I think any comment from me about this would be superfluous, and make it less funny:
Chris Bertram, October 16, 2011:
Violence down, claims Pinker the thinker: The Guardian has an interview with Steven Pinker about his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes.... In order to evaluate its claims properly, I’d actually have to read the book, but everything tells me that doing so would be an immense waste of valuable time.... I can, however, comment snippily on the material that surfaces in interviews and reviews… so here goes.... I’m relieved to know that the general ad hominem insults are permitted in this fight and that I’m under no obligations to be fair to “the thinking man’s Malcolm Gladwell”…
[…]
(Jack Strocchi seems to have forgotten that I permanently banned him some time ago. 2 comments deleted)…
"It is sad if people fall for Pinker’s ploy, though not as sad as if they give the remotest shred of credence to John Gray." Well yes, Gray is a troll, but rather that than the nauseating sight of Pinker providing the intellectually pretentious fraction of the ruling class with a cosy colour-supplement image of itself…
Watson, what bullshit…
Right Watson. No more comments from you on this thread for 24h please, you’ve made more than enough as a proportion of the total…
"I don’t know what Bertram’s or Gray’s problem is. They seem to want Pinker to be wrong, not only in his explanation for the trend but also in describing the trend." Well your reading comprehension is clearly defective, at least in my case. See comments upthread…
Incidentally, does anyone else see a problem with using a population-scaled metric here as a measure of decline in violence. Seems to me that absolute numbers ought to matter too. So, compare: Society A (hunter-gatherer band). Population 50, murder 7 in orgy of violence. Society B (advanced capitalist society). Population 50 million. Murder 6 million using bureaucratic apparatus and industrial chemicals. Violence up or violence down? Or indeterminate?...
I may have been imprecise… street-brawling, everyday homicide and the like (certainly down) with institutional violence and the credible threat thereof (states killing people, incarcerating people, stopping them crossing borders which were previously open etc etc)…
I think there are some good reasons to distinguish between state control of borders and territory and state enforcement of taxation and property rights…. [T]he latter is mutually beneficial (and those subject have reason to consent)…. Of course… the credible threat of violence is not itself violence. But to the degree to which the absence of actual violence is the result of a monopolist wielding such a credible threat, it seems somewhat relevant…. [T]here were physical barriers, land mines, guns triggered by tripwires and the like. Knowing they couldn’t safely cross, most people didn’t try…
https://twitter.com/#!/crookedfootball/status/125999249589665792 :: @crookedfootball Chris Bertram: @dsquareddigest I’ve been hoping for a DeLong intervention [in this thread], so I can joke that, before, the internet, I’d have punched his lights out...
