0:00

Peter. Michael. What do you know about

0:02

the better angels of our nature? I

0:04

don't know what's worse, living in a society

0:06

where you might die by the spear, or

0:09

living in a society where there are 900 page

0:12

non-fiction books. So today

0:14

we are

0:16

talking about the better

0:19

angels of our nature

0:21

by Steven Pinker. This

0:23

is one of those

0:32

books that didn't sell like Oprah

0:34

well. The number that I've seen

0:36

bandied about is 1 million copies,

0:39

which is still a shitload, but nowhere near

0:41

things like The Secret. Right. But it

0:43

is one of the most influential books of

0:45

the last 20 years. Bill

0:48

Gates called it the best book he's

0:50

ever read. It's been promoted very heavily

0:52

by like the Davos set. And it

0:54

has turned Steven Pinker into Aspen royalty.

0:56

He's one of the most prominent

0:59

public intellectuals in the United States. And a lot

1:01

of it is by spreading this

1:03

message that it might seem bad, but

1:05

in fact, things have gotten a lot

1:07

better over the last 500 years. You

1:10

thought it would have ruled to be

1:12

a caveman, but it's actually not true.

1:15

This episode is a little bit different than

1:17

previous ones, or maybe it's the same, who knows. But

1:19

as we mentioned on our last

1:21

bonus episode, I got some sort

1:23

of weird bug over Christmas. And

1:26

Michael, I'm sorry, but the plague

1:28

was worse. And

1:30

so I don't want to hear about this. But

1:32

I basically have not like left the

1:35

house or like been very functional since

1:37

Christmas. But I usually have

1:39

like a couple hours a day where I can like

1:41

concentrate and read stuff. And so I have

1:43

basically been chipping away at Steven Pinker's

1:46

900 page book

1:48

for like seven weeks now. This

1:51

is going to be a two part episode. And

1:54

the first episode is really about like the parts

1:56

of his argument that are correct. I think there's

1:58

a real a genuine story. behind this

2:00

like better angels narrative that is honestly really

2:02

interesting and I don't think is as well

2:05

known as You'd think

2:07

right and then episode two is

2:09

gonna be where we get into Some

2:12

of the dicey er stuff.

2:14

So this is gonna be like the nice the

2:16

nice episode. I have 250

2:19

pages of notes for this part one Michael cuz

2:21

I basically have had like nothing to do

2:23

the section of the book You're covering sounds

2:26

like it isn't even that long. Yeah I

2:29

This is roughly the first third of the book So

2:32

it's like 300 pages of pinker and

2:34

like 250 pages of Mike folks. Do you

2:36

understand what I'm dealing with? Listen

2:38

at home. So apologies in advance for

2:40

taking you on this journey with me and

2:42

making you feel as tired as I feel all

2:44

the time The

2:46

title of this book is the better

2:48

angels of our nature colon why violence

2:51

has declined and I am

2:53

going to send you the opening This

2:55

book is about what may be the most

2:57

important thing that has ever happened in human

2:59

history Believe it or not,

3:02

and I know that most people do

3:04

not violence has declined over long stretches

3:06

of time And today we

3:08

may be living in the most peaceable

3:10

era in our species existence The

3:12

decline to be sure has not been

3:14

smooth It has not brought violence

3:16

down to zero and it is not

3:18

guaranteed to continue But it is

3:20

an unmistakable development visible on scales from

3:22

millennia to years from the waging of

3:24

wars to the spanking of children So

3:27

at the most basic level like this is

3:29

accurate We're gonna go through all kinds of

3:31

categories and there's a lot of debate

3:33

about various specifics But if you really

3:35

really really zoom out It

3:37

does appear to be the case that you

3:39

are less likely to die in a violent

3:41

way now Than at any

3:44

time in human history, you know, I've seen this

3:46

Talking point used to shut down

3:49

debate and discussion so many times in

3:52

the last decade that I'm Predisposed

3:54

to being annoyed by it even though

3:57

it's objectively correct, right people like well isn't

4:00

Isn't it cool that now we live in

4:02

a time with indoor plumbing and less violence

4:04

and it's like yes Yeah, but like it

4:06

feels like it's an argument that is used

4:08

in favor of complacency

4:11

in the right face of various

4:14

different Struggles and injustices right?

4:16

It's also not something that

4:18

like your politics

4:21

or policy preferences should

4:24

Revolve around in a meaningful way right

4:26

like this was also basically true in

4:28

the 1700s

4:31

right yeah, but if like an

4:33

intellectual Movement developed around

4:35

how good things were at that

4:37

time It could

4:40

inhibit progress right and then perhaps we don't

4:42

get the progress of the next couple of

4:44

centuries exactly I'm imagining him lecturing Alexander

4:46

Hamilton like did you know as

4:49

a hunter-gatherer you didn't have taxation

4:51

or Representation right you want to be

4:53

in the room where it happens. Well guess what?

4:56

50,000 years ago. They didn't even have rooms I'm

4:59

also not entirely sure that that's true because I feel

5:01

like well first of all I feel like I would

5:03

have been I would Not have been a hunter which

5:05

is dangerous. I would have been like the most athletic

5:07

gatherer I

5:10

would have been the best at this frankly I feel

5:12

like I would have thrived so I just want to

5:14

talk very quickly that the introduction of the book he

5:16

talks about like how He's going to structure this which

5:18

is kind of the way that we're going to structure

5:20

our episodes about this so the

5:22

first third of the book is about the

5:24

kind of 10,000 year

5:26

history of declining Silence over time and then

5:28

the second third of the book which is

5:30

what we're going to talk about next episode

5:32

It's like the post-war world right how like

5:35

things have gotten better for race things have

5:37

gotten better for gender for gays And

5:39

then the third section of the book which

5:41

we're barely going to talk about he lays

5:43

out these kind of inner demons and better

5:45

angels like psychological factors that explain the

5:47

decline of violence He says the

5:50

final third of the book features six

5:52

trends five inner demons four better angels

5:54

and five historical forces Okay, this book

5:56

is like the Donkey Kong 64 of

5:59

non-fiction There's like 31

6:01

purple bananas and like eight golden coins.

6:03

I'm sort of interested in like the

6:05

psychological Explanation because at least

6:07

that's his field right well Peter first of all

6:09

I only included that description so I could make

6:11

my Donkey Kong joke It's

6:14

mostly like kind of pop psychology

6:16

stuff It's it's basically going

6:18

back and forth between all of these

6:20

impulses that humans have it's like okay Some

6:22

of us defer to authority right we do what

6:24

we're told but sometimes we rebel against authority when

6:26

he's right. He's right It's

6:29

just sort of like it most of it

6:31

is just kind of platitudes about like

6:33

yeah We all contain within us impulses

6:35

to violence and like impulses to empathy right

6:37

some like donkey. Come joke was good It's

6:41

gonna hit with our entire audience Mike Split

6:45

into a couple different categories of

6:47

violence that have declined over time Okay, the first

6:49

one that we're gonna talk about is the decline

6:52

in homicides. Yeah, okay human beings used to murder

6:54

each other much more than they do I believe

6:56

that the project of the parts of the book

6:58

that we're gonna talk about This

7:01

episode is really he's trying to draw

7:03

a straight line from humans now where

7:05

violence is relatively low Essentially

7:07

all the way back to like our

7:09

primate ancestors Okay, modern humans emerged somewhere,

7:11

you know between 200,000 years

7:13

ago and like 75,000 years ago kind of

7:16

depending on how you define it And

7:18

so he walked through the genuinely

7:20

very interesting evidence that there was

7:22

a lot of violence in hunter-gatherer

7:24

society So there's this famous body that's found

7:26

in the Alps where he appears to

7:28

have an arrowhead like stuck in his back uh-huh,

7:31

it looks like maybe he was running away from

7:33

somebody and they shot him in the back and

7:36

There's mass graves from tens

7:38

of thousands of years ago We're like 40% of

7:41

the skeletons have some sign of violence, right people

7:43

will have Defensive wounds on their arms

7:45

which looks like they were kind of being attacked

7:47

with like an axe or a machete People

7:50

have caved in skulls which look like

7:52

they were hit with some sort of

7:54

blunt object And so the kind of brutality

7:56

that we see now actually has a very long

7:58

lineage in humanity I'm

8:00

sort of interested in how

8:02

he addresses the Holocaust, World

8:04

War I, etc. Because I

8:06

think, to me it

8:09

seems intuitively correct that the

8:11

ambient violence of hunter-gatherer societies

8:13

was way higher than it

8:16

is now. But

8:18

we are now capable of violence on

8:20

a scale that they were not. And

8:22

so you get these peaks of violence

8:24

in the modern era that are well

8:26

beyond anything that could have been produced

8:29

in the past. Right. This is

8:31

the kind of nuance that he does

8:33

not engage in in the book. And

8:35

all of the experts who debunk this

8:37

book – experts fucking hate this book,

8:40

by the way. It's not as simple

8:42

of a narrative as he

8:44

describes. And also, my

8:47

impression with this entire section of the book was

8:49

just like he doesn't really need

8:52

this, right? It's true that there's

8:54

lots of evidence that hunter-gatherers engaged

8:56

in violence, right? They killed each

8:58

other. That is very well established.

9:00

But what he's doing is he's

9:02

using these like skeletons and like

9:04

fossilized remains to say that they

9:06

killed each other at a rate much higher than we

9:08

do now. And we're

9:10

talking about, again, 60,000 years plus of human history,

9:13

right? We're

9:15

talking about every region of the

9:17

world, climactic conditions. The number of

9:19

skeletons that are preserved from that

9:22

time is minuscule, right? We have

9:24

very little information. And

9:26

something like a skeleton having its skull bashed in,

9:28

well, that could have been a tree

9:30

falling on them. That could have been an animal that did that.

9:33

And also, society back then burying their dead

9:35

appears to be relatively rare. It could be that

9:38

they only buried people that were killed in some

9:40

violent way, right? Like these were the soldiers that

9:42

died in a big war, and this is like a

9:44

glorification of them, or maybe not. I mean, we just

9:46

know so little about

9:49

this time. And so when you read

9:51

the sort of expert debunkings of him, they're

9:53

all just like, you don't need to do this. We

9:55

know that there was violence, but like saying that

9:58

40% of the soldiers died, right? Skeletons

10:00

found at some site had signs of violence. Well

10:02

the signs of violence are super It's

10:04

really a judgment call like what scratches on somebody's

10:07

femur mean It might be the case

10:09

that that was a particularly violent hunter-gatherer society

10:11

Yeah, but in different regions of the world different

10:13

time periods they might not have been right He

10:16

he at some point puts like specific numbers on

10:18

this He's like the homicide rate among hunter-gatherers and

10:20

you're like dude. No, we don't know we don't

10:22

know that yeah He

10:24

also cites accounts from kind

10:27

of current Quote-unquote Uncontacted

10:29

tribes, so there's still communities that live

10:31

in like Amazon rainforest these Societies

10:34

are not representative of how societies

10:36

would have been you know 50,000 years ago

10:38

partly because by definition There's

10:41

no such thing as anthropological accounts of

10:43

uncontacted tribes, right? It is true that

10:45

those societies appear to have higher rates

10:47

of violence than like we do But

10:49

a lot of that is like competition

10:51

over scarce resources due to

10:53

the fact that like their habitat is being destroyed and

10:55

a lot of the Uncontacted

10:57

tribes that exist today have actually been

10:59

in contact with the rest of society

11:01

and some of them saw Steven

11:04

Pinker's book on the shelves and just decided

11:06

to withdraw back into

11:08

hunter-gatherer societies the book kind

11:11

of gets rolling or the book gets interesting

11:13

once he gets to Settled

11:15

societies and essentially when we have written records

11:18

So the thing to know is that right now current homicide

11:20

rates are in Western Europe

11:22

around one homicide per 100,000

11:25

population that's kind of the the benchmark in

11:27

America. It's six. Yeah, but have you met

11:29

Americans you'd want to come? Yeah Maybe

11:33

we're just six times more deserving of death So

11:37

these are all you know, very low rates,

11:39

right? If you go back

11:41

to roughly 1200 right in

11:44

the middle of the Middle Ages you find rates

11:46

of around 100 per hundred thousand Oh,

11:48

these are societies that have up to

11:50

a hundred times more Homicides

11:52

than we do now. I like to imagine

11:54

the first guy who was just like Watching

11:57

a good chunk of their friends get

11:59

murdered and was like, we should start writing this down.

12:02

You know? And

12:04

so if you look at the trend all

12:06

across Western Europe, starting in around 1200, once

12:09

we start getting written records, you see

12:11

the same slow but very steady

12:13

decline in homicide rates. There's lots of

12:16

nuance to go over, but zooming

12:18

all the way out, it's like you look

12:20

at Western Europe super violent in the year 1200,

12:24

very nonviolent by the time we get like 1800s and

12:26

1900s. One of

12:28

the genuinely really interesting things about this is that

12:30

the patterns of homicides, to the extent that we

12:32

know this, is most of

12:34

the homicides, way, way, way back in the Middle

12:36

Ages, were like men killing men. The

12:39

drop in homicides is almost exclusively like stranger

12:41

danger homicides. Like people killing each other, like

12:43

you know these like duels and shit. Like

12:45

do you spit your thumb at me,

12:47

sir? Right. That man over there is

12:50

wearing his handkerchief directed towards me. Exactly.

12:52

Exactly. Sir, one of us must

12:54

die. We also see a faster and

12:56

larger drop among like the upper classes.

12:59

So like the aristocracy stopped killing each other,

13:01

and then eventually that kind of trickles down

13:03

to like common folk, right? So

13:06

this trend is roughly accurate. But

13:08

of course, Pinker then has to

13:10

explain why this happened. His

13:12

main explanation for this is the emergence of

13:15

like the modern state. This

13:17

is from Pinker's description of this.

13:19

He says, during Norman rule in England,

13:22

some genius recognized the lucrative possibilities in

13:24

nationalizing justice. For centuries, the legal system

13:26

had treated homicide as a tort. In

13:28

lieu of vengeance, the victim's family would

13:30

demand a payment from the killer's family.

13:33

King Henry I redefined homicide as an

13:35

offense against the state. Murder cases were

13:37

no longer John Doe versus Richard Roe,

13:39

but the crown versus John Doe. Or

13:41

later in the United States, the people

13:43

versus John Doe. Justice was administered by

13:46

roving courts that would periodically visit a

13:48

locale and hear the accumulated cases. To

13:50

ensure that all homicides were presented to

13:52

the courts, each death was investigated by

13:54

a local agent of the crown, the coroner.

13:56

And so what philosophers call like the state

13:58

monopoly on violence. Explains why people

14:01

wouldn't do this kind of entrepreneurial violence anymore.

14:03

I don't need to kill you and your

14:05

family I can just report it to

14:07

the local constable and then he will put you

14:09

on trial and he will punish you appropriately And

14:12

so this also explains why murderers

14:15

fell among the upper classes first

14:17

is basically they had access to the court system

14:19

Right if a poor person says oh this person

14:21

has like violated my rights in some way They

14:24

don't give a shit the criminal justice system didn't give

14:26

a shit back then right but upper classes Could start

14:28

to use the court system as a way to settle

14:31

disputes between each other and then again

14:33

over time as state capacity increases We

14:36

start getting poor people being able to use these

14:38

systems, right? The second explanation is

14:40

what he calls the civilizing process

14:43

He's basing this on a philosopher called

14:45

Norbert Elias who writes a book called

14:47

the civilizing process and when we think

14:50

of you know What is civilization a

14:53

huge component of it is resisting our impulses, right?

14:55

All of us a couple times a day. You're

14:57

probably I want to punch that fucking guy But

14:59

you don't do it because you're like, ah, you know, I'll go

15:01

to jail or like it's not right I wouldn't want somebody to

15:04

do it to me. Right, right This

15:06

is really the core thesis of Pinker's book

15:08

over time. We've all gotten better at

15:10

resisting our impulses, right? We have

15:13

these better angels He says the habits

15:15

of refinement self-control and consideration that

15:17

are second nature to us had to be acquired

15:19

That's why we call them second nature and they

15:21

developed in Europe over the course of its modern

15:23

history Norbert Elias proposed over

15:25

a span of several centuries beginning in the

15:28

1100s and maturing in the 1700s Europeans

15:31

increasingly Inhibited their impulses and

15:33

anticipated the long-term consequences of their

15:35

actions and took other people's thoughts and

15:38

feelings into consideration a culture of honor

15:40

The readiness to take revenge gave way

15:42

to a culture of dignity the readiness

15:44

to control one's emotion okay, I'm

15:47

not saying that that is like wrong, but it

15:49

feels like a pretty

15:51

aggressive narrative to Prescribe

15:55

based on a relatively limited data set.

15:57

This is actually the like the first

15:59

part of book where I was like, I

16:01

don't know. Like the first couple hundred pages

16:03

of the book are actually like very good. Like most of

16:05

us have about hundred gathers. It's quite

16:07

nuanced. He's got a lot of data. He's a

16:10

very good writer, like really smart, really readable. And

16:13

I found most of the stuff there kind of fascinating.

16:15

But then once he gets to the civilizing

16:17

process, it's like maybe

16:20

like it's an interesting explanation. Yeah. He kind of

16:22

presents it as like, well, this has now been

16:24

proven. And you're like, well, I don't know that

16:26

you can prove something like that. This is

16:28

just one of those things where the

16:31

number of variables bouncing around here

16:33

is so high that any conclusion

16:35

you come up with, even though

16:37

it might be a partial explanation,

16:40

it's almost necessarily not a full explanation.

16:42

Right. There's just too much happening. As

16:44

I was reading this, I was like, this is like

16:46

an interesting way to look at things. Like, yeah, sure.

16:48

Why not? But then the main thing that he cites

16:50

as evidence for this is etiquette

16:52

guides. In 1844, it was

16:55

the first time that an etiquette guide included

16:57

do not murder. I mean, more or less.

17:00

So I'm going to send you his description

17:02

of this. People of the

17:04

Middle Ages were, in a word, gross.

17:06

A number of the advisories in the

17:09

etiquette books deal with eliminating bodily effluvia.

17:11

Don't relieve yourself in front of ladies

17:13

or before doors or windows of court

17:15

chambers. Don't touch your

17:17

private parts under your clothes with your bare

17:20

hands. Don't greet someone while they

17:22

are urinating or defecating. Fair point.

17:25

Don't blow your nose onto the tablecloth

17:27

or into your fingers, sleeve or hat.

17:29

Do not spit so far that you

17:31

have to look for the saliva to

17:33

put your foot on it. Turn away

17:35

when spitting lest your saliva fall on

17:37

someone. Don't stir sauce

17:40

with your fingers. These people were gross.

17:42

There's also one more thing

17:44

I want you to read. I'm always greeting

17:46

someone who's defecating and then stirring the sauce

17:48

with my fingers. In

17:51

the European Middle Ages, sexual activity, too,

17:53

was less discreet. People were publicly naked

17:56

more often, and couples took only perfunctory

17:58

measures to keep their court. as private.

18:01

Prostitutes offered their services openly.

18:04

In many English towns, the red light

18:06

district was called Gropecont Lane. The G

18:08

word, we say the G word now.

18:10

Men would discuss their sexual exploits with

18:12

their children, and a man's illegitimate offspring

18:14

would mix with his legitimate ones. Disgusting.

18:17

Different children types. During the transition

18:19

to modernity, this openness came to

18:21

be frowned upon as uncouth and

18:24

then as unacceptable. We already see

18:26

Pinker kind of mixing

18:28

this like, civilizational process stuff

18:30

of like, some of it is like germ theory shit,

18:32

like don't spit all over the place. Yeah. But

18:35

then it's also like, don't let your

18:37

legitimate children mix with your illegitimate children,

18:39

which is just like a Victorian values

18:41

thing. Were both Gropecont words in the

18:44

Middle Ages? Yeah, I know. You

18:46

can find old records of Gropecont Lane

18:48

in London. Yeah, that's where Buckingham Palace is,

18:50

I believe. So,

18:54

my favorite kind of books for this show

18:57

are books that are so problematic that people

18:59

write entire books debunking them. So,

19:01

for this, I read a book called

19:03

The Darker Angels of Our Nature, colon,

19:06

refuting the Pinker theory of history

19:08

and violence, which is less a

19:10

book than a collection of essays that's edited by

19:12

Philip Dwyer, who is a researcher on the

19:14

history of violence that I interviewed. I

19:17

want to start by saying this whole thing

19:19

of like, homicide rates declining. This is

19:22

something where Pinker is correct. Some

19:24

of the criticisms of Pinker kind of

19:26

amount to like maybe nitpicks or something.

