An Extremely Long Essay called "Are Things Overall Good or Bad in the Modern World?"

Are things overall good or bad in the modern world?

As I neared the end of Steven Pinker’s very well-publicised and mostly acclaimed 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature a couple of months ago, I did share something of Peter Singer’s emotional reaction to the book (written about in his rhapsodic New York Times review[1]). In short, it made me kind of happy. For a non-fiction book, it was exceptionally gratifying. Elegantly written, superbly argued and constantly backing up its seeming meliorism with mountains of data, I found it hard to fault. And I did try. In fact, at the time I had been recently learning more about cognitive biases (particularly Kahneman and Tversky’s work), and this meant I was constantly on the lookout for subtle signs of bias, distortion and so on. Of course, to complicate matters further, I was simultaneously aware that Pinker himself is highly cognisant of the literature on human biases and fallacies, because much of the information I have about them came from citations in his books. He even cites Kahneman and Tversky in The Better Angels of our Nature, multiple times. But, to complicate matters yet further, I also knew this awareness and acceptance on Pinker’s part definitely didn’t prescind the possibility of Pinker still being biased. Indeed, regardless of Pinker’s beliefs on human foibles, it remained true that the book was in defence of an extremely bold and strong claim: that there has been an essentially steady, across-the-board decline in all “violence” for centuries, everywhere. There are few arguments less grandiose than that. And if there’s one thing Kahenman has taught me since (in reading Thinking Fast and Slow), it’s that you should never be grandiose. You should always seek disconfirmation for patterns that suit your preconceptions, because you’re bound to see a lot more of such patterns than ones that clash with your prejudices. Moreover, if your argument is as massive as Pinker’s – taking a very nebulous notion and trying to prove that it’s generally declined over vast swathes of history – then it seems almost guaranteed that you’re going to be guilty of emphasis and omission. To be precise, anyone who writes such a strong thesis is surely bound to fall prey to all sorts of biases of complex arguments: confirmation bias, selection bias, the availability heuristic and – perhaps most importantly in this case – the fallacy known as “anchoring”. Thinking about anchoring in works like these gets very interesting. At what point did Pinker decide that it was possible to argue such a robust thesis? Was it in the middle of his research? Did he have an inkling near the beginning? Ideally, you’d hope that an author would only be thinking about his ultimate thesis at the very end of his research, after looking at all the data available, and every serious source he was able to read. But given what we know about human nature, it seems highly unlikely that anyone could manage to be that circumspect and restrained. Instead, it is highly likely that Pinker, being a flawed human being like any other, did anchor his thesis at some point before he had finished writing his book, and thereafter never quite had an open mind or an evenhanded research programme. In fact, it’s inevitable that he anchored at some point before he had finished writing his book. Even if he anchored his thesis much later than a sceptic might suppose, he still did it. Therefore, the book can’t be ideally rational.

Of course, it’s not too hard to imagine how Mr. Pinker would try to repudiate this charge. First off, the book is very long and superbly argued, as I said. More importantly, it is backed up by hundreds of other historians and sociologists, and mountains of data. Given that Pinker doesn’t use any primary sources, you might even be justified in calling it more a meta-analysis or a conspectus than a truly individual opus, and this is certainly not a downside. After all, a meta-analyst of data doesn’t have to climb the mountain from the very base to reach the summit of knowledge on a topic, but begins from a base camp already near the top, established by thousands of other climbers. In taking all the controlled and analysed data he can get his hands on, along with what he assesses to be the best arguments explaining them, Pinker becomes like a summiteer with all the state-of-the-art, carbon-fibre equipment and a set of highly detailed maps. It is not unreasonable to think that such a privileged person could manage to create a picture of something as grand as the history of violence that is not just a parochial view of one of the slopes, but a full vista of all sides of the mountain, looking down from the top.[2]

Then again, even leaving aside the cognitive psych literature on bias, a more basic fact remains to cast doubt on the ultimate truth of Pinker’s arguments: The Better Angels of our Nature is just one book. There are definitely some very esteemed thinkers, historians, sociologists and anthropologists whom Pinker omitted. A hell of a fucking lot, on every single specific topic he covers in the book.

Before I give any examples of this, I’d like to return to the sentiment at the start, and make a few confessions. Although I have been conveying an impression of great scepticism about Pinker’s book so far, and will talk more about Pinker biases a bit later (when I give those examples) the truth is that – when I was actually reading the book – I was too dazzled by Pinker’s arguments to keep up any sceptical guard for long. It really bowled me over. I had never read such a persuasive argument before. Around page 90, when he was talking about incarceration, I remember basically deciding to resign myself to Pinker’s correctness on just about everything. No, I thought, it is not important that I also feel that Chomsky is right about massive injustices in US society, the propaganda system, neoconservative ideology and the evils of American foreign policy. No, that does not matter, because Pinker is right about the big picture. He has the facts on his side. Not only that, but most of his claims are kind of obvious. Indeed, for several hundred pages, the doubts almost entirely ceased. Yes, of course, there is a “pacifying effect” from the imposition of authority. Yes, of course Norbert Elias is right. This stuff about hygiene, discipline and etiquette makes perfect sense. Yes, of course Pinker’s right about human tendencies to essentialism and moralising that we’ve managed to repress. Yes, that is so true about the utopianism and religiosity of Marxism and Nazism and all the other “counter-Enlightenment ideologies” – they are undergirded by absurd, romantic notions. Yes, we really do need the Leviathan and a strong authority; no sane person can really deny that. Yes, liberal democracies really are the best form of government – we really have enjoyed anomalous peace under them. By the end, I was even weighing up whether I should become just like Pinker politically, moving to the political centre.

Why all of this was so persuasive to me seems fairly clear in retrospect. I believe the main reason is, oddly enough, that a huge amount of Pinker’s claims in the book were things I used to believe as a child. The more I delved into the book, the more I found myself thinking, “How did I ever let myself be persuaded that all these obvious facts about the world were false? How did I ever let myself be persuaded that things aren’t better than they have ever been on almost any relevant indicator you can name? They obviously are.” In other ways, too, I was primed to believe most of Pinker’s claims in this book. In particular, I had been recently reading his other work and had pretty thoroughly assimilated his views on evolution and human nature, and I had also watched a few Youtube videos in which Pinker defended his thesis. In this way, Pinker had already done much of the work of convincing me.

A few days after finishing the book, I remember driving my mum’s car at this big intersection in Thornleigh, on the corner of Pennant Hills Road and the Comenarra Parkway. I think I was in a queue before a red light, waiting to turn into Comenarra and thence to home. It was not an unfamiliar situation for me to be in. I had been stuck at this same intersection in various cars who knows how many times in my life previously. Notably, I had often had the same thought while at this intersection: it was a profoundly ugly place. In fact, not just ugly. From a certain age on, I often regarded this place as the very height of urban ugliness, a true excrescence – occasionally as a synecdoche for the hideousness of the modern world in general. Every time I came to this place, I would watch the predictable zooming of thousands of gas-guzzling cars and trucks, shitting their way along the road, grunting and grumbling, their strange and malformed chassis reflecting all the glare of a hostile sun – colour without vibrancy, shine without lustre. I would see the used-car yard, filled with shouty signs plastered onto the old and worn-out cars. I would see the big, lurid servo, covered in advertisements for chocolate milk or the amazing new $1 coffee deal or Mrs Mac’s authentic, homemade pies. Prices everywhere, ads everywhere, poorly punctuated slogans saturating the landscape. I would see the big, leering vertical structures: the dull, wooden electricity posts, the huge, gangly traffic lights with their peculiar, unreal eyes. And everywhere I turned, concrete filled the view: endless concrete pavements, innumerable concrete shops, the immense concrete overpass, concrete behind the billboards, concrete infused into the road, concrete, concrete, concrete, concrete the base of all. What a repulsive, Orwellian world it was. This was Hell, a 21^st Century capitalist Hell. What had we done?

But as I waited in the intersection this time, I was in a very different philosophic mood. I hadn’t really been suffering from that kind of modernity-hating[3] for quite a while, since I had made some philosophical progress even before reading The Better Angels of our Nature, and with greater logicality came the loss of the flighty, overemotional, rather poetic thoughts that had so often accompanied me in the throes of my adolescence. I suspect I was more temperate in general, having taken on a more Stoic mindset with respect to my social status and personal problems. One of the products of this change of attitude was that I had recently (for some indefinite period of time[4]) started much more frequently (mostly very consciously) adopting a Ricky-Fitzian viewpoint about beauty. That is to say, I had started making myself see things as totally, ineffably beautiful, even if they didn’t immediately, unself-consciously strike me that way. For example, I had even done the exact Fitzian thing of feeling awe at the beautiful dance of a plastic bag in the middle of a road – specifically, the Pacific Highway at Lindfield, in front of Coles, while in the car with my dad. It is true that I do always feel a little self-conscious in these situations, because I am aware of the deliberate action of aesthetic activation, but the awe can still have great power. I mean, to some extent, I suspect feeling awe is always – to some extent – self-induced. It is possible to will yourself not to feel awe when standing in front of the Eifel Tour, Notre Dame Cathedral, Uluru, the colossal, yawning Three Sisters canyon in the Blue Mountains, the bleak heathland of the wilds of Tasmania, the jagged and strange monoliths of the Warrambungles etc. In much the same way, it is possible to will yourself to go from a low-level awe to being totally shaken and transfigured by such an experience. I prefer the latter option.

Now, I should make clear that I have always been very high-up on the Ricky-Fitz spectrum. For as long as I can remember, I have always had a propensity to awe, a tendency towards absentminded contemplation of apparently inane or banal things, a habit of becoming acutely self-conscious of my own existence in a particular space, my respiration, my vision, my very sentience and the wonder of all creation and whatever the thing is that I’m looking at right now – a curiosity about life itself, I suppose, to sound wanky. Nonetheless, since this indefinite period of time began, I think I had increased the frequency of these moments. To return to the particular occasion we’re talking about, I remember that as I approached the queue of cars before the red light, I suddenly made the decision to see the area around me through Fitzian eyes. I was going to make myself see it as beautiful, using Pinker’s empirical support about the wonder of the West in the 21^st Century to assist me. This probably sounds incredibly odd, but that’s what happens when you have no practical things to concern you and thus become a full-time philosopher. This is not to say that I wasn’t myself aware of the weirdness of making a conscious decision to see a place as beautiful, but I was able to do it despite this (albeit with a voice in my head reminding me of the weirdness).  And it worked: suddenly everything around me was really beautiful.

What a beautiful world we live in, I thought, as I stared at the bright, concrete world around me, at the signs and billboards and the various structures great and small. What a paradise it is! Pinker is so right. We have peace and harmony and political stability, high-quality healthcare, abundant food, abundant drink, there is no risk of me suddenly dropping dead of some pernicious or painful disease. I have clothes, a car, incredible technology, I can entertain myself any time through all sorts of rich, immersive media. There is air-conditioning in the car protecting me from the searing heat of the day outside, I can listen to wonderful CDs exhibiting the greatest of human culture inside this car, the car itself is so terrific and elegant and sleek and comfortable. And look at the other cars! Look at their fascinating shapes and various looks, their immense size, their complex, intricate technology, the phenomenal capabilities all of them possess. Yes, they’re not smooth and shapely like animals – they’re kind of like harder, harsher, shinier, metallic versions of rhinos or something – but I can easily make myself see them as magnificent and beautiful. They are magnificent and beautiful. And, my God, there are people in every single one of those cars. My God, there are so many people in just this area, so many people in this city. What a grand civilisation we have created on this planet! From such humble beginnings back in Africa, we have created such immense and complex metropolises, which accommodate so many millions of people, almost all with their own house and car and family and life. And look at the beautiful spectacle of these cars turning at the intersection. The cars move so elegantly and smoothly. It looks surreal, and so, so sublime! How could I have not noticed the wonderful spectacle of moving cars before! I’ve overlooked this beautiful ballet all my life! Why go to ballets when you can just watch cars? Why look at art? Beauty is everywhere! The people in the cars – like that woman – they just steer the wheel and put the foot on the peddle and the cars can go forward and back, twist and turn, accelerate and slow down. Look at all of these cars in this great dance. How could I have ever had the attitudes of my adolescence? How I have ever contracted modern malaise? Why do people complain about the modern world? It’s so good. How could I have ever been so wrong? There is no doubt that I was wrong. Now I can see it. The truth is that everything is fine. Pinker is right. This is what a utopia looks like. This is it. This is what a utopia looks like.

So, anyway, the point is the book very much worked on me.      

Most readers of The Better Angels of our Nature are, of course, not like this. From the very start of the work, Pinker demonstrates his awareness that many, many readers will not be primed to believe most of the views he puts forward. Indeed, the first sentence of the second paragraph of chapter one is, “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene”. Unsurprisingly, for me the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time struck me as probably true. It seemed to me impossible for any reasonable person to doubt about the first-world. And even for the third-world, I didn’t think it too implausible at all. Of course, I know what other people would be thinking about. America’s homicide and incarceration rates are certainly first-world barbarities, and when you look at everywhere else but the West, our world still appears to be as vicious, nasty, savage and miserable as it’s ever been. Endless civil wars in Africa, gun violence in South America, rape in India, atavistic executions in Saudi Arabia, and perpetual crisis, war and turmoil in the rest of the Middle East, dominated at the moment by the scourge in Syria. So I understand why Pinker needed to be so politic. But from my standpoint, even factoring in all those third-world conflicts our media doesn’t do a very good job of publicising – for example, most of the horrific sectarian conflicts that forever gouge Africa, or the brutal Indonesian invasion of East Timor that became such a cynosure for Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent (and all his subsequent talks) – I still figured, from page one of Better Angels, that Pinker’s main claim was probably true.

