Steven Corry – Engaging Peace

Abraham tries to sacrifice Isaak.
Image by Sibeaster, image is in the public domain.

The postulates and prophesies of the impressively credentialed psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, formerly at MIT and now at Harvard, appear to be everywhere. He is a darling of the New York Times and endless variations on his ex cathedra pronouncements concerning a purported global decline in violence echo across the media. Violence, he intones repeatedly, “has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species” (emphasis added).

One pillar of Pinker’s argument is that, historically, human beings were much more violent than is generally recognized today. One of his sources, the Old Testament, contains, he tells us, numerous examples of genocide as well as death by stoning to punish “nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one’s parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath.” Early tribes of Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese were, he said, as murderous as those early Hebrews, and current casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan pale by contrast. It is romanticizing the past and ignorance of history, Pinker argues, that lead people to believe the modern era is unduly violent.

(To see rejections of his historical arguments, click here. )

Mathematically, Pinker supports his thesis by calculating percentages of violent deaths in relation to the global population within a particular era. As Timothy Snyder suggests, “[Ask] yourself: Is it preferable for ten people in a group of 1,000 to die violent deaths or for ten million in a group of one billion? For Pinker, the two scenarios are exactly the same, since in both, an individual person has a 99 percent chance of dying peacefully.” Snyder’s question is critical one. What would your answer be?