threat of violence.
However the world is not a safe place. One a serious threat materializes, you want your population, notably your young men, to be raring to go crush some skulls of the hated enemies. And suddenly it becomes a desireable feature—go kill the Huns! kill the Japs! No angst, kill them to feel good about yourself.
If your population becomes sufficiently sheepified and you happen to have a big bad wolf as a neighbour, though, you have problems. Certainly, it’s neither necessary nor sufficient to be a sheep in order to find yourself eaten, but lacking the willingness to fight eases the way into someone’s stomach.
So I think that the underlying brutishness is a valuable feature that societies (“elties”, maybe) want to switch on and off at will, depending on the circumstances. I’m guessing you’re mostly focused on the long period of peace in Europe post-WW2 and I’m taking a bit wider and a bit longer view.
For whom?
I’m saying that given that we’ve managed several decades of non-skullcrushing, and they seem to have been on the whole pretty good decades by most measures, it seems clear that skullcrushing-lust is not an unavoidable feature of human psychology, nor in “reasonable” times is it a sorely-needed one.
That’s perfectly consistent with saying, as you did and I think I would agree, that sometimes The Powers That Be find it convenient to encourage a substantial part of the population to feel skullcrushing-lust directed a particular way. Or even with saying, as you did though I think I probably disagree, that sometimes it’s actually necessary for the benefit of the people as a whole for them to feel skullcrushing-lust. (I think a country can have pretty effective armed forces even if they aren’t in it for the joy of seeing people crushed, blown up, sliced to bits, etc.)
Incidentally, I think your sheep metaphor conflates peacefulness with obedience. Those who rule want obedient people all the time; sometimes they want obediently peaceful people, sometimes obediently bloodthirsty ones. As far as obedience goes, in skullcrushing mode the people aren’t any less sheep-like.
By “we” you mean the rich developed countries, right? I don’t think Sub-Saharan Africa ever stopped and Middle East isn’t too far behind...
I’m not sure that your point demonstrates that skullcrushing-lust is “avoidable”. What it shows is that it can be successfully controlled and channeled.
Good point about obedience, but I mean not just that. Since population control is still quite imperfect :-/ the mood of the population matters. Being obedient is correlated with the position on the docile—bloodthirsty axis. I disagree that in the skullcrushing mode people are just as obedient—I think they are less obedient. You might be able compensate for that because they are more easily manipulated and redirected, but that’s a slightly different thing.
Near enough, yes.
I think this may just be a disagreement about definitions.
I ask again: What proposition is it that you think you’re arguing against?
I beg leave to doubt this, or at least to doubt whether it has the significance it seems you’re suggesting. If you consider only times of peace when TPTB want docile (I note in passing that yet again you’re choosing terminology that encourages equivocation between “peaceful” and “obedient”) sheep, then of course obedience will be correlated with docility. But if you consider only times of war when TPTB want bloodthirsty sheep, you’ll find obedience correlated with bloodthirstiness. Lately peace is more common than war, and it’s mostly only the youngish men that TPTB want to be bloodthirsty, so no doubt overall the correlation with peacefulness is positive. I think that reflects the fact that peacefulness is usually more useful than bloodthirstiness, not a fundamental link between peacefulness and obedience.
I’m maybe overstating my case a bit. People have moods in which they want to burn the world down, and those tend to be less obedient and more bloodthirsty. So there probably is some genuine correlation between obedience and peacefulness that isn’t just a matter of peace being, well, mostly better than war. But I think your choices of metaphor are liable to push readers towards thinking there’s much such correlation than there is.
That we can get rid of bloodthirstiness in humans easily enough.
I don’t think so. Let me make a caricature of my position so that it becomes clearer: humans have a violent beast inside them which civilization contains and tries to tame. This beast is not obedient by its nature. In peacetime TPTB make the containment cage as strong as possible, but in wartime the cage is open and the beast is let loose. There is less obedience, but that’s the price you pay for the ability to smash. Think berserkers.
I shudder to imagine what kind of thinking on the part of my readers will this metaphor push them towards :-P
Well, depending on what you mean by “we”, “get rid of” and “in humans” my answer is somewhere between “yes we can, and we have, and we can see that all around us” and “well, duh, of course we can’t, and no one claimed otherwise” :-).
OK, so the corresponding caricature of my position goes like this: humans do indeed have such a beast, but it can in fact be tamed as well as contained, and in many humans it is well enough tamed that its existence is scarcely detectable, and taming it doesn’t appear to do anyone any harm. If released, the beast doesn’t obey its human very well, but that’s largely orthogonal to the (dis)obedience of individual humans to the society they’re in and its leaders. In particular, the idea that individuals will become more free if they release the beast is an error, often deliberately fostered by people of malign intentions; the actual main effects of releasing the beast are (1) that you are more at the mercy of the beast, which you do not control well, and (2) that you are more at the mercy of TPTB, if they happen to be the sort of PTB that are good at manipulating people by throwing red meat to their beasts.
Indeed :-)
Under the assumption that this segregated part of the society, the Beast Riders (commonly called the armed forces), will be adequate to stop the Joyous Skullcrushers if and when they appear.
Yes, I agree with that.