As aforementioned, the funny thing I realised the more I read of The Better Angels of our Nature is that many or most of the big claims presented in this book correspond to the views I had when I was a child. I will discuss what exactly I mean by this now.

It will not surprise you to learn I didn’t have a very rich knowledge of history and philosophy as a child. In fact, the only history and philosophy I had engaged with came from the following, select sources: my parents,[5] several BBC documentaries, Horrible Histories books (which I did read extensively), Age of Empires, toy figurines, probably a couple of radio programmes and the info on signs at tourist sites (during our holiday in Europe). However, when combined with the comments of my slightly misanthropic father and my own nature, I know these influences did lead me to develop a fair few inchoate impressions about human nature and our past.

First off, like Pinker, childhood-me believed the prehistoric world was rather Hobbesian. To use the massively overused quote, I definitely figured that the state of nature was “solitary, poore, nasty brutish and short”. I was very accepting of palaeoanthropology and the animal reality of our evolutionary history, and got a very grim picture of the life of a ‘caveman’ from a stop-motion animation show called The Gogs, as well as the Horrible Histories book called “The Savage Stone Age” (and perhaps Horrible Histories books generally made me misanthropic). Of course, I can’t really know quite how much “The Savage Stone Age” influenced me, but I do seem to remember learning from that book that the average (estimated) life span of a Palaeolithic person was just eighteen, and being very disturbed by that. I also remember that I was transfixed by the scenes featuring the Neanderthals in Walking with Beasts, in particular, that wonderful scene (which featured in the intro) where the Neanderthal man is running from a gigantic woolly rhino, accompanied by this loud, dramatic, heart-thumping music. It is literally a man running for his life, and I used to find it so powerful. The brutality and harshness of that world. The man’s desperation. It stirred me as nothing else could.

I suspect I was kind of Hobbesian by temperament, too. Boyhood me wouldn’t have believed any romantic guff about primitive people being gentle and nice to each other, gallivanting about in forests, picking petals off flowers and engaging in enormous, filial orgies. No. It was blood and guts and gore, savagery and hunting, man against man and man against beast. The world is savage and cruel. You fall over, you crack open your skull, you die. You get angry, you grab a rock, you beat the other man to death. Basically, I was a larval version of Pinker himself, and my intuitions about the dark heart of Man (meaning literally “men”, in essence) still are very Pinkerian. Both Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness were significant later influences helping to push me further in this direction. Again, though, I was perfectly ready to agree with the ideas of these books before I read them. Whenever I looked around me, in both primary school and high school, I did see the cruelty of boys. Whenever I thought about the social groups, I did discern what looked very much like primitive, animal hierarchies. It seemed obvious to me that the idea of a Homo sapiens alpha male was not a social construction. You could spot them instantly; it was written in their face, their physique, their gait, their comportment, their manner, their voice and their attitudes. I came to the conclusion that professional sport was dominated by troglodytes, particularly Rugby (both League and Union). I seemed to learn very early on that a type of phrenology – looking at the chin, facial structure and eyes of a person – could tell you a hell of a lot. Prognathous, sharp-edged faces, with tiny, dull eyes – they were people you didn’t want to be friends with. They were ruthless, mean and dominant. Without even knowing anything about the effects of prenatal testosterone on facial morphology, I had actually worked out that testosterone predicts certain behaviours. I was convinced that these types of boys or men were models for how primitive Man must have been. As a child, I sometimes deluded myself that I was one of these true men, but I eventually abandoned that habit completely. No, I concluded, I would not have made it in an uncivilised world.

Secondly, childhood-me believed, like Pinker (and Norbert Elias), that the Middle Ages was – in general – a ghastly, nightmarish period of history essentially dominated by death, disease, squalor, gore and terror. This general picture of the epoch would obviously have been influenced by Horrible Histories books, but there were plenty of other forces at work encouraging me to conceive of the Middle Ages in that way. Monty Python’s Holy Grail and Blackadder (II) would have been influences, as would various other cartoons, movies and documentaries. I think our trip to Europe in September 2003 evoked this picture of the age, particularly our visit to York and the many awesome and daunting cathedrals. Of course, as my mention of York might have given away, I suspect I kind of conflated the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages in my imagination. I think I can remember some of the “pictures” I had in my head whenever I thought of the Medieval period[6]: filthy, mud-smeared peasants labouring away on a farm in dirty rags, looking very cross, stupid and flea-bitten (perhaps with a castle towering above them nearby, and with a knight in shiny steel armour watching over them); similar-looking peasants standing knee deep in green-brown, faecal, pathogenic muck, either in a rural scene (perhaps near a castle again) or in one of the sordid streets of London, near some corpses; Joan of Arc (or perhaps some other woman accused of being a witch) screaming as the flames lick at her feet or she is consumed by the excruciating fire; people supplicating at shrines, and clutching icons close to their chest; peasants looking up at magnificent cathedrals in awe and terror, chilled by the demonic gargoyles, chastened and cowed by the immensity of the edifice; a family inside a rudimentary wooden shack tending to a dying relative covered in hideous buboes, perhaps dabbing his or her forehead with a handkerchief and weeping; a series of dead corpses inside a rudimentary wooden shack, all covered in hideous buboes, with possibly one person left in a state of despair (I recall I had nightmares of being the last surviving member of a family struck down by plague); royals reclining in a splendid, opulent court, perhaps being entertained by a jester or lyre-player; massive wars waged in big, open, grassy fields, probably with copses of pine trees here and there, both armies including archers (wearing light leather armour), infantrymen (perhaps with pikes (AoE influence)) and lots of cavalry, ridden by manly, Hollywood knights, proudly holding their standards aloft; a massive convoy of knights walking through a desert landscape towards the Middle East for the Crusades, perhaps discussing their hopes for plunder or the promise of paradise; the knights of the West fighting in one-on-one battles with the bearded, turban-headed Arabs, as they dance through a dusty city (maybe Jerusalem) which has a very Arabian look, lots of square, stone architecture and perhaps a minareted mosque in the background.

Importantly, these are roughly the kinds of images Pinker tries to evoke of the Middle Ages in the book. In fact, he even gives us literal images at one point: two drawings that Elias found in The Medieval House-book, 1475-80 depicting a veritable cornucopia of cruelty, torture, gore and horror. I was, of course, totally taken in by Pinker’s macabre portrayal of the era as I was reading the book, and I recall the images affected me also, provoking me to return to the dark daydreams of my childhood. They really did make me imagine, however fleetingly, that I was one of those benighted folks in that most bedevilled of ages, surrounded by death in all its forms, forever struggling through the muck and misery, perpetually mourning. It’s important to note, however, that this entire picture of the Middle Ages is regarded by the relevant historical experts as a bit simplistic (who’da thunk it?). Here’s what Benjamin Ziemann from the University of Sheffield says about Pinker’s use of the images in an ambivalent review of the book:

“Pinker reproduces two illustrations from the late 15th century ‘Housebook’ which Elias had already used in order to explain how late medieval knights indulged in relentless, brutal acts of savagery. Here as on other occasions, Pinker uses pictorial evidence in a highly naïve manner, suggesting that these images simply depict historical “reality” (pp. 65f., 112). Far from it. Historians have shown in quite some detail that the use of primary evidence by Norbert Elias, and particularly his interpretation of the ‘Housebook’, was utterly misleading already by the standards of historical knowledge achieved by the 1930s, when he worked on his book. Rather than simply being a realistic depiction of actual violence, these images offered a highly normative reading of the contemporary situation.”

By “highly normative reading”, I suppose he means that the artists were Bible-thumpers (or something) who thought that the world around them was unholy and depraved, and wanted to make their depiction as disturbing as possible. This seems very plausible. To be fair to Pinker, he doesn’t rely entirely on Elias’ impressions. He does cite all the Medieval homicide statistics he can get his hands on (obviously all from Western Europe), and they do give us a very strong trend: crime has been going bumpily down across Western Europe from 1200 on. From terrifying levels around 1200 (the average for the countries included seems to be about 80 homicides per 100,000 people per year) we have finally reached the rather excellent levels we enjoy today (approximately 1 homicide per 100,000 people per year for countries in Western Europe). Anyhow, the point is that Pinker shares my childhood picture of the Middle Ages: a violent, pestilent, deeply superstitious time, when a feudal system guaranteed that the life of peasants truly was infernal by any modern standard, and death was everywhere.

Thirdly, childhood-me, like Pinker, didn’t have any radical political views about the state of the world right now (eg a belief that America has been the new imperial empire since the Second World War, or that they are “global terrorists”), and wasn’t particularly aware of bloody foreign conflicts, so naturally concluded that I was living in a blessed age. It is of course true that no-one could possibly deny that this is an incomparably peaceful age for all those living in first-world countries, except perhaps in the case of America. As a child, I wasn’t even aware that America was that anomalous in homicide statistics and incarceration rates (and so on), so I think I basically believed that the horrors of the past were very much consigned to the past. And since I was not particularly informed about the horrors occurring in other countries, most of the claims of The Better Angels of our Nature would have seemed totally fucking obvious to me. (Even with a bit more knowledge about bad things in the world and a more mature brain, most of the claims of The Better Angels of our Nature did end up seeing totally fucking obvious to me, as I’ve been saying.) One small example of Pinker steering me closer to my childhood beliefs is on 20^th Century changes in attitudes, which Pinker documents in the chapter called “The Rights Revolutions”. As a kid, I had basically thought that racism and sexism were mainly problems of the past. Until I read the book, adult-me did think that racism was a far greater problem in the sixties than now, but wasn’t so sure about sexism and violence against women. One of the main things I realised as I matured was that sexism still pervades our society. But Pinker did indeed bring me a little closer to my childhood self on women’s progress. The stats on domestic violence were of particular note. We keep hearing that there’s an epidemic of domestic violence in Australia and constantly get bombarded with disturbing stats. But the stats are always contemporary and non-comparative (and sometimes dodgy) – never once has anyone in the media given me a long-term overview of trends in domestic violence. The question I find myself asking is, how am I meant to know if something’s an epidemic unless I know how it compares to the past? You wouldn’t say that this year there’s an epidemic of flu cases just because there are a lot of them this year; there were a lot of them last year also. Australia does have crime stats somewhere which would give us a good indication, but they’re actually really hard to find. If you type into Google, “Comparison of domestic violence rates today with past”, you get zero relevant hits. Luckily, Pinker gives me broader trends on domestic violence in the US and in England and Wales, and the results are decisively positive, like all of his results. The approval of husbands in the US for wife-slapping went from 25% in 1965 to about 15% in 1995 (after almost getting to 10%), and for women themselves it went from about 16% to 6% in the same period. Obviously, it’s still shocking, but much improved. The statistics on assaults by intimate partners in the US from 1993 to 2005 show a significant improvement for female victims (the amount of male victims is a bumpy plateau). From just under 1,000 assaults per 100,000 women per year in 1993 (1 in 100), it’s dropped more than half and seems to be slowly closing the gap on the relatively stable figure for men: 100 or so assaults per 100,000. The statistics on homicides of intimate partners from 1976 to 2005 show a gradual decline for female victims: it’s gone from a little under 1.5 homicides per 100,000 women per year to a tick under 1 (and there are now only around 0.2 homicides per 100,000 men per year). The stats on general “domestic violence” in England and Wales from 1995 to 2008 show parallel trends. Reported incidents of domestic violence with female victims occurred to more than 2,500 women per 100,000 in 1995 (1 in 40) and roughly 1,000 women per 100,000 per year in 2008.

Finally, I suspect the majority of explanations Pinker offers for the trends documented in the book are just vastly more sophisticated versions of the kinds of explanations childhood-me might offer for the trends. When you reduce them to their essence, practically every “exogenous cause” Pinker adduces to explain this or that statistical phenomenon seems naïve or childish (which is not to say they’re wrong). It may be true that if you asked childhood-me why men would kill each other in an anarchic, pre-civilised world, I would not say, well, contemporary game theory and our best mathematical models tell us that Thomas Hobbes basically got it right with his schema (in short, “glory, competition and diffidence”) and his tragic notion of the Pacifist’s Dilemma. Given that I wouldn’t have discussed game theory at all, I can guarantee that Pinker’s favourite terms – “adaptive trait”, “zero-sum game”, “pay-off” – wouldn’t have got a mention either. But then again, if you gave me time to think, I almost certainly would have talked about competition for status, for women, and the striving for dominance that men engage in habitually. I might even have mentioned the concept that is central to the Pacifist’s Dilemma, the “diffidence” (meaning distrust or wariness) that each man would have towards every other man, increasing the probability of an unprovoked first strike.

When you come to the next thing that has to be explained – why violence per capita (apparently) is lower under any form of state control than in anarchy (“the Pacification Process”) – I reckon childhood-me would have been extremely close to Pinker in analysis. Again, childhood-me wouldn’t have used Pinker’s vocabulary – in this case, the Hobbesian concept of the “Leviathan” – but he would have said something to the effect of, “In this period, there is now an authority that enforces law and order, controlling people’s behaviour”. Crucially, from this base, I would have been in harmony with Pinker for much of the book. This Hobbesian idea that peace has to be foisted on people by authority and “discipline” is absolutely pivotal to his thesis (not to mention world-view).

In order to explain the next great process of violence-reduction, the so-called “Civilizing Process”, Pinker draws from a rarely-cited but impressive sociologist, Norbert Elias. It is fair to say that Elias prosecuted the case for the most school-teacherish possible version of this Hobbesian doctrine. In a nutshell, he argues that civilisation comes from good manners. Now, perhaps this sounds risible, but – for the most part – it is actually a highly convincing theory, and Pinker defends it very well. Pinker first establishes that medieval people were “impetuous, uninhibited, almost childlike”, his longest quote from Elias illustrating this point nicely:

“Not that people were always going around with fierce looks, drawn brows and martial countenances…. On the contrary, a moment ago they were joking, now they mock each other, one word leads to another, and suddenly from the midst of laughter they find themselves in the fiercest feud. Much of what appears contradictory to us – the intensity of their piety, the violence of their fear of hell, their guilt feelings, their penitence, the immense outbursts of joy and gaiety, the sudden flaring and the uncontrollable force of their hatred and belligerence – all these, like the rapid changes of mood, are in reality symptoms of one and the same structuring of the emotional life. The drives, the emotions were vented more freely, more directly, more openly than later. It is only to us, in whom everything is more subdued, moderate, and calculated, and in whom social taboos are built much more deeply into the fabric of our drive-economy as self-restraints, that the unveiled intensity of this piety, belligerence, or cruelty appears to be contradictory.”

Pinker then establishes that medieval people were “gross”, quoting from a 1530 etiquette manual by “the great scholar Desiderius Erasmus called On Civility in Boys to illustrate this. After including hundreds of this book’s nauseating prescriptions, Pinker writes,

“In the mind of a modern reader, these advisories set off a train of reactions. How inconsiderate, how boorish, how animalistic, how immature those people must have been! These are the kinds of directives you’d expect a parent to give to a three-year-old, not a great philosopher to a literate readership. Yet as Elias points out, the habits of refinement, self-control, and consideration that are second nature to us had to be acquired – that’s why we call them second nature – and they developed in Europe over the course of its modern history.”

Finally, Medieval people can be characterised by unbridled concupiscence:

“In the European Middle Ages, sexual activity too was less discreet. People were publicly naked more often, and couples took only perfunctory measures to keep their coitus private. Prostitutes offered their services openly; in many English towns, the red-light district was called Gropecunt Lane. Men would discuss their sexual exploits with their children, and a man’s illegitimate offspring would mix with his legitimate ones. During the transition to modernity, this openness came to be frowned upon as uncouth and then as unacceptable.

The change left its mark in the language. Words for peasantry took on a second meaning as words for turpitude: boor (which originally just meant “farmer”, as in the German Bauer and the Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, or commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat. Many of the words for the fraught actions and substances became taboo. Englishmen used to swear by invoking supernatural beings, as in My God! and Jesus Christ! At the start of the modern era they began to invoke sexuality and excretion, and the “Anglo-Saxon four-letter words,” as we call them today, could no longer be used in polite company. As the historian Geoffrey Hughes has noted, “The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shitecrow and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece.” Bastard, cunt, arse, and whore also passed from ordinary to taboo.”  

 I know childhood-me would definitely have been open to the idea that the violence of Medieval people was linked to their vulgarity and uncouthness. In fact, this is the implicit message you constantly get as a child. When you’re young, the suggestion is always that in order to become a civilised member of society, you have to stop making poo jokes, rolling around in filth (and then refusing to take baths), eating with your fingers, picking your nose and – finally – that you must always say “Please” and “Thank you”. Almost everyone achieves this, but imagine if they didn’t! Perhaps our world really would look a lot more like the European Middle Ages.

You may have noticed that this all sounds rather Freudian. This is no accident. Elias was influenced by Freud, and – according to Pinker – “helped himself to Freud’s structural model of the psyche, in which children acquire a conscience (the superego) by internalizing the injunctions of their parents when they are too young to understand them. At that point the child’s ego can apply these injunctions to keep their biological impulses (the id) in check.” Pinker definitely buys this basic idea, too. Indeed, several hundred pages later in the book, when Pinker is explaining the nature of the “better angels” and “inner demons”, it seems to me that Pinker basically just translates Freud’s model of the psyche into the technical jargon of modern neuroscience. To wit, the superego is now the frontal lobes, which are exercised far more in our society than they would have been back in the Middle Ages, and the Id is the “reptilian brain”, also known as the limbic system. There are other details but these are definitely the most important ones.  

Of course, Freud’s model of the mind also works extremely well with the Hobbesian doctrine I’ve argued is central to the thesis of the book. Both Hobbes and Freud claim that authority and discipline lie at the heart of civilisation; the difference is that Freud located that authority inside the brain and Hobbes located it outside it. When you combine them, they reinforce each other.

The most amusingly ideological example of Pinker’s use of the Hobbesian/Freudian doctrine comes towards the end of this long chapter, when Pinker explains the constantly mentioned “uptick” in violence during the 1960s in terms of a “decivilizing process”. Once again, I’m sure this notion would have appealed to me as a child. Sure, filthy hippies are uncivilised. Civilised people wear suits and have responsible jobs and so on. And though it is embarrassing, I eventually felt that Pinker was spot-on as an eighteen-year-old, too. Indeed, not only did I think he was right – I was affected by his powerful arguments. Much of this section reminded me of the work of David Foster Wallace, particularly the long chapter narrated by Chris Fogle in The Pale King and the political conversation between the IRS employees in the same book. (Perhaps having been a former admirer of Wallace’s had further primed me to agree with Pinker.) Anyway, here’s my favourite passage from this section on the 1960s. Although I’ve not included the footnotes, it’s still extremely long, so be warned:

“Why did the Western world embark on a three-decade binge of crime from which it has never fully recovered? This is one of several local reversals of the long-term decline of violence that I will examine in this book. If the analysis is on the right track, then the historical changes I have been invoking to explain the decline should have gone into reverse at the time of the surges.

An obvious place to look is demographics. The 1940s and 1950s, when crime rates hugged the floor, were the great age of marriage. Americans got married in numbers not seen before or since, which removed men from the streets and planted them in suburbs. One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1070 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent. Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent too.

Many criminologists have concluded that the 1960s crime surge cannot be explained by the usual socioeconomic variables but was caused in large part by a change in cultural norms. Of course, to escape the logical circle in which people are said to be violent because they live in a violent culture, it’s necessary to identify an exogenous cause for the cultural change. The political scientist James Q. Wilson has argued that demographics were an important trigger after all, not because of the absolute numbers of young people but because of their relative numbers. He makes the point by commenting on a quotation from the demographer Norman Ryder:

“There is a perennial invasion of barbarians who must somehow be civilized and turned into contributors to fulfilment of the various functions requisite to social survival.” That “invasion” is the coming of age of a new generation of young people. Every society copes with this enormous socialization process more or less successfully, but occasionally that process is literally swamped by a quantitative discontinuity in the number of persons involved…. In 1950 and still in 1960 the “invading army” (those aged fourteen to twenty-four) were outnumbered three to one by the size of the “defending army” (those aged twenty-five to sixty-four). By 1970 the ranks of the former had grown so fast that they were only outnumbered two to one by the latter, a state of affairs that had not existed since 1910.”

Subsequent analyses showed that this explanation is not, by itself, satisfactory. Age cohorts that are far larger than their predecessors do not, in general, commit more crimes. But I think Wilson was on to something when he linked the 1960s crime boom to a kind of intergenerational decivilizing process. In many ways the new generation tried to push back against the eight-century movement described by Norbert Elias.

The baby boomers were unusual (I know, we baby boomers are always saying we’re unusual) in sharing an emboldening sense of solidarity, as if their generation were an ethnic group or a nation. (A decade later it was pretentiously referred to as “Woodstock Nation”.) Not only did they outnumber the older generation, but thanks to new electronic media, they felt the strength of their numbers. The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up with television. And television, especially in the three-network era, allowed them to know that other baby boomers were sharing their experiences, and to know that the others knew that they knew. This common knowledge, as economists and logicians call it, gave rise to a horizontal web of solidarity that cut across the vertical ties to parents and authorities that had formerly isolated young people from one another and forced them to kowtow to their elders. Much like a disaffected population that feels its strength only when it assembles at a rally, baby boomers saw other young people like themselves in the audience of The Ed Sullivan Show grooving on the Rolling Stones and knew that every other young person in America was grooving at the same time, and knew that the others knew that they knew.

The baby boomers were bonded by another new technology of solidarity, first marketed by an obscure Japanese company called Sony: the transistor radio. The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios. I can still remember the thrill of tuning in to signals from New York radio stations bouncing off the late-night ionosphere into my bedroom in Montreal, listening to Motown and Dylan and the British invasion and psychedelia and feeling that something was happening here, but Mr. Jones didn’t know what it was.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times. But this decivilizing process was magnified by a trend that had been gathering momentum throughout the 20^th century. The sociologist Cas Wouters, a translator and intellectual heir of Elias, has argue that after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process. The Civilizing Process had been a flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward. But as Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were leveled. The informalization affected the way people dressed, as they abandoned hats, gloves, ties, and dresses for casual sportswear. It affected the language, as people started to address their friends with first names instead of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss. And it could be seen in countless other ways in which speech and demeanor became less mannered and more spontaneous. The stuffy high-society lady, like the Margaret Dumont character in the Marx Brothers movies, became a target of ridicule rather than emulation.

After having been steadily beaten down by the informalizing process, the elites then suffered a second hit to their legitimacy. The civil rights movement had exposed a moral blot on the American establishment, and as critics shone a light on other parts of society, more stains came into view. Among them were the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the pervasiveness of poverty, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the many illiberal military interventions, particularly the Vietnam War, and later the despoliation of the environment and the oppression of women and homosexuals. The stated enemy of the Western establishment, Marxism, gained prestige as it made inroads in third-world “liberation” movements, and it was increasingly embraced by bohemians and fashionable intellectuals. Surveys of popular opinion from the 1960s through the 1990s showed a plummeting of trust in every social institution.

The leveling of hierarchies and the harsh scrutiny of the power structure were unstoppable and in many ways desirable. But one of the side effects was to undermine the prestige of aristocratic and bourgeois lifestyles that had, over the course of several centuries, become less violent than those of the working class and underclass. Instead of values trickling down from the court, they bubbled up from the street, a process that was later called “proletarianization” and “defining deviancy down”.

These currents pushed against the civilizing tide in ways that were celebrated in the era’s popular culture. The backsliding, to be sure, did not originate in the two prime movers of Elias’s Civilizing Process. Government control did not retreat into anarchy, as it had in the American West and in newly independent third-world countries, nor did an economy based on commerce and specialization give way to feudalism and barter. But the next step in Elias’s sequence – the psychological change toward greater self-control and interdependence – came under steady assault in the counterculture of the generation that came of age in the 1960s.

A prime target was the inner governor of civilized behavior, self-control. Spontaneity, self-expression, and a defiance of inhibitions became cardinal virtues. “If it feels good, do it,” commanded a popular lapel button. Do It was the title of a book by the political agitator Jerry Rubin. “Do It ‘Til You’re Satisfied (Whatever It Is)” was the refrain of a popular song by BT Express. The body was elevated over the mind: Keith Richards boasted, “Rock and roll is music from the neck downwards.” And adolescence was elevated over adulthood: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” advised the agitator Abbie Hoffman; “Hope I die before I get old,” sang The Who in “My Generation.” Sanity was denigrated, and psychosis romanticized, in movies such as A Fine Madness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, King of Hearts, and Outrageous. And then of course there were the drugs.

Another target of the counterculture was the ideal that individuals should be embedded in webs of dependency that obligate them to other people in stable economies and organizations. If you wanted an image that contradicted this ideal as starkly as possible, it might be a rolling stone. Originally from a song by Muddy Waters, the image resonated with the times so well that it lent itself to three icons of the culture: the rock group, the magazine, and the famous song by Bob Dylan (in which he taunts an upper-class women who has become homeless). “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” the motto of onetime Harvard psychology instructor Timothy Leary, became a watchword of the psychedelia movement. The idea of coordinating one’s interests with others in a job was treated as selling out. As Dylan put it:

“Well, I try my best

To be just like I am,

But everybody wants you

To be just like them.

They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.”

Elias had written that the demands of self-control and the embedding of the self into webs of interdependence were historically reflected in the development of timekeeping devices and a consciousness of time: “This is why tendencies in the individual so often rebel against social time as represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many people come into conflict with themselves when they wish to be punctual.” In the opening scene of the 1969 movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conspicuously toss their wristwatches into the dirt before setting off on their motorcycles to find America. That same year, the first album by the band Chicago (when they were known as the Chicago Transit Authority) contained the lyrics “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can’t imagine why.” All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: “How can you be a mensch without a zager?” She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day.

Together with self-control and societal connectedness, a third ideal came under attack: marriage and family life, which had done so much to domesticate male violence in the preceding decades. The idea that a man and a woman should devote their energies to a monogamous relationship in which they raise their children in a safe environment became a target of howling ridicule. That life was now the soulless, conformist, consumerist, materialist, ticky-tacky, plastic, white-bread, Ozzie and Harriet suburban wasteland.

I don’t remember anyone in the 1960s blowing his nose into a tablecloth, but popular culture did celebrate the flouting of standards of cleanliness, propriety, and sexual continence. The hippies were popularly perceived as unwashed and malodorous, which in my experience was a calumny. But there’s no disputing that they rejected conventional standards of grooming, and an enduring image from Woodstock was of naked concertgoers frolicking in the mud. One could trace the reversal of conventions of propriety on album covers alone. There was The Who Sell Out, with a sauce-dribbling Roger Daltrey immersed in a bath of baked beans; the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, with the lovable moptops adorned with chunks of raw meat and decapitated dolls (quickly recalled); the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, with a photo of a filthy public toilet (originally censored); and Who’s Next, in which the four musicians are shown zipping up their flies while walking away from a urine-splattered wall. The flouting of propriety extended to famous live performances, as when Jimi Hendrix pretended to copulate with his amplifier at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Throwing away your wristwatch or bathing in baked beans is, of course, a far cry from committing actual violence. The 1960s were supposed to be the era of peace and love, and so they were in some respects. But the glorification of dissoluteness shaded into an indulgence of violence and then into violence itself. At the end of every concert, The Who famously smashed their instruments to smithereens, which could be dismissed as harmless theatre were it not for the fact that drummer Keith moon also destroyed dozens of hotel rooms, partly deafened Pete Townshend by detonating his drums onstage, beat up his wife, girlfriend, and daughter, threatened to injure the hands of a keyboardist of the Faces for dating his ex-wife, and accidentally killed his bodyguard by running over him with his car before dying himself in 1978 of the customary drug overdose.

Personal violence was sometimes celebrated in song, as if it were just another form of antiestablishment protest. In 1964 Martha Reeves and the Vandellas sang “Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street.” Four years later the Rolling Stones replied that the time was right for fighting in the street. As part of their “satanic majesty” and “sympathy for the devil,” the Stones had a theatrical ten-minute song, “Midnight Rambler,” which acted out a rape-murder by the Boston strangler, ending with the lines “I’m gonna smash down on your plate-glass window / Put a fist, put a fist through your steel-plated door / I’ll … stick … my … knife … right … down … your … throat!” The affectation of rock musicians to treat every thug and serial killer as a dashing “rebel” or “outlaw” was satirized in This is Spinal Tap when the band speaks of their plans to write a rock musical based on the life of Jack the Ripper. (Chorus: “You’re a naughty one, Saucy Jack!”)

Less than four months after Woodstock, the Rolling Stones held a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, for which the organizers had hired the Hell’s Angels, romanticized at the time as “outlaw brothers of the counterculture,” to provide security. The atmosphere at the concert (and perhaps the 1960s) is captured in this description from Wikipedia:

“A huge circus performer weighing over 350 pounds and hallucinating on LSD stripped naked and ran berserk through the crowd toward the stage, knocking guests in all directions, prompting a group of Angels to leap from the stage and club him unconscious. ^{[citation needed]}”

No citation is needed for what happened next, since it was captured in the documentary Gimme Shelter. A Hell’s Angel beat up the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane onstage, Mick Jagger ineffectually tried to calm the increasingly obstreperous mob, and a young man in the audience, apparently after pulling a gun, was stabbed to death by another Angel.

When rock music burst onto the scene in the 1950s, politicians and clergymen vilified it for corrupting morals and encouraging lawlessness. (An amusing video reel of fulminating fogies can be seen in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.) Do we now have to – gulp – admit they were right? Can we connect the values of 1960s popular culture to the actual rise in violent crimes that accompanied them? Not directly, of course. Correlation is not causation, and a third factor, the pushback against the values of the Civilizing Process, presumably caused both the changes in popular culture and the increase in violent behavior. Also, the overwhelming majority of baby boomers committed no violence whatsoever. Still, attitudes and popular culture surely reinforce each other, and at the margins, where susceptible individuals and subcultures can be buffeted one way or another, there are plausible causal arrows from the decivilizing mindset to the facilitation of actual violence.

One of them was a self-handicapping of the criminal justice Leviathan. Though rock musicians seldom influence public policy directly, writers and intellectuals do, and they got caught up in the zeitgeist and began to rationalize the new licentiousness. Marxism made violent class conflict seem like a route to a better world. Influential thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman tried to merge Marxism or anarchism with a new interpretation of Freud that connected sexual and emotional repression to political repression and championed a release from inhibitions as part of the revolutionary struggle. Troublemakers were increasingly seen as rebels and nonconformists, or as victims of racism, poverty, and bad parenting. Graffiti vandals were now “artists”, thieves were now “class warriors,” and neighbourhood hooligans were “community leaders.” Many smart people, intoxicated by radical chic, did incredibly stupid things. Graduates of elite universities built bombs to be set off at army social functions, or drove getaway cars while “radicals” shot guards at armed robberies. New York intellectuals were conned by Marxobabble-spouting psychopaths into lobbying for their release from prison.

In the interval between the onset of the sexual revolution of the early 1960s and the rise of feminism in the 1970s, the control of women’s sexuality was seen as a perquisite of sophisticated men. Boasts of sexual coercion and jealous violence appeared in popular novels and films and in the lyrics of rock songs such as the Beatles’ “Run for Your Life,” Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” and Ronnie Hawkins’s “Who Do You Love?” It was even rationalized in “revolutionary” political writings, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s bestselling 1968 memoir Soul on Ice, in which the Black Panther leader wrote:

“Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women – and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.”

Somehow the interests of the women who were defiled in this insurrectionary act never figured into his political principles, nor into the critical reaction to the book (New York Times: “Brilliant and revealing”; The Nation: “A remarkable book … beautifully written”; Atlantic Monthly: “An intelligent and turbulent and passionate and eloquent man”).

As the rationalizations for criminality caught the attention of judges and legislators, they became increasingly reluctant to put miscreants behind bars. Though the civil liberties of the era did not lead to nearly as many vicious criminals “going free on a technicality” as the Dirty Harry movies would suggest, law enforcement was indeed retreating as the crime rate was advancing. In the United States from 196 to 1979, the likelihood that a crime would lead to an arrest dropped from 0.32 to 0.18, the likelihood that an arrest would lead to imprisonment dropped from 0.32 to 0.14, and the likelihood that a crime would lead to imprisonment fell from 0.10 to 0.02, a factor of five.

Even more calamitous than the return of hoodlums to the street was the mutual disengagement between law enforcement and communities, and the resulting deterioration of neighbourhood life. Offenses against civil order like vagrancy, loitering, and panhandling were decriminalized, and minor crimes like vandalism, graffiti-spraying, turnstile-jumping, and urinating in public fell off the police radar screens. Thanks to intermittently effective antipsychotic drugs and a change in attitudes toward deviance, the wards of mental hospitals were emptied, which multiplied the ranks of the homeless. Shopkeepers and citizens with a stake in the neighbourhood, who otherwise would have kept an eye out for local misbehavior, eventually surrendered to the vandals, panhandlers, and muggers and retreated to the suburbs.

The 1960s decivilizing process affected the choices of individuals as well as policymakers. Many young men decided that they ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more and, instead of pursuing a respectable family life, hung out in all-male packs that spawned the familiar cycle of competition for dominance, insult or minor aggression, and violent retaliation. The sexual revolution, which provided men with plentiful sexual opportunities without the responsibilities of marriage, added to this dubious freedom. Some men tried to get a piece of the lucrative trade in contraband drugs, in which self-help justice is the only way to enforce property rights. (The cutthroat market in crack cocaine in the late 1980s had a particularly low barrier for entry because doses of the drug could be sold in small amounts, and the resulting infusion of teenage crack dealers probably contributed to the 25 percent increase in the homicide rate between 1985 and 1991.) On top of the violence that accompanies any market in contraband, the drugs themselves, together with good old-fashioned alcohol, lowered inhibitions and sent sparks onto the tinder.

The decivilizing effects hit African American communities particularly hard. They started out with the historical disadvantages of second-class citizenship, which left many young people teetering between respectable and underclass lifestyles just when the new antiestablishment forces were pushing in the wrong direction. They could count on even less protection from the criminal justice system than white Americans because of the combination of old racism among the police and the new indulgence by the judicial system toward crime, of which they were disproportionately the victims. Mistrust of the criminal justice system turned into cynicism and sometimes paranoia, making self-help justice seem the only alternative.

On top of these strikes came a feature of African American family life just pointed out by the sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, for which he was initially vilified but eventually vindicated. A large proportion (today a majority) of black children are born out of wedlock, and many grow up without fathers. This trend, already visible in the early 1960s, may have been multiplied by the sexual revolution and yet again by perverse welfare incentives that encouraged young women to “marry the state” instead of the fathers of their children. Though I am sceptical of theories of parental influence that say that fatherless boys grow up violent because they lack a role model or parental discipline (Moynihan himself, for example, grew up without a father), widespread fatherlessness can lead to violence for a different reason. All those young men who aren’t bringing up their children are hanging out with one another competing for dominance instead. The mixture was as combustible in the inner city as it had been in the cowboy saloons and mining camps of the Wild West, this time not because there were no women around but because the women lacked the bargaining power to force the men into a civilized lifestyle.”

Interesting read, eh?

Anyhow, as this last paragraph implies, Pinker doesn’t just use Elias’ arguments about civilising through manners, hygiene and self-control when trying to explain the trends in violence. One of the other major explanations he resorts to is a certain social phenomenon called “a culture of honor”. While the concept of a culture of honour is not an Eliasian concept, it is still an adapted Hobbesian concept, since it corresponds to the “Glory” component of Hobbes’ schema of bloodlust and it arises – Pinker argues – in situations of partial anarchy. I suspect it’s also an explanation I would have understood as a child, though perhaps less readily than Pinker’s other ones.

Basically, Pinker mostly uses this idea of a culture of honour to explain those statistical phenomena that seem to be anomalies in the decline in interpersonal violence, or counterexamples to his thesis.

One of these seeming anomalies is that despite the massive decline in homicide from the 13^th century on, the homicide rate among the upper classes was still “remarkably high” in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and “violence was a part of the lives of respectable men, such as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr”. Back in the first chapter of the book, after establishing that formal duelling was not an invention of American politicians, Pinker illustrates this quirk of the age more vividly,

“[Duelling] emerged during the Renaissance as a measure to curtail assassinations, vendettas, and street brawls among aristocrats and their retinues. When one man felt that his honour had been impugned, he could challenge the other to a duel and cap the violence at a single death, with no hard feelings among the defeated man’s clan or entourage. But as the essayist Arthur Krystal observes, “The gentry … took honor so seriously that just about every offense became an offense against honor. Two Englishmen dueled because their dogs had fought. Two Italian gentlemen fell out over the respective merits of Tasso and Ariosto, an argument that ended when one combatant, mortally wounded, admitted that he had not read the poet that he was championing. And Byron’s great-uncle William, the fifth Baron Byron, killed a man after disagreeing about whose property furnished more game.”

Dueling persisted in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, despite denunciations by the church and prohibitions by many governments. Samuel Johnson defended the custom, writing, “A man may shoot the man who invades his character, as he may shoot him who attempts to break into his house.” Dueling sucked in such luminaries as Voltaire, Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, Robert peel, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and the mathematician Evariste Galois, the last two fatally. The buildup, climax, and denouement of a duel were made to order for fiction writers, and the dramatic possibilities were put to use by Sir Walter Scott, Dumas père, de Maupassant, Conrad, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Thomas Mann.”

When we get to “The Civilizing Process” chapter, it becomes clear that Pinker’s explanation for this phenomenon is that gentlemen in this period were fatally embroiled in a culture of honour. This culture was, in turn, a product of a lack of strong law-enforcement for those at the top of the society (no Leviathan). How Pinker explains this is as follows: a power vacuum creates a reliance on “self-help justice”, and self-help justice inevitably leads to an obsession with the intangible currency known as ‘honor’, because every man must be seen to be capable of enforcing his own justice. Since a man’s honour is his shield against exploitation in such a world, every perceived slight or trespass – however trivial it may seem to us – is interpreted as an unpardonable humiliation. If you impugn or denigrate a man’s honour in a world without a Leviathan, you risk making him seem like a walkover. People who don’t retaliate are going to be insulted again, or worse. Therefore, his only option is to retaliate. (You can see how Hobbes and game-theory go hand-in-hand.)  Conversely, when there is a Leviathan and men don’t have to take justice into their own hands, a man’s status isn’t bound up so tightly in his honour; it is even possible to show weakness around other men. Ergo, violence goes down.

Now, Pinker’s most fascinating use of this concept comes in when explaining the anomaly of America’s crime rate in the present day. Before he gets to the section specifically devoted to American crime, hints about the answer appear in Pinker’s use of the work of the legal scholar Donald Black. Black argued in an influential article called “Crime as Social Control” that “most of what we call crime is, from the point of view of the perpetrator, the pursuit of justice.” Instead of being committed “as a means to a practical end”, Black informs us that “the most common motives for homicide are moralistic: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel, punishing an unfaithful or deserting romantic partner, and other acts of jealousy, revenge, and self-defense.” Thus, “most homicides […] are really instances of capital punishment, with a private citizen as the judge, jury, and executioner.” The reason this kind of culture is most prevalent at the socio-economic margins, particularly in black communities and ghettos, is that the police aren’t trusted. There is effectively no Leviathan at all in such milieux.

Fascinatingly, Pinker claims that the generally elevated homicide rates of America – almost entirely caused by the violent South – stems from a historical, more deep-seated culture of honour that has dominated the South for generations. Although it is fashionable for liberals to attribute America’s huge problem with mass shootings and homicide to its weak gun laws, Pinker has convinced me that there’s no way that’s the whole story. Apart from anything else, one must question why so many people have guns to begin with (mostly in the South), and why there is such a fervent resistance to the very suggestion of restriction (mostly in the South). Clearly, the culture of the place is utterly different from that of other Western countries (and even just the northern half of America). I don’t want to get into Pinker’s history of the South too much, because I’ve already spilled way too many words on this book (and there’s a lot more to come). Basically, Pinker suggests that the culture of honour we see in the South today is a legacy of the lawlessness of the colonisation of America and the extreme isolation of many of the communities (which leads to a reliance on self-help justice). Most southerners today have inherited a culture that served their ancestors well but is unnecessary in a world with strong law enforcement. Even if one doubts the exact details of Pinker’s history, there is no doubting the evidence that there is a difference in the culture of the North and South in America today. Here is the most interesting of the evidence for the existence of a culture of honour in the South today:

“The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment. The psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen have shown that this mindset continues to pervade southern laws, politics, and attitudes. Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, they found, only in those sparked by quarrels. In surveys, southerners do not endorse the use of violence in the abstract, but only to protect home and family. The laws of the southern states sanction this morality. They give a person wide latitude to kill in defense of self or property, put fewer restrictions on gun purchases, allow corporal punishment (“paddling”) in schools, and specify the death penalty for murder, which their judicial systems are happy to carry out. Southern men and women are more likely to serve in the military, to study at military academies, and to take hawkish positions on foreign policy. […]

Nisbett and Cohen also captured the southern culture of honor in the lab. Their subjects were not bubbas from the bayous but affluent students at the University of Michigan who had lived in the South for at least six years. Students were recruited for a psychology experiment on “limited response time conditions on certain facets of human judgment” (a bit of gobbledygook to hide the real purpose of the study). In the hallway on their way to the lab, the students had to pass an accomplice of the experimenter who was filing papers in a cabinet. In half of the cases, when the student brushed past the accomplice, he slammed the drawer shut and muttered, “Asshole.” Then the experimenter (who was kept in the dark as to whether the student had been insulted) welcomed the student into the lab, observed his demeanor, gave him a questionnaire, and drew a blood sample. The students from the northern states, they found, laughed off the insult and behaved no differently from the control group who had entered without incident. But the insulted students from the southern states walked in fuming. They reported lower self-esteem in a questionnaire, and their blood samples showed elevated levels of testosterone and of cortisol, a stress hormone. They behaved more dominantly toward the experimenter and shook his hand more firmly, and when approaching another accomplice in the narrow hallway on their way out, they refused to step aside and let him pass.”

Fascinating.

When it comes to the Humanitarian Revolution, I think the explanations of childhood-me would again roughly align with Pinker’s. Pinker basically attributes the great moral progress of this period to two main forces:

1.)    The power of reason, assisted by the increased cosmopolitanism and secularism of society, and the creation of a “Republic of Letters” via massive improvements in printing technology.

2.)    A far expanded circle of empathy, assisted again by the massive improvements in printing technology and the proliferation of popular novels about social injustice in the 19^th Century and beyond.

I wrote a little comment about the second force in a previous essay which basically sums up Pinker’s claim about the power of fiction: “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is known to have had an enormous impact on the American abolitionist movement, while Dickens novels like Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations achieved enormous success in entreating their readers to ponder the social stratification, injustice, cruelty and absurdity of British society, and the plight of the working-class, particularly children. Never before had so many upper-class aristocrats been made to ponder their privilege and the humanity they shared with the millions of unwashed ruffians below them.”

With respect to the first, most important force, Pinker well and truly plays his New Atheist hand by writing the following,

“Bringing people and ideas together, of course, does not determine how those ideas will evolve. The rise of the Republic of Letters and the cosmopolitan city cannot, by themselves, explain why a humanitarian ethics arose in the 18^th century, rather than ever-more-ingenious rationales for torture, slavery, despotism, and war.

My own view is that the two developments really are linked. When a large enough community of free, rational agents confers on how a society should run its affairs, steered by logical consistency and feedback from the world, their consensus will veer in certain directions. Just as we don’t have to explain why molecular biologists discovered that DNA has four bases – given that they were doing their biology properly, and given that DNA really does have four bases, in the long run they could hardly have discovered anything else – we may not have to explain why enlightened thinkers would eventually agree against African slavery, cruel punishments, despotic monarchs, and the execution of witches and heretics. With enough scrutiny by disinterested, rational, and informed thinkers, these practices cannot be justified indefinitely. The universe of ideas, in which one idea entails others, is itself an exogenous force, and once a community of thinkers enters that universe, they will be forced in certain directions regardless of their material surroundings. I think this process of moral discovery was a significant cause of the Humanitarian Revolution. […]

The universality of reason is a momentous realization, because it defines a place for morality. If I appeal to you to do something that affects me – to get off my foot, or not to stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning – then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours if I want you to take me seriously (say, by retaining my right to stand on your foot, or to stab you, or to let your children drown). I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I’m standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

You and I ought to reach this moral understanding not just so we can have a logically consistent conversation but because mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children when they get into trouble, and refrain from knifing each other than we would be if we hoarded our surpluses while they rotted, let each other’s children drown, and feuded incessantly. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one where we both are unselfish.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. This foundation of morality may be seen in the many versions of the Golden Rule that have been discovered by the world’s major religions, and also in Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Hobbes and Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all people are created equal.

From the factual knowledge that there is a universal human nature, and the moral principle that no person has grounds for privileging his or her interests over others’, we can deduce a great deal about how we ought to run our affairs. A government is a good thing to have, because in a state of anarchy people’s self-interest, self-deception, and fear of these shortcomings in others would lead to constant strife. People are better off abjuring violence, if everyone else agrees to do so, and vesting authority in a disinterested third party. But since that third party will consist of human beings, not angels, their power must be checked by the power of other people, to force them to govern with the consent of the governed. They may not use violence against their citizens beyond the minimum necessary to prevent greater violence. And they should foster arrangements that allow people to flourish form cooperation and voluntary exchange.

This line of reasoning may be called humanism because the value that it recognizes is the flourishing of humans, the only value that cannot be denied. I experience pleasures and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same.

If all this sounds banal and obvious, then you are a child of the Enlightenment, and have absorbed its humanist philosophy. As a matter of historical fact, there is nothing banal or obvious about it. Though not necessarily atheistic (it is compatible with a deism in which God is identified with the nature of the universe), Enlightenment humanism makes no use of scripture, Jesus, ritual, religious law, divine purpose, immortal souls, an afterlife, a messianic age, or a God who responds to individual people. It sweeps aside many secular sources of value as well, if they cannot be shown to be necessary for the enhancement of human flourishing. These include the prestige of the nation, race, or class; fetishized virtues such as manliness, dignity, heroism, glory, and honor; and other mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, and struggles.

I would argue that Enlightenment humanism, whether invoked explicitly or implicitly, underlay the diverse humanitarian reforms of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The philosophy was explicitly invoked in the design of the first liberal democracies, most transparently in the “self-evident truths” in the American Declaration of Independence. Later it would spread to other parts of the world, blended with humanistic arguments that had arisen independently in those civilizations. And as we shall see in chapter 7, it regained momentum during the Rights Revolutions of the present era.”

Notably, all of Pinker’s grandiose, self-congratulatory analysis here amounts to a very simple explanation for why we gradually came to abandon “cruel and unusual punishments” and moral abominations like slavery. The answer is basically, We got smarter. Again, you might even call it a bit “childish” (which, to repeat myself, doesn’t necessarily make it wrong).

I’m now finally done with discussing how Pinker’s arguments swept me away, and the priming that I believe led to that. It is time now to expatiate on the areas where Pinker diverges from other esteemed thinkers – the parts of the book that I’ve come to see, in hindsight, as intractably ideological or dogmatic. Of course, when I use these words “ideological” and “dogmatic”, I don’t mean them in the hard sense of totally irrational inveteracy. Until we get a wider view of the content of the book, I’m trying not to make any overt judgments at all; at the moment, I’m merely using those words to refer to a strong, vehement but not necessarily irrational attachment to a particular set of doctrines. However, when we are done with this analysis of the book’s most contentious points, my personal view on The Better Angels overall will have become clearer.

There are two main areas that I’ll give as examples of Pinker’s contentiousness or dogmatism. The first is his perspective on non-state deaths in warfare.

It seems that most anthropologists disagree with Pinker on the figures of non-state peoples found to have died in war. One is the respected Rutgers University anthropologist Brian Ferguson, who has a very strong reply to Pinker’s early stats on hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticultural violence, analysing very carefully the origin of the statistics and how they are often pressganged (rather unscientifically) to bolster a particular evo psych agenda. Naturally, the people who do this claim they are the ones fighting against a political agenda, namely, a “neo-Rousseauian” agenda/political correctness (yes, everything is ideology). Ferguson’s monograph can be found here: http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/sites/fasn/files/Pinker's%20List%20-%20Exaggerating%20Prehistoric%20War%20Mortality%20(2013).pdf

As Ferguson reveals, there is no doubt that Pinker is very committed to a view of evolutionary psychology inherited from figures like Edward O. Wilson, Martin Daly, Margaret Wilson, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and consistently draws on this in all his books (Pinker does tend always to cite the same people). Presumably, Pinker would justify this by saying that the evidence supports the kind of evo psych propounded by these thinkers, and it is of course true that there is plenty of evidence in today’s world for the darkness of man and so on. As I’ve already made clear, my own personal disposition on human nature (particularly male nature) is definitely Hobbesian and misanthropic, so I understand this. But I also think that Ferguson is very much justified in questioning the data. The data isn’t nearly so iron-clad as Pinker would like to think – not even close. Ferguson’s conclusion beautifully illustrates how wrong he thinks Pinker is: “Is this sample [Pinker’s list] representative of war death rates among prehistoric populations? Hardly. It is a selective compilation of highly unusual cases, grossly distorting war’s antiquity and lethality. The elaborate castle of evolutionary and other theorizing that rises on this sample is built upon sand. Is there an alternative way of assessing the presence of war in prehistory, and of evaluating whether making war is the expectable expression of evolved tendencies to kill? Yes. Is there archaeological evidence indicating war was absent in entire prehistoric regions and for millennia? Yes. The alternative and representative way to assess prehistoric war mortality is demonstrated in chapter 11, which surveys all Europe and the Near East, considering whole archaeological records, not selected violent cases. When that is done, with careful attention to types and vagaries of evidence, an entirely different story unfolds. War does not go forever backwards in time. It had a beginning. We are not hard-wired for war. We learn it.” Does Ferguson go too far the other way? Perhaps. But Pinker is undoubtedly on thin ice in this area.

The second area where Pinker goes against the grain of most contemporary thinkers (but not New Atheists) is a very big one. In short, it is his belief in all the more bland platitudes of the secular establishment. To be more precise, it is his seemingly naïve trust in the power of the reason and the greatness of the Enlightenment, and his total belief in the superiority of the “liberal democracies” of the West, which he thinks reflect Enlightenment ideals.

Pinker attributes the source of the great “moral progress” our Western societies have undergone since the 17^th Century or so – “The Humanitarian Revolution” and later “The Rights Revolutions” – almost entirely to the power of “reason”. In several passages throughout the book, Pinker exalts reason’s power to overcome parochialism, tribalism and essentialism, and he declaims the responsibility of reason for the wonderful liberal democracies we live in today, as well as the Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and autonomy that undergird them. He thinks empathy is slightly overrated when compared with reason, and gives the Enlightenment literally zero credit for any of the bad things to have happened since the Enlightenment. Nazism, Marxism and all political ideologies that differ from the “liberal democracies” that we’ve had since World War II in the West are dismissed as “counter-Enlightenment ideologies”. His reason for lumping all these ideologies together as “counter-Enlightenment” perversions isn’t really elaborated on, but I think it’s essentially because all these dogmas submerge the lives and happiness of individual people under some kind of national glory or glorious struggle. Yet, as the philosopher John Gray points out in his review (which it must be said is excessively grandiloquent and weakly supported), this doesn’t make much sense. It’s basically just Pinker projecting his values onto the past. There were plenty of respected “Enlightenment” figures who didn’t espouse exactly the doctrines Pinker likes, but Pinker totally disregards them because they don’t espouse exactly the doctrines Pinker likes. Gray calls attention to Pinker’s omitting to mention the rather nefarious precepts of Enlightenment thinkers who are otherwise regarded as titans of the age (Locke, Voltaire, Kant, Bentham). Personally, however, I think another conspicuous absence from Pinker’s discussion of the Enlightenment is even more important than that: namely, the very significant truth that none of the Enlightenment political philosophers we admire today would have endorsed the contemporary Western world as an ideal. Certainly, no sane Enlightenment thinker could possibly have claimed that free-market capitalism was an “ideal” that would help us create just, equitable humanistic societies. Yet Pinker claims that our society is in line with Enlightenment ideals. This argument is facilitated by Pinker’s penchant for referring to the Western countries using the simple phrase “liberal democracy”, which presupposes that all the countries of the West really are true liberal democracies according to the Enlightenment ideal. This seems particularly egregious in the country where he lives, America. It’s a strange kind of democracy where Wall Street and big corporations have far more political agency than the people. Anyhow, since the concept of the ideal state as a “liberal democracy” was a very popular one in the Enlightenment, this naïve usage allows him to get away with arguing that we basically do live in the ideal type of society.

Now, it is true that Pinker does manage to find one work from a famous Enlightenment thinker that appears to fit perfectly with all of his later statistical analysis on the natural pacifism of our contemporary “liberal democracies” (his main claim is that liberal democracies don’t go to war with each other). This work is one of Immanuel Kant’s little-known productions, a 1795 essay called “Perpetual Peace”. Kant outlines three conditions for peace in this essay. The first is that states should be democratic. “Democracies tend to avoid wars because the benefits of war go to a country’s leaders whereas the costs are paid by its citizens.” His second was that ““the law of nations shall be founded on a Federation of Free States” – a “League of Nations,” as he also called it.” (Pinker reckons the UN serves this function for us, although he doesn’t mention how often the US completely ignores the recommendations of the UN.) The third is ““universal hospitality” or “world citizenship.” […] The hope is that communication, trade, and other “peaceable relations” across national boundaries will knit the world’s people into a single community, so that a “violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world.” I think Pinker mainly likes this treatise because Kant just happens to endorse a holy trinity that – at least superficially – works perfectly with the state of the world today. Does everyone vote in the West? Yes. Do we have an international Leviathan? Yes. Is there plenty of free-trade and do we live in an increasingly globalised world? Yes. Later, all this enables Pinker to declare that Kant made some brilliant predictions and is spot-on about peace.

