What Planet Does He Live On? Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 4.

A silhouette showing a police officer striking a person, symbolising police brutality.
Artwork by liftarn and is in the public domain.

In regard to his argument that the “better angels” of human nature have been bringing about a decline in global violence, Steven Pinker comments that some people, deceived by all the horror stories they have ingested from the popular media, take offense at his optimism. He asserts that arguing for a steady decline in violence “invites skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger.” My assertion is that much of the anger directed at his claims is due not to the idea that violence may be declining but to his obdurate failure to own up to the many forms of violence today that may have little effect on him but destroy the lives of millions of others.

Pinker says, for example, that in the “developed world” of which he is so proud, “the civil rights movement obliterated lynchings”; indeed, as a scientist committed to the convincing power of numbers, he claims, “Lynchings of African Americans used to take place at a rate of 150 a year. During the first half of the twentieth century, the rate fell to zero.” Seems like an obfuscation to me. What about the rest of the 20th century?

How about Emmett Till? and was Paul Robeson’s argument to the United Nations in 1951 that the US was guilty of genocide for its lynchings of black people based on nothing? and how about the reaction of many in the South to the Civil Rights Movement? We don’t see as many references to lynching in today’s papers as when I was young, but I see an awful lot of references to murder and assault of minority group members—not so much by the KKK now as by the police or community watchdogs.

Really, in today’s America, who can read this statement by Pinker and not feel rage at his apparent callousness: “by standards of the mass atrocities in human history, the lethal injection of a murderer in Texas, or an occasional hate crime in which a member of an ethnic minority group is intimidated by hooligans is pretty mild stuff.”

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology