Science 18 May 2012:
Vol. 336 no. 6083 pp. 829-830
DOI:10.1126/science.336.6083.829
Vol. 336 no. 6083 pp. 829-830
DOI:10.1126/science.336.6083.829
Special Issue News
The Battle Over Violence
Under the long shadow of Rousseau and Hobbes, scientists debate whether civilization spurred or inhibited warfare—and whether we have the data to know.
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Scott Atran
Much debate over Pinker’s thesis on decline of violence focuses on fragmentary data. Even if evidence supports decline in interpersonal violence, this underplays the power-law distribution for big wars: since about 1500, they are increasingly infrequent but many times more murderous and wide-ranging than those preceding. Each bigger event generates more world-shaking consequences than the last: politically, economically, socially. The interpersonal trend has progressed downward for centuries, even millennia, whereas large-scale intergroup violence has powered upward until recently. Pinker acknowledges the power-law trend but argues that since 1945 no "Big War" has occurred. Conflating a 70 year-old reduction in international war with a 7000-year decline in interpersonal violence implies a fairly sudden convergence of factors that supposedly lead to overall reduction in violence: increasing interdependencies, awareness and empathy with others' values, and Reason. Few policymakers I know believe we’ve avoided nuclear war because we suddenly became empathetic, globally aware, and reasonable. Projecting trends that include catastrophic events, as nuclear war likely would be, requires figuring in expected risk of such events, not just actual occurrences. People I’ve interviewed involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis estimated risk of thermonuclear war at "about 20%," still in line with the upward trend (imagine a war as 1 in 36 chance of rolling snake eyes; even if you don’t get it in 72 rolls that doesn’t mean the dice are fixed). With the USSR’s collapse risk has dipped. But Pakistan has the world’s fastest growing nuclear stockpile while spiraling into political chaos, and many militants I’ve interviewed there believe nuclear war with India inevitable. There’s a remarkable lack of concern that my students in Paris, Michigan and New York have about nuclear weapons – thinking of them as big bunker busters; and the “normality” surrounding them in policy circles makes them all the more insidious.
Carmi Turchick
While Pinker's book examines levels of violence, the purported topic of this article is war, not individual level violence, and the two are not the same at all in terms of causation or psychology. The murder rate in Detroit has nothing at all to do with the topic of war. Societies can have low levels of internal violence and high levels of warfare, or the opposite (as in the Inuit). While I applaud Pinker's effort and appreciate the care he took in examining both levels of violence, I suspect that he underestimated the importance of purely economic and technological factors in bringing about lower mortality rates in wars involving complex societies. War between complex societies involves greater distances, much longer campaigns, and equipment and training which all incur large costs. These costs limit the percentages of able-bodied men who can be sent off into combat, which lowers the average mortality rate for the society. Everyone can fashion a bow and make some arrows and walk three days to raid a neighbor. Not everyone can make a chariot, train and feed some horses, and so on. Also, with the advent of agriculture captive males can have some value. But on the other side, those who still seek to claim that war began with the advent of agriculture are not even wrong. Any group territorial species will evolve to compete directly for territory with conspecifics, because resources are unequally distributed and access to resources determines fitness. The idea that our ancestors lived in peace for tens of thousands of years requires as support evidence that the Theory of Evolution is wrong. This is not to say that war must be automatic; evolution also selects for greater flexibility of behaviors that are high risk and our large brains are generally agreed to offer us greater flexibility of behavior. That we can and do choose peace does not contradict the evolutionary basis of war. Much in science depends on asking the right questions. To me the right questions here are 1)What evolved psychological features make us vulnerable to the sirens of war? 2)What is the psychological process that takes us from committing to a group to being willing to kill out-group on behalf of that group? 3)How can we actively and consciously intervene in this process?