Nevertheless, it is simply false to argue that we really do live in a society that any of the respected Enlightenment figures would regard us as Enlightened in terms of justice, equality, self-determination and so on. No, not even Adam Smith would endorse the structure of our world, as Chomsky has repeatedly insisted: http://chomsky.info/warfare02/

Towards the end of the book, when talking about the eponymous “better angels”, Pinker claims the “Rights Revolutions” of the second half of the 20^th Century are also mostly attributable to reason, that morality (construed largely as primitive, essentialist morality or moralising) and empathy are both overrated forces. He draws on Singer for this – particularly, his very influential twin-metaphors of the “expanding circle” and the “escalator of reason”. He then diverges from Singer. He does this not because Singer exaggerates the role of reason (as it might easily be alleged), but because he focusses too much on the advances of great thinkers and doesn’t mention the “Flynn Effect”. This is the phenomenon, documented by the philosopher James Flynn in the 1980s, that the average IQ test performance score has been steadily rising since the beginning of the 20^th Century – so much so that an average teenager today would, if they were able to travel back to 1910, register a score of 130.[7] Pinker thinks our greater ability in abstract reasoning is one of the main reasons we have been able to transcend parochialism and essentialism. I think this probably does offer some explanation for rapid changes in attitudes to racism, sexism and animal cruelty in the sixties and seventies (which obviously came after public high-school education had exploded across the West in the fifties), but the way he ends up using the Flynn Effect leaves much to be desired. Indeed, after his exposition of the phenomenon, there comes the weakest section of the book (in my opinion), in which Pinker spends several pages exploring links between intelligence and the things he’s spent the book arguing. Even at the time I was reading the book, it was this section that broke Pinker’s spell. Now, looking back on it, I think it’s kind of embarrassing. The first part of this section is ok; it’s just a very brief summary of evidence linking higher intelligence to less involvement in violent crime. Apparently, the correlation between these two things holds true even keeping socioeconomic status and other variables constant. The next part – discussing the link between intelligence and co-operation – is also not too silly. A few experiments have apparently shown that the two are causally connected. Ok, fine. Yet the next three links that Pinker examines are, I think, just absurd. Pinker basically uses a few studies to try to show that people who believe exactly what Pinker believes are slightly more intelligent on average, and that that is somehow important. Check out this shameless, totally unscientific masturbation from his examination of the first of these three links, that between “Intelligence and Liberalism”:

“Since intelligence is correlated with social class, any correlation with liberalism, if not statistically controlled, could simply reflect the political prejudices of the upper middle classes. But the key qualification is that the escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself. Intelligence need not correlate with other ideologies that get lumped into contemporary left-of-center political coalitions, such as populism, socialism, political correctness, identity politics, and the Green movement. Indeed, classical liberalism is sometimes congenial to the libertarian and anti-political-correctness factions in today’s right-of-center coalitions. […]

Among more than twenty thousand young adults who had participated in the national Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, average IQ increased steadily from those who identified themselves as “very conservative” (94.8) to those who identified themselves as “very liberal” (106.4). The General Social Survey shows a similar correlation, while also containing a hint that intelligence tracks classical liberalism more closely than left-liberalism. The smarter respondents in the survey were less likely to agree with the statement that the government has a responsibility to redistribute income from the rich to the poor (leftist but not classically liberal), while being more likely to agree that the government should help black Americans to compensate for the historical discrimination against them (a formulation of a liberal position which is specifically motivated by the value of fairness). […]

A second analysis discovered that brighter ten-year-olds were more likely to vote when they grew up, and more likely to vote for the Liberal Democrats (a center-left/libertarian coalition) or the Greens, and less likely to vote for nationalist and anti-immigration parties. Again, there is a suggestion that intelligence leads to classical rather than left-liberalism: when social class was controlled, the IQ-Green correlation vanished, but the IQ-Lib Dem correlation survived.”

What the fuck, Pinker. I have two main problems with this passage (and his examination of the next link is even worse):

1.)    It’s fundamentally pointless. It is of near zero importance that there is a correlation between slightly higher average intelligence and acceptance of “classical liberalism” (which is probably best defined as “Pinker’s view on politics”) as long as there are still plenty of people who are not classical liberals and very intelligent. Why do I say this? Well, Pinker is obviously trying to demonstrate that reason itself naturally leads to classical liberalism and therefore peace. But even if you were to accept that classical liberalism is the best political philosophy for attaining peace, the data adduced would still not go anywhere near proving that reason itself naturally leads to classical liberalism. If, say, 50% of people with IQs above 100 subscribed to classical liberalism, he might have a point. However, as it stands, using a couple of surveys with decidedly undramatic results to advance the case that “Ppl who do not agree with me iz dumb” is such a cheap way of trying to score political points. More importantly, it proves nothing.

2.)    It is sophistic. Take this sentence, for example: “But the key qualification is that the escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition.” You may not have noticed it, but this sentence contains a very devious rhetorical trick. The key qualification turns out not to make any sense. Why do I say this? Well, because you can value the autonomy and well-being of individuals without being classically liberal as Pinker defines it. Pinker seems to be exploiting the word “tribe” to connote both tribalism and collectivist or communitarian ideology. Since classical liberalism for Pinker is more individualistic in focus than standard liberalism, this double-meaning somehow makes it seem as if you can only value the autonomy and well-being of individuals if you also have a generally individualistic mindset. But this makes no sense. And then you have these two sentences: “Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself. Intelligence need not correlate with other ideologies that get lumped into contemporary left-of-center political coalitions, such as populism, socialism, political correctness, identity politics, and the Green movement.” What the fuck? I can discern no logical basis for these claims. None. It is pure zealotry. I don’t even understand how he can make these assumptions. Pinker seems to think that if you care just the right amount about other people – presumably because one’s duty to worship the “free-market” trumps one’s obligations to the lives of the poor and downtrodden – then that is the most purely reason-based attitude… Huh? Somehow being preoccupied with true economic equality and with the protection of the natural environment does not follow from pure reason, but Pinker’s political centrism (which he calls “classical liberalism”) does… Just a minute ago he was saying that morality is only a consequence of reason but now suddenly he’s saying that you can’t have too much – without justifying why.

It only gets worse when Pinker examines the second of these three links – that between intelligence and what Pinker describes as “Economic Literacy”. Pinker’s political ideology really comes to the fore here, at what I believe is the nadir of the book:

“And now for a correlation that will annoy the left as much as the correlation with liberalism annoyed the right. The economist Bryan Caplan also looked at data from the General Social Survey and found that smarter people tend to think more like economists (even after statistically controlling for education, income, sex, political party, and political orientation). They are more sympathetic to immigration, free markets, and free trade, and less sympathetic to protectionism, make-work policies, and government intervention in business. Of course none of these positions is directly related to violence. But if one zooms out to the full continuum on which these positions lie, one could argue that the direction that is aligned with intelligence is also the direction that has historically pointed peaceward. To think like an economist is to accept the theory of gentle commerce from classical liberalism, which touts the positive-sum payoffs of exchange and its knock-on benefit of expansive networks of cooperation. That sets it in opposition to populist, nationalist, and communist mindsets that see the world’s wealth as zero-sum and infer that the enrichment one group must come at the expense of another. The historical result of economic illiteracy has often been ethnic and class violence, as people conclude that the have-nots can improve their lot only by forcibly confiscating wealth from the haves and punishing them for their avarice. As we saw in chapter 7, ethnic riots and genocides have declined since World War II, especially in the West, and a greater intuitive appreciation of economics may have played a part (lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy). At the level of international relations, trade has been superseding beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism over the past half-century and, together with democracy and an international community, has contributed to a Kantian peace.”

At this point, I will defer to an inversely ideological (but truly excellent and very cogent) review of Pinker’s work, which has much to say about the attitude Pinker exhibits here. It is part written by Chomsky’s mate Edward Herman, who co-wrote Manufacturing Consent with Chomsky, so you know in advance that it will accuse Pinker of defending the establishment (particularly economic establishment), covering up America’s role in creating many of the evils of today’s world, and of promulgating government-sanctioned myths. It does so with aplomb. http://publicintellectualsproject.mcmaster.ca/democracy/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/

There’s too much incisive, impassioned analysis and rebuttal in this to quote any one passage. I would recommend reading the whole thing. In fact, read it now. Don’t read the rest of this work until you have done so. It’s very long but worth it.

Now that we’ve concluded our discussion of Pinker, I’d like to talk about a rather well-known intellectual. His name has already cropped up several times in this essay, and his ideas feature heavily in the review you’ve just read. Mr Avram Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky’s view on the state of the modern world is obviously radically different from Pinker’s, so his perspective should hopefully expand and enrich our picture of the way things are.

It is fair to say that very few people actually understand Chomsky’s political work, despite it being fairly accessible to a general audience (lucidly articulated), and extremely well-known. And when I say “very few people”, I don’t just mean very few laypeople. It is true that very few laypeople understand Chomsky’s political work, and thus reflexively resort to calling him a conspiracy theorist, America-hater, self-hating Jew, liberal extremist, fascist-sympathiser, terrorist-sympathiser, senile imbecile, ruthless alpha male, cult-leader etc. But a lot of these pejoratives originally come from his more academic critics – and not just the right-wing ones, for whom Chomky induces rage beyond measure. In fact, lots of these pejoratives come from liberal critics. Here is some proof: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-chomsky-guardian-personality

I have a theory about one remedy that could help this happen less often. My suspicion is that rational people couldn’t possibly lash out at Chomsky so vehemently and ferociously if they just understood a couple of the basic axioms of his political work. It seems to me that the following pattern is forever repeated with critics of Chomsky:

1.)    They are first exposed to Chomsky through second-hand information. This is typically highly critical, lambasting his supposed fallacies, biases, errors, denials, apologetics, insanities (and so on).

2.)    Armed with this new information, every time they hear one of his bizarre-seeming claims – the US is the world’s leading terrorist state, Obama is no better than George W. Bush, every US President since Eisenhower would have been hanged if the standards of the Nuremberg Trials were applied to them, wage slavery is fundamentally the same as slavery, education is a system of indoctrination for the youth – it appears to reinforce the first opinion they read. Chomsky really is a little deranged!

3.)    They are thus rendered incapable of engaging properly with his political work.

My hunch is that there is one concept in particular that is key to much of this misunderstanding. If more people understood it, it would cast every single criticism ever levelled at him in a different light. This might sound fanciful, but I don’t think it is. Every criticism I’ve ever read of Chomsky has hinged on the misapprehension of the concept he calls an “institutional mindset”.

Understanding this concept would also help one to understand the arguments contained in Herman and Peterson’s review of The Better Angels (after all, they are Chomsky associates). Indeed, one of the sentences from near the end of their piece illustrates well Chomsky’s view of global politics and why things occur:

“Could it be that institutional factors—the global interests of transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex, the refusal of the nuclear weapons-states to give up their advantage, a permanent-war system that is more resource-commanding than ever, and possesses the potential for unprecedented destruction—carry more weight in policy decisions than does the sociobiological expansion in the powers of reason and empathy speculatively asserted by Pinker, but impossible to prove?”

Chomsky is so often criticised for not including “intention” and “human psychology” in his analysis of global politics and world affairs. In her wax-on-wax-off 2003 New Yorker profile of Chomsky, Larissa MacFarquhar represents this perspective on Chomsky perfectly, even doing the classic move of connecting several disparate facts about the man in order to give her misinterpretation and psychoanalysis as much coherence as possible:

“Chomsky always refuses to talk about motives in politics. Like many theorists of universal humanness, he often seems baffled, even repelled, by the thought of actual people and their psychologies. He says he has no heroes, and he doesn't believe in leaders. This refusal to talk about political motives is in one sense a great weakness, because it amounts to a refusal to take seriously the difference between Administrations, or even between countries, and is by extension a refusal to consider the possibility, short of revolution, of significant political change. It also results in what have become characteristically outrageous Chomsky comparisons. When Chomsky likened the September 11th attacks to Clinton's bombing of a factory in Khartoum, many found the comparison not only absurd but repugnant: how could he speak in the same breath of an attack intended to maximize civilian deaths and one intended to minimize them? But, in another sense, Chomsky's argument was a powerful one. For him, the relevant issue was not whether the bombing was conducted specifically in order to kill people (motive) but whether it could be reasonably expected to do so. If there was a reasonable possibility that the factory manufactured medicine rather than arms, then the potential effects of a bombing upon Sudan's citizens (the number of people who would die without the drugs it supplied--several thousand, according to the Boston Globe) was properly part of the moral calculus. Chomsky's logic is the unforgiving, mathematical logic of tort law: the philosopher Avishai Margalit has called him "the Devil's accountant." His moral calculus is a simple arithmetic. Nothing exculpates or complicates the sheer number of the dead. Chomsky's refusal to consider motives in politics is not just a moral impulse; it is also an intellectual position. He believes that a discussion of individual motives is pointless because politics is driven by the economic interests of elite institutions. "Take Robert McNamara," Chomsky says. "I'm sure he's a nice man. The actions that he was responsible for are outrageous because of the social and economic institutions within which he was acting more or less reflexively." The word "reflexively" is significant--it sounds, at times, as though Chomsky were describing a kind of political behaviorism. But he is a rationalist: central both to the linguistics for which he first became famous and to his political thinking is the belief that the human mind contains at birth the structures of thought-even moral thought--through which it perceives the world. Elites, then, in his view, act selfishly, on their own behalf, but this selfishness follows an institutional logic rather than an individual one. They are morally culpable, and yet they can scarcely act otherwise. It might seem strange that an anarchist libertarian like Chomsky, committed to the idea that people are free and self-determining, should think about politics in such institutional terms, but this is an old paradox. By rejecting, in the name of individual freedom, the idea that people are formed by their circumstances (he is not a Marxist), Chomsky dismisses as inessential everything that makes people individual--all their culture and history and experience. This move follows from the rationalist tradition: if reason is what is most important about humans--what separates them from animals--and if reason is universal, then it follows that humans should be, at core, the same. Chomsky finds this idea congenial: being of a logical rather than an anthropological or literary temperament, he has never been attracted to the notion that psychological originality or cultural variety is essential to what it means to be human. Politically, though, this has always been a dangerous move (the Jacobin move), for it allows the theorist not to take seriously any argument that departs from rationality as the theorist defines it. There is no need to pay attention to motive--what people say they want and why they want it--because their true desires are already written in the logic of their reason. There can be no disagreement, then, only truth and error; no differences, only mistakes, or lies.”

