Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 5. The slippery slope to moral disengagement

Lethal injection room at San Quentin, built in 2010
Lethal injection room at San Quentin, built in 2010
Image is in the public domain.

Moral disengagement, as discussed frequently on this blog, allows individuals to participate in or at least tolerate inhuman behaviors such as homicide and torture. Major forms of moral disengagement include misrepresenting, minimizing, or denying the consequences of one’s violence; making advantageous comparisons between one’s own violence and other forms of violence that are made to seem more frightening or odious; and displacing or diffusing responsibility for inhumane behavior—e.g., by “blaming the victim.”

Unlike members of that notorious group, the military-industrial complex, Steven Pinker does not explicitly endorse violence and other forms of inhumane behavior; as far as I know he is not encouraging the United States corporate power structure to become involved in yet another war. However, he appears to relish the details he provides on the horrors of human violence in the past and to be wearing extremely effective blinders relating to the often deadly exploitation of poorer nations by the West. Moreover, in lauding the peacefulness he attributes to the West, he uses processes identified by Albert Bandura as forms of moral disengagement.

Consider, for example, his assertion that “daily existence is very different if you always have to worry about being abducted, raped or killed”—a state of anxiety that he views as gone from today’s enlightened democratic societies. Is he right or is he minimizing the dangers facing many immigrants and people of color in the nation in which he has become a highly paid celebrity?

And how about his claim that “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”? Does that assertion smack of both minimization and advantageous comparison?

Also, in discussing the aberrant period of increased violence in the 1960s and 1970s, which he views as hitting the African American community particularly hard, Pinker suggests, “widespread fatherlessness can lead to violence” because “all those young men who aren’t bringing up their children are hanging out with one another competing for dominance instead.” Can we see an element of displacement of responsibility here?

What do you think?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

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

Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 3.

Dragging Guantanamo captive.  Image by Shane T. McCoy and is in the public domain.
Dragging Guantanamo captive.
Image by Shane T. McCoy and is in the public domain.

Among the types of violence that Steven Pinker designates as “rare to non-existent in the west” is that chilling form  of inhumanity, torture. Yet the  western nation in which he lives and writes, the United States, seems up to its eyeballs in the perpetration of the dirty deeds.

Anyone remember what members of the U.S. military did in Abu Ghraib?

And how about Guantanamo Bay? Have you seen the Senate Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program that chillingly confirmed horrendous acts of torture at Guantanamo and various “black sites”?

Torture, including prolonged solitary confinement, is also flourishing in  penal institutions across the fifty states.

Immigrant children are physically and sexually abused while being held in detention until their fates can be resolved.

Both men’s and women’s prisons are hotbeds for rape and other forms of torture.

Sexual abuse is on the rise in juvenile correctional facilities;  according to one report, the majority of the abusers are women.

And who will deny that police torture people in the streets, in paddy wagons, and in their stations?

According to Pinker,  “The 18th century saw the widespread abolition of judicial torture, including the famous prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” in the eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution (emphasis added).” He praises our enlightened society for recognizing that torture is wrong. But really, should we smugly pat ourselves on our backs if today’s judicial system no longer makes explicit recommendations of torture as a punishment for people they decide are guilty of something (e.g., being the “wrong” color), when its decisions often spawn it?

Pinker’s reassurances do not leave me hopeful for the imminent demise of torture in our institutions.  The genuine optimists,  like Nancy Arvold, Maria Rotella, Stephen Soldz, Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity, and Psychologists for Social Responsibility, work tirelessly to end torture, but resistance to reforms persist.  

Underplaying the problem as Pinker does seems itself to be cruel but not unusual, although we should celebrate the genuine good news when it comes.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

 

Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 2. The Multiple Abominations of Slavery

Photograph of an FBI agent leading away an adult suspect arrested in the “Operation Cross Country II”
Image is in the public domain.

In his argument that violence has been declining for centuries, Steven Pinker (Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 1) claims that activities such as “slavery as a labor-saving device were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history”—and certainly slavery has been around a long time, but not equally so in all parts of the world.

However, today, Pinker insists, slavery and other such abominations “are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.”

Such an assertion is disingenuous at best and dangerously deceptive at worst. Has slavery been nothing historically except a labor saving device? Is sex trafficking merely an effort at labor saving? If not, does that mean sex trafficking does not count as slavery? Has Pinker considered all the modern forms that slavery takes?

It seems unlikely that Pinker’s definition of slavery is as broad as that of the U.S. Department of State, whose definition of modern slavery includes forced labor, sex trafficking, bonded labor, debt bondage among migrant laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, child soldiers, and child sex trafficking (here’s a horror story on that topic). And how about convict labor, especially given that the U.S. prison population has quadrupled in the last four decades.

These forms of slavery are certainly concealed and often widely condemned when brought to light but many of them are not nonexistent and not even rare in the US and elsewhere in the West.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, J.J. Gould tells us, “150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever.” Indeed, he says, “There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade”—with the current global slave population estimated at between 20 million and 30 million people.

Seems to me it would take a lot of statistical shenanigans and redefinitions of terms to translate those figures into a “decline in slavery.”

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology