Pinker: 'Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times.'

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html

What do you think about this article and others like it?

he's obv right but there's more money in telling ppl that things are going straight to hell

There are not enough historically accurate statistics about the entire world to prove the thesis or to prove its contrary. Viewed purely in terms of the past few decades in the USA or Europe, violent crime is statistically trending down.

What Pinker seems not to recognize is that having a sense of ease in the world is absolutely essential to peace, because peace is much more complex state than the simple absence of violence. If the vast majority of people feel anxious and uneasy that does not equate to 'peaceful times', no matter if crime statistics are dropping. Perhaps what he is really arguing is that we should all turn off our televisions, but that is not his stated thesis.

i read a 200-word version of pinker's argument on the back of a chipotle take out bag yesterday, and that seems to indicate that we lived in completely fucked up times

it's almost like steven pinker is a total fucking fraud or something

well he's no ilx poster adam

hasn't he been making this argument for a few years now/wrote a book about it etc.?

seems undeniable that fewer people across the globe are dying in wars, esp compared to the 20th century (which will go down in history as the age of genocide imo). violent crime kinda harder to quantify (and kinda less important imo)

i'm more interested in the violence that could be coming close to me, as my employer is moving us to the southern tip of Manhattan next year

Pinker sucks and is a stupid poopoohead with a dumb haircut

Entropy, pathogens, and human folly are a backdrop to life, and it is statistically certain that the lurking disasters will not space themselves evenly in time but will frequently overlap. To read significance into these clusters is to succumb to primitive thinking, a world of evil eyes and cosmic conspiracies.

I'm suspicious about the idea that these events are overlapping at random; also wait, just by reading significance in the clusters of events, I believe in a cosmic conspiracy?

Also he seems to be interested in violent crime, terrorism, etc; article doesn't say much about wages, job stability, availability of jobs, etc

what do the latter have to do with "peaceful"

this is a stupid article by a stupid person

average standard of living for humans has never been higher, as evidence i submit that there are more humans alive today than in any other time in history and that they are on average living longer than any other time in history

this is a stupid reductive article by a stupid person reductive thinker

oh man, that's rich

he is reductive, in that he takes a certain set of statistics and then defines peace as whatever it is these statistics measure. the appropriate approach would be to investigate how people actually think of peace as it applies to their own lives, refine that into a definition which reflects his findings, then seek out statistics that measure that kind of peace, if any can be found.

Crime rates, wars, casualties in war, genocides, etc. are pretty reasonable indicators of peace.

xp

further, I have read four of Pinker's books on language development, semantics and grammar and I found them quite interesting. I would also describe his approach to those subjects as reductive, but with the observation that these subjects yield much more insight under that approach that does 'peace'.

Environmental groups would argue that any "peace" would have to factor the environment in. What we're doing to the Earth is violent.

Also, in the US at least, so much has been invested in the threat of the criminal bogeyman, entire communities have been devastated because of these fears...when will our leaders admit that violent crime will continue to decrease.

There's something to his 'don't freak out, let's take a measured look at how bad things are' approach?

his argument is narrow and polemical, which i think he would be the first to admit. but it's not wrong. and i think it's a good thing that there's less homicide and war casualties than ever before.

another of the amazing omissions in his book though is suicide. it is literally not discussed, in a book about physical violence. there's no explanation for this other than the fact that it contradicts his argument, because suicide rates are rising rapidly all over the world.

correct me if i'm wrong but haven't the suicide rates been going up particularly in countries that have experienced the highest levels of standard of living increases, and most limited exposure to violence/war/displacement?

there's obv unreliable statistics for war-torn countries (and developed countries for that matter), but my impression is most suicidologists think it's rising everywhere

Does he talk about the number of weapons in the world? That strikes me as important, though I'm not sure how you'd measure it. If we talk about something nebulous like "total deadliness" then the reduction in nuclear arsenals would probably outweigh everything else, though at that level I'm not sure that the difference between 5,000 and 50,000 matters very much.

...also there are normative reasons to be uncomfortable with the "increased suicide is just a product of less homicidal violence, so it's tolerable on the balance" line of thinking

weren't a lot of ppl making a similar argument back in 89/90, what with the fall of communism and the so-called 'end of history'?

totally different arguments imho

but they probably would've been right to make this argument in the early 90s if they had

Interesting point about the decrease in homicides in Latin America. At some point, the right is going to have to concede that they've been neglectful of cities. They've been anti-urban in so many ways. It's always about foreign or cultural agendas. We're going to have to acknowledge the damage drugs have done, admit that the carnage has been decreasing fir twenty years, and invest more in cities. Patriotism in the US is never about rebuilding infrastructure.

Seems like Pinker rolls out with this argument whenever the US is under criticism for doing something horrible in the world, or when a streak of mass shootings happen. This time it's probably because the US tortured and performed human experiments on detainees and people are protesting police violence against black people. dude's a shameless mouthpiece for the status quo.

Steven Pinker in Arabia, bizarre narcissistic haircut blowing in the wind: "I know you just had hummus shoved up your ass by the US government, but look! These charts say the world's getting less violent, and it's all read through my speculative reading of history!"

Tortured detainee: "What's that have to do with me?"

Steven Pinker: "Well, the US media plays up violence to get ratings! I have to show them they're wrong about it!"

Tortured detainee: "Fuck off you mop-wearing freak."

Steven Pinker: "Great. Now where I can I cash this Harvard paycheck?"

God I hate Steven Pinker.

otm otm otm. it's not the argument, it's how it gets used.

otm

What Pinker seems not to recognize is that having a sense of ease in the world is absolutely essential to peace, because peace is much more complex state than the simple absence of violence. If the vast majority of people feel anxious and uneasy that does not equate to 'peaceful times', no matter if crime statistics are dropping. Perhaps what he is really arguing is that we should all turn off our televisions, but that is not his stated thesis.

i think this is right -- as usual pinker gets it "right" but is missing a larger point. though i do think his point is one that's worth keeping in mind.

that said, the impending destruction of human civilization (and much else besides) thanks to global climate change kind of renders his optimism moot, doesn't it?

xxpost

coolradio, i think you're on to something, although i wonder if pinker is really an apologist for violence fostered by western powers... or if he's just a habitually contrary chap. these cognitive theorist guys (or linguists in his case, but there's overlap) enjoy being challopsy.

Yeah, I think the point about rhetorical deployment is totally right. It's one thing to argue that violence is at an ebb when you're doing so in service, say, of refuting a fear-mongering tough-on-crime government that wants to impose harsher sentencing. But Pinker also lists "lethal police" in his opening sentence; it sounds as though he's telling post-Ferguson protesters not to get so worked up, that cops aren't worse than ever, as if that needed to be explained.

yeah, the point to make about that is that cops have been terrorizing black folks for a long, long time, it's just that people increasingly won't put up with it. which is very hard to construe as a Bad Thing.