Now, MacFarquhar does approach a very interesting claim here. In fact, one could argue that she contradicts what I said earlier, since she does acknowledge the institutional mindset, which is the basis of Chomsky’s elision of personal motive: she mentions his belief that “politics is driven by the economic interests of elite institutions”. Nevertheless, like most expositors, she doesn’t take it seriously, and I believe this is one of the main reasons why – like most of the profile – this extract is plagued by distortions, spurious and invidious connections, and a small army of straw men.

To be fair, I suppose it’s hard to include any complex details about a person’s political theory in a profile about a person in which you’re trying to capture their character, their inner psyche, their defining features, a sense of the contours of their life and so on. Even so, MacFarquhar offers a weak effort. It becomes very obvious that she doesn’t agree with his politics (and – I would claim – hasn’t tried to), and thinks other people should be highly sceptical about his politics, too. Even in this passage I’ve quoted, which isn’t the worst, there are clear signs of her agenda. Without any basis, she suggests that Chomsky is “baffled, even repelled, by the thought of real people and their psychologies” (pure, dogmatic fabrication). She arbitrarily connects his very reasonable rejection of hero-worship to his political theory. She then says this: “[His refusal to take psychology seriously] amounts to a refusal to take seriously the difference between Administrations, or even between countries, and is by extension a refusal to consider the possibility, short of revolution, of significant political change.” This is flagrant misrepresentation. Again, MacFarquhar has refused to take seriously the idea of an institutional mindset. Instead, she has imputed to personal pathology Chomsky’s belief that there are certain fundamental structures in our society that lead to predictable outcomes no matter the figurehead of the state. Not only that, but she has exaggerated his view on how immutable things are; he does constantly talk about differences between “Administrations”, “countries” and how to make “political change” without “revolution”. Then comes the mention of “Chomsky’s characteristically outrageous comparisons” and the introduction of the example that Sam Harris would later latch onto (possibly after having read this profile): “When Chomsky likened the September 11th attacks to Clinton's bombing of a factory in Khartoum, many found the comparison not only absurd but repugnant: how could he speak in the same breath of an attack intended to maximize civilian deaths and one intended to minimize them?” Once more, this betrays on MacFarquhar’s part, the classic refusal to take seriously Chomksy’s concept of the “institutional mindset” and the reflexive, wholesale rejection of the idea that our political leaders don’t have to be as nefarious and deranged as Hitler to carry out acts of monstrous evil. It is also a classic example of the American, imperialist mindset. Somehow a word as highly-charged as “repugnant” is invoked to describe a comparison Chomsky drew to try to get people in his nation to think – for once – of the immense, blood-curdling death toll of our government’s actions abroad. Is it really “repugnant” to force us to consider the far greater numbers of people who die at the hands of our own government? To consider the terror and atrocity of these actions? The horrors that people without white skin face every day? Most curiously: why does MacFarquhar think the difference between the two events is so simple as harm-minimization versus harm-maximization? The worst thing about this is that it proves my point so well: MacFarquhar has either not read Chomsky’s work or not taken it seriously. Even if she had just read and absorbed his flagship political essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (let alone the more directly pertinent, "Foreign Policy and the Intelligentsia"), she would have a few more answers.

In fact, here is what Chomsky says in “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” about the classic, naïve view of governmental intention:

“AS A FINAL EXAMPLE of this failure of skepticism, consider the remarks of Henry Kissinger in his concluding remarks at the Harvard-Oxford television debate on America’s Vietnam policies. He observed, rather sadly, that what disturbs him most is that others question not our judgment, but our motives—a remarkable comment by a man whose professional concern is political analysis, that is, analysis of the actions of governments in terms of motives that are unexpressed in official propaganda and perhaps only dimly perceived by those whose acts they govern. No one would be disturbed by an analysis of the political behavior of the Russians, French, or Tanzanians questioning their motives and interpreting their actions by the long-range interests concealed behind their official rhetoric. But it is an article of faith that American motives are pure, and not subject to analysis (see note ¹). Although it is nothing new in American intellectual history—or, for that matter, in the general history of imperialist apologia—this innocence becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable, therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us each day. We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders. The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.”

And here is what Chomsky says about governmental intention (with particular focus on the Khartoum bombing) when talking to Mr. Sam Harris in that depressing email exchange:

“I am sorry you are unwilling to retract your false claim that I “ignore the moral significance of intentions.” Of course I did, as you know.  Also, I gave the appropriate answer, which applies accurately to you in the al-Shifa case, the very case in question.

If you had read further before launching your accusations, the usual procedure in work intended to be serious, you would have discovered that I also reviewed the substantial evidence about the very sincere intentions of Japanese fascists while they were devastating China, Hitler in the Sudetenland and Poland, etc.  There is at least as much reason to suppose that they were sincere as Clinton was when he bombed al-Shifa.  Much more so in fact.  Therefore, if you believe what you are saying, you should be justifying their actions as well.  I also reviewed other cases, pointing out that professing benign intentions is the norm for those who carry out atrocities and crimes, perhaps sincerely – and surely more plausibly than in this case.  And that only the most abject apologists justify the actions on the grounds that perpetrators are adopting the normal stance of criminals.

I am also sorry that you evade the fact that your charge of “moral equivalence” was flatly false, as you know.

And in particular, I am sorry to see your total refusal to respond to the question raised at the outset of the piece you quoted.  The scenario you describe here is, I’m afraid, so ludicrous as to be embarrassing.  It hasn’t even the remotest relation to Clinton’s decision to bomb al-Shifa – not because they had suddenly discovered anything remotely like what you fantasize here, or for that matter any credible evidence at all, and by sheer coincidence, immediately after the Embassy bombings for which it was retaliation, as widely acknowledged.  That is truly scandalous.

And of course they knew that there would be major casualties.  They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?

In fact, as you would know if you deigned to read before launching accusations, they were informed at once by Kenneth Roth of HRW about the impending humanitarian catastrophe, already underway.  And of course they had far more information available than HRW did.

Your own moral stance is revealed even further by your complete lack of concern about the apparently huge casualties and the refusal even to investigate them.

As for Clinton and associates being “genuine humanitarians,” perhaps that explains why they were imposing sanctions on Iraq so murderous that both of the highly respected international diplomats who administered the “Oil for food” program resigned in protest because they regarded them as “genocidal,” condemning Clinton for blocking testimony at the UN Security Council.  Or why he poured arms into Turkey as it was carrying out a horrendous attack on its Kurdish population, one of the worst crimes of the ‘90s.  Or why he shifted Turkey from leading recipient of arms worldwide (Israel-Egypt excepted) to Colombia, as soon as the Turkish atrocities achieved their goal and while Colombia was leading the hemisphere by far in atrocious human rights violations.  Or why he authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the murderous Haitian junta in violation of sanctions.  And on, and on, as you could learn if you bothered to read before launching accusations and professing to talk about “ethics” and “morality.”

I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but rarely at this level – not to speak of the refusal to withdraw false charges, a minor fault in comparison.

Since you profess to be concerned about “God-intoxicated sociopaths,” perhaps you can refer me to your condemnation of the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy.

No point wasting time on your unwillingness to respond to my request that you reciprocate by referring me to what I have written citing your published views.  If there is anything I’ve written that is remotely as erroneous as this – putting aside moral judgments – I’ll be happy to correct it.

Plainly there is no point pretending to have a rational discussion.  But I do think you would do your readers a favor if you presented your tale about why Clinton bombed al-Shifa and his grand humanitarianism.  That is surely the least you can do, given your refusal to withdraw what you know to be completely false charges and a display of moral and ethical righteousness.”

For refusing to simplify the analysis of global politics to battles between ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ – for refusing to project personal morality onto the actions of governments – Chomsky is said to be an apologist for evil. Meanwhile, Harris, who espouses the truth of standard, consequentialist utilitarianism in his childish book, The Moral Landscape, thinks he is the voice of calm, cool reason as he squirms and wriggles to find defences for his government’s actions abroad – to the extent of completely changing his views on morality.   

Now back to that extract from MacFarquhar’s profile.

I suspect I have been a teeny-weeny bit unfair to MacFarquhar. As I said earlier, she does eventually mention the institutional mindset, after her reference to the Khartoum bombing. Then again, she quickly impugns this idea – making him seem like an overly rigid thinker and a pure consequentialist, and giving him an unflattering moniker – and exploits it to make several more spurious connections to another disparate area of his work: his rationalism about the mind. This is despite the fact that Mr Chomsky has repeatedly insisted that he can see no real coherent links between his politics and his linguistics – certainly nothing worth talking about. More importantly, it is despite the fact that what follows is pure bullshit: “By rejecting, in the name of individual freedom, the idea that people are formed by their circumstances (he is not a Marxist), Chomsky dismisses as inessential everything that makes people individual--all their culture and history and experience. This move follows from the rationalist tradition: if reason is what is most important about humans--what separates them from animals--and if reason is universal, then it follows that humans should be, at core, the same.” This is a ludicrous straw man. It is completely invented. None of these claims are true, and the connection to rationalism is just bizarre. Chomsky doesn’t dismiss as inessential any of those things, but when it comes to politicians, corporate leaders and other authority figures in a corporate state, he thinks personality differences are liable to be subsumed. And does he think all humans are, at core, the same because of some romantic attachment to a childish version of “rationalism”? No. He does have a rather quixotic view that we’re all naturally “creative” (turning the combinatorial power of our language faculty into a more poetic generalisation about human nature), but he does not think we’re all the same. His ideal, anarcho-syndicalist society would still allow people to specialise based on their natural temperament and aptitudes.

Although I have flayed aspects of MacFarquhar’s profile so far, I must admit that the profile could have been a lot worse. MacFarquhar is, after all, a very intelligent woman and has great flair, psychological insight and knowledge. I discovered her after reading a profile of the renowned English moral philosopher and moral realist Derek Parfit, written in 2011, just after he had published his massive tome On What Matters. In this article, I was very much enthralled by her emphasis on the eccentricity of the man’s character and his personality quirks. Yet, despite similar practices being applied in the profile on Chomsky, I find it hard to stomach. I realise why I have this very different reaction. It is because I know how genuinely Chomsky hates the cult of personality, I know that MacFarquhar’s impression of his moral commitment is very misleading, and I know that much of what MacFarquhar says in general is injurious and unfounded. I also know that Chomsky hated the profile and thinks it was all calculated to give a certain ugly impression, without regard for the truth.

That said, it remains true that there are great insights in the profile, very valuable data, moments of humour and warmth, several fascinating speculations and much that is thought-provoking – about morality, philosophy, human nature, how to live a good life and more.

But then again (to oscillate once more), I feel that if you are going to write a profile on someone, you have a responsibility to be as understanding and as scrupulous as possible. MacFarquhar feels nothing of this responsibility; that’s why I originally called it a “wax-on-wax-off profile”. It vacillates between two modes: cruel, withering insinuations of intellectual rigidity, ruthlessness, egomania, ulterior motives and the like (which are false), and poetic praise and exaltation of the sort that makes him seem greater-than-human and not-of-this-world (which is the kind of thing that Chomsky hates). Here are some examples of MacFarquhar’s malice:

·         MacFarquhar quotes Christopher Hitchens twice in the profile, both times with characteristically vicious, unsubstantiated remarks. The first quote has Hitchens saying that a “gleam of utter lunacy” is discernible in Chomsky’s recent work and the second accuses him of “empiricism of the crudest kind”, a “very vulgar” attitude that results from “the authoritarian personality”. Hitchens was, of course, an extremely reputable and trustworthy man to ask– a man who had recently completed his transformation to right-wing state propagandist, imperialist, warmonger and rabid Chomsky critic, and was now using his vicious, capricious temperament to dismember all on the left. (Hitchens used to be a left-wing rebel and Chomsky admirer. His transformation is not all that surprising when you consider that his own friend Martin Amis described him as having “the mind of a child”, and that he spent his entire life trying to be a contrarian, iconoclast and provocateur without regard for morality or truth.)

·         Insinuation of egomania 1: “When Chomsky became interested in Carol, he used his influence to make sure that she got a place in Hebrew summer camp, so that she would speak the language well enough to be worthy of him.” MacFarquhar adduces no evidence to prove that this was his motive. In fact, it seems extremely unlikely that she could have got that information from anywhere; most likely, it is made-up.

·         Insinuation of egomania 2: “People often accuse Chomsky of setting himself up as a guru, of encouraging the cult that has grown up around him, but if he wanted to be a guru he would not work so consistently to alienate his followers. "There really is an alpha-male dominance psychology at work there," a colleague says. "He has some of the primate dominance moves. The staring down. The withering tone of voice." Revolutions, even some intellectual ones, are brutal, and carried out by brutal people. When Benjamin Jowett, a close friend of Florence Nightingale, was asked to describe her, he said, "violent. Very violent." Chomsky is an extraordinarily violent man. Though he is a rhetorician of serpentine cunning, Chomsky chooses to believe that his debates consist only of facts and arguments, and that audiences evaluate these with the detachment of a computer. In his political work, he even makes the silly claim (the opposite of the sophisticated anti-empiricism he favors in linguistics) that he is presenting only facts--that he subscribes to no general theories of any sort. (His theories, of course, are in his tone--in the sarcasm that implies "this is only to be expected, given the way things are.")” As is mentioned earlier in the profile, Chomsky actually speaks in a soporific, very quiet voice, and shows little emotion. More importantly, he reviles power, authority and laments the cult of personality that has grown up around him (I see no reason to doubt his sincerity when he says this). Furthermore, while it is true that he can be very harsh and unforgiving in his put-downs, try to imagine what you would do if you were in his position. When you are constantly going around and giving talks, and forever having to defend your controversial point-of-view against highly hostile interlocutors, you can’t allow yourself to be drowned out; all the facts must come out, as clearly as you can muster them. The description of Chomsky as “an extraordinarily violent man” is practically libel. It’s absurd. And it is not untrue that Chomsky is unique among public intellectuals in his strict reliance on facts and figures, rather than high emotion, passion, indignation and so on. Perhaps it is true that most people aren’t as ideally rational as he’d like them to be, but this rhetorical habit does reflect a sincere ideal.

·         Insinuation of egomania 3: “Chomsky had carefully erected methodological walls to keep his grammar pure, free from the messiness of the social, but the generative semanticists gleefully punched holes in the walls to let all the beautiful chaos flood back in. In 1967, Chomsky came back from Berkeley and immediately went on the attack. The generative semanticists found the conflict very upsetting: Chomsky was their hero, and here he was, seemingly destroying their theory for the sake of it. He seemed to them to be fighting dirty, purposely misunderstanding their arguments. Chomsky, of course, denied that he was doing any such thing--he felt he was just correcting error, as usual. The situation was too emotional to be an ordinary academic disagreement, and soon it grew nasty. The generative semanticists had been trained in the fight against Bloomfield to wage theoretical war with as much cruelty as possible, and, if Chomsky had once been an angel to them, he now became Satan. Paul Postal, these days a professor at N.Y.U., still loathes Chomsky with an astonishing passion. "After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false," Postal says. "He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake." MacFarquhar puts all her credence in the account of one bitter, highly aggrieved individual.

  

Hopefully this has demonstrated that most academics don’t understand Chomsky, and that the concept of “an institutional mindset” lies at the heart of this miscomprehension.

I’d now like to talk about Chomsky’s actual political ideas, and how the concept of an institutional mindset relates to them. 

Chomsky’s most famous big political idea is probably the main one expressed in Manufacturing Consent: namely, that we live in a highly propagandistic society in which the intellectuals are massaged to accept state-sanctioned myths and support the status quo, and the rest of the populace is distracted, stupefied and rendered incapable of thought. Importantly, the idea of an institutional mindset is absolutely key to the elaborate edifice of reasoning that makes up the “propaganda model”.

Chomsky’s propaganda model is one of the things that people tend to dismiss out-of-hand. It is quite hard to explain in a way that makes it convincing, because it’s not claiming anything as straightforward as it sounds. Chomsky is not claiming that we live in Orwell’s dystopia, but that our lives are controlled nonetheless, in a far more subtle and indirect way. Whence this radical view?

To even begin to understand the propaganda model, one must first recognise a certain, necessary truth: corporations are – by definition – rapacious, pitiless and relentlessly exploitative. Even if the CEO of a given corporation is a really benevolent person, a loving family man, an environmental activist, a civil rights activist or a fully-committed philanthropist, that won’t affect his behaviour. No matter a corporate employee’s personality type, the imperatives of the corporation as a whole will always compel him to act in a way that maximally benefits the corporation (the institutional mindset). This may not seem immediately obvious but Chomsky explains it well in another book (that I haven’t read) called Free-Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World:

“Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago.

Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They’re nothing else – they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can’t make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it’s like taking a totalitarian state and saying “Be less brutal!” Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that’s not the point – the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it.

Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press – there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts]; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there – they weren’t asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it.

And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there’s nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism – namely Stalinism and Fascism – and they have no more legitimacy than they do.

I mean yeah, let’s try and make the autocracy less brutal if that’s the short term possibility – but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it “those who work in the mills should own them”. And on to everything else, and that’s democracy – if you don’t have that, you don’t have democracy.”

Secondly, once you acknowledge that corporations are intrinsically selfish, ruthless and destructive, you simply have to observe that all the mass media is controlled by corporations and is largely funded by advertisements. These are the first two filters outlined by Chomsky and Herman, given the names “Organisation” and “Advertising”. This is how Wikipedia summarises the role of these two filters:

“Ownership[edit]

Main article: Concentration of media ownership

The size and profit-seeking imperative of dominant media corporations create a bias. The authors point to how in the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged which addressed the concerns of workers but excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the 'respectable' wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless, there remained a degree of diversity. In postwar Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications) and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system. The authors posit that these earlier radical papers were not constrained by corporate ownership and were therefore free to criticize the capitalist system.

Herman and Chomsky argue that since mainstream media outlets are currently either large corporations or part of conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric), the information presented to the public will be biased with respect to these interests. Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is publicized. According to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests of those who own the media will face the greatest bias and censorship.

It then follows that if to maximize profit means sacrificing news objectivity, then the news sources that ultimately survive must be fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.

Advertising[edit]

The second filter of the propaganda model is funding generated through advertising. Most newspapers have to attract advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, they would have to increase the price of their newspaper. There is fierce competition throughout the media to attract advertisers; a newspaper which gets less advertising than its competitors is at a serious disadvantage. Lack of success in raising advertising revenue was another factor in the demise of the 'people's newspapers' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper — who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population — while the actual clientele served by the newspaper includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this filter, the news is "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the content and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the news has only a marginal role as the product.”

Thirdly, you have to recognise the reality of the three other filters in the model, named “Sourcing”, “Flak” and “Anti-Communism”. The “Sourcing” filter is fairly straightforward. All media organisations tend to source their news stories from establishment authorities and then source from each other, creating widespread uniformity. Moreover, news organisations always tend to post journalists to central news “terminals”, like the houses of parliament (in each country), which helps the government’s agenda to dominate. The “Flak” filter is described as “negative responses to a media statement or [TV or radio] program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and Bills before Congress and other modes of complaint, threat and punitive action.” This filter is probably best described as a sub-filter, since it is itself a product of the corporate control of the media. That it is a real phenomenon is very well-demonstrated by the corporate success in suppressing the science of climate change. Finally, the “Anti-Communism” filter is another sub-filter that is – as Wikipedia puts it – “exemplified in British tabloid headlines of 'Smash Saddam!' and 'Clobba Slobba!'.^[5] The same is said to extend to mainstream reporting of environmentalistsas 'eco-terrorists'. The Sunday Times ran a series of articles in 1999 accusing activists from the non-violent direct action group Reclaim The Streets of stocking up on CS gas and stun guns.”

Finally, you simply have to draw the logical inference that corporate control must pervade our society in general. Given that the media is so pivotal to our understanding of everything, and given that politicians are sponsored by corporations and have to rely totally on corporations to achieve any economic success and create booms, and given that politicians are also bound to have an institutional mindset of power-preservation (regardless of idealistic instincts, if they have any), and given that the standardised educational syllabi are heavily influenced by politicians, and given that the education system is generally based on hierarchical authority, obedience and conformity, and given that everything reinforces everything else once a sufficiently large number of people are indoctrinated (and politicians and intellectuals will be the most indoctrinated, having been through all the selective procedures and thoroughly trained), suddenly Chomsky doesn’t seem like such a conspiracy theorist after all. Suddenly, pronouncements like “education is a system of indoctrination for the young” or “[sport] is a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism” seem much less risible. Suddenly, you see that the intentions of politicians in such a complex, multifarious, superordinate web of corporate control are almost irrelevant. It’s not about some dogmatic commitment to “rationalism” or about denying the role of human psychology in human affairs; it’s just that our lives are largely controlled by corporate entities. Although it’s not thought-control in the blatant, unambiguous way of 1984 or that silly movie They Live, it’s still thought-control. Through a circuitous series of filters, corporations have a stranglehold on our society and our lives.

It sounds ludicrous and embarrassing, but so be it. If you actually look at the argumentation and evidence that Herman and Chomksy provide in Manufacturing Consent, it’s extremely difficult to just wave it away. Perhaps it is wrong to use melodramatic language, but certain facts remain irrespective of the language used. Chief among them is the truth that most of what we read, watch or hear is – through an elaborate system of filters – dictated to us by old men in suits.

Another daring and grand problem Chomsky identifies with our modern, Western world is that of “wage slavery”. The first time I came across Chomsky’s claim that “wage slavery is fundamentally no different from chattel slavery”, I was as startled as anyone. By wage slavery, he literally means working for wages at the mercy of someone higher up in the chain. But when you see his justification for this claim, it no longer seems quite so silly. Here is how he justifies this claim in one of his conversations with James McGilvray, transcribed in the book The Science of Language:

“Yet the arguments that were given for slavery -- which were not insubstantial -- were never answered; they were just rejected as being morally intolerable through a period of growth of moral consciousness. I haven't heard a sensible answer to the main argument offered by slaveholders in the United States -- it was a perfectly sensible argument, and has implications. The basic argument was that slaveholders are more moral than people who live in a market society. To take an anachronistic analogy, if you buy a car and I rent the same car, and look at those two cars two years from now, yours is going to be in better shapes than mine, because you're going to take care of it; I'm not going to take care of mine. Well, the same is true if you rent people or you buy them. If you buy them, you're going to take care of them; it's a capital investment. If you rent people, they're just tools; you throw them out when you're done with them -- if they can't survive, who cares, you can throw them out on the dump yard. That's the difference between a slave society and a market society. In a market society, you rent people; in a slave society, you buy them. So therefore slave societies are more moral than market societies. Well, I've never heard an answer to that, and I don't think that there is an answer. But it's rejected as morally repugnant -- correctly -- without following out the implications, that renting people is an atrocity. If you follow out that thought, slave owners are right: renting people is indeed a moral atrocity. It's interesting that 150 years ago, when there was an independent, free, labour-based press, it was just taken for granted -- so fully taken for granted, that it was even a slogan for the Republican Party, that wage labour is fundamentally no different corm chattel slavery except that it's temporary, and has to be overcome.”

Most people just never think about things like that, but I think it is indeed a very hard argument to refute. Yes, it may be true that an employee at McDonalds (or any kind of worker) has the freedom to go home at night and purchase things with her income and live a life outside of work. But she is still being rented, just as we all are from the very moment we enter the adult world. How on earth do you square this with our basic moral commitments, treating people as ends not means, according all equal dignity and liberty and so on? Chomsky so often points out the inconsistencies in moral reasoning, perverted (he says) by propaganda. And the important point is this: even if you agree with Pinker that things are far better in the first-world than they were in the 19^th Century, when slavery was still around, there are still structures of power and authority that are morally unjustifiable. Therefore, if you care about morality at all, you ought to work to dismantle them. It’s not even a matter of utopian thinking; it’s just a matter of moral thinking. You just have to follow through your principles to their logical conclusion. It may be radical to question the fundamental organisation of our society, but you have no choice if you really are going to be morally consistent. 

This all leads quite naturally to Chomsky's political philosophy, anarcho-syndicalism, which is predicated on the morally undeniable principle that all illegitimate authority should be eliminated. Perhaps it is a fantasy, but as Chomsky has put it,

"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world."

At long last, it is now time to end this epic essay. What is my conclusion about the state of the modern world? Is it overall good or bad?

I think it’s pretty much a fuzzy picture. I think Pinker and Chomsky both get many, many things correct. I think Pinker’s right that things are great for people like me – absolutely unparalleled in the long tapestry of time. I’m happy, healthy, sheltered, well-fed, well-clothed, under no danger and so on. It is for this reason that I believe people like me should “check their [historical] privilege” far more often, as well as checking their privilege in relation to those starving and desperate people in the third-world – particularly in Syria, at the moment. Equally, I think that there are infinite moral abominations in our society and I recognise that monstrous atrocities continue to be carried out every day. I think Chomsky is right that our society is nowhere near perfect, and that we haven’t got close to the ideal political system. I think he is right that there is no way of justifying almost all of the systems of authority to which we are forced to submit on a daily basis.

Overall, therefore, things are both good and bad. No point trying to get more precise than that.

After 45 pages, you get this bathetic answer.

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[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html?_r=0

[2] This is an allusion to a popular analogy in historiography. According to this metaphor, complex historical subjects are kind of like mountains, and each historian views them from a different perspective. It supposedly explains why there is so often a profusion of well-argued theses on the reality of this or that historical figure or the causes of this or that war. The crucial idea is that, although Mt. Everest looks radically different from each side, each side is still part of the same, immensely complex mountain. This analogy thus reconciles the axiomatic historiographical truth that rigorously argued, fully empirical historical works can have radically divergent views, with the conviction that there is some kind of truth behind rigorously argued, fully empirical history. It features in my favourite historiographical quote, by Edward Carr in his 1961 book What is History? (which I’ll probably get around to reading at some point): 'It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes. It does not follow that because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is as good as another.' An eminently sane view of the epistemology of all complex systems, I think.

[3] Or “modern malaise”, in the language of H. Ramage and me.

[4] I always suspect I might be butchering my personal history. Everything is inevitably simplified when you try to make sense of it, so even though I endlessly introduce qualifications (“I think”, “It seems”, “probably” etc) and use low modality, I know there is still a large element of fabrication.

[5] Who didn’t go out of their way to teach me, except perhaps when we were on holidays in England and France.

[6] They do seem to be unduly influenced by Holy Grail, though.

[7] It should be said that people often misinterpret Flynn’s results, and the increase is not quite as astonishing as it may intuitively seem. Knowledge, vocabulary and skill in arithmetic have not been areas of general improvement by any means, and in fact – for those who could afford it – the education system of yore would have trained students much better in arithmetic, historical and geographical facts, and vocabulary (Latin being a staple), because of the emphasis on the rote and not on individual thought. So one’s conclusion shouldn’t be the one that a lot of Youtube commentators have drawn, namely, that Flynn is claiming that our era has better writers than Shakespeare, Dostoevsky or Joyce (or better painters than da Vinci etc). Instead, “abstract reasoning” is the central area of improvement – in similarities, analogies, and visual matrices. The two basic explanations offered for this are a universal, increasingly “scientific” education, which encourages creativity, and our increasingly media-saturated world.