19:28

I think nuances are super interesting, but

19:31

it's like on the broad scale, he is

19:33

correct. And I think it's fair to point

19:35

this out and try to think through what

19:37

could explain this. Right. He's

19:40

drawing like some specific conclusions that

19:42

feel like they are unsupported about

19:45

like specific homicide rates in the

19:47

past or whatever. Exactly. And

19:49

that's like the basic premise of like homicide

19:52

rates in the past were almost certainly way

19:54

higher than they are now. Exactly.

19:56

That's like relatively uncontroversial. And Frank,

19:58

I mean maybe. uncontroversial is putting

20:01

it lightly. Like, that is true. Yes, this is

20:03

absolutely accurate. The first thing that experts get really

20:05

frustrated about is Pinker citing this number of 100

20:08

homicides per 100,000 population. That's

20:11

like way overdoing it. There's various meta-analyses

20:13

and, you know, of course the data

20:15

from fucking 1100s England

20:18

is like very unreliable. So

20:20

the closest anyone can get to

20:22

a real like highest ever rate of homicides is

20:24

around 24 per 100,000. Okay. Obviously

20:28

the problem is that, you know,

20:30

nothing gets written down. It appears

20:32

that in urban areas they

20:34

would log all the homicides for like

20:36

the entire rural region. So Pinker

20:38

is depending on an account from Oxford. They

20:40

would write down all the homicides, even ones

20:42

that didn't take place in Oxford. So

20:44

it looks like everyone in Oxford is

20:47

fucking murdering each other constantly. But actually

20:49

it's like just what gets written down. There's also

20:51

a thing in like the quote unquote criminal justice

20:53

system back then that oftentimes the same homicide would

20:55

be logged three or four times as it

20:57

moves through the system. And

20:59

there wasn't a defined way

21:02

of naming people back then.

21:04

Like the concept of a last name

21:06

had had not really caught on. So

21:08

somebody would be like John by the

21:10

brook in one homicide case and

21:13

the same guy would be like John the

21:15

blacksmith in the same case being logged another

21:17

time. Again, we just

21:19

don't really know what the rates were to

21:21

the extent that we can say anything. It

21:23

appears that rates of homicides actually went up

21:25

between like the 1200s and the

21:28

1500s and then dropped. I

21:30

should also give Pinker credit. You know what

21:32

when I spoke to Philip Dwyer, he

21:34

says that you know this this drop is

21:37

roughly true. And the explanation that state capacity

21:39

essentially took entrepreneurial violence and

21:42

replaced it with state violence like

21:44

imprisoning people, executing people, etc. That's

21:46

also roughly true, right? You find

21:49

drops in various countries as the state matures.

21:52

This happens at different times but it tends

21:54

to coincide with state structures although it also depends

21:56

on things like you know the rise of

21:58

literacy, religious and civil rights. Institutions

22:00

were really important. There's just much more

22:02

nuance. I think experts are like, yeah fine

22:06

But it's not just like the one thing happening

22:08

There's all kinds of other things and then things

22:10

get like way dicier when we

22:12

talk about this like civilizing process

22:15

Philip Dwyer told me about there's like a huge

22:17

spike in homicide rates in England between like the

22:19

1580s and the 1620s And

22:23

so if we're all getting better at resisting our

22:25

impulses, why do we see this

22:27

huge spike in crime? Why do we see huge

22:30

differences region to region right are

22:32

people gaining this ability and then losing

22:34

it? That's the thing about these simplified

22:37

narratives And again, this is just

22:39

the basic problem of biting off

22:41

too much, right like trying to

22:44

ascribe simple narratives to

22:46

hundreds of years of complicated history

22:48

Right, it's you're just never going

22:50

to be entirely correct This is

22:52

where Pinker starts painting himself into

22:54

a corner about you know If

22:56

crime is dependent on the civilizing

22:59

process, right? Like how civilized we are how well

23:01

we can resist our impulses That

23:03

then has to become his explanation for

23:05

like all trends in crime going

23:07

forward Uh-huh, the next section of

23:09

Pinker's book is about explaining violence

23:12

in the United States, right? So

23:14

as we've noted America has like

23:16

six times higher homicide rates than Western

23:18

Europe to this day and beginning hundreds of

23:20

years ago this is kind of always been

23:23

the case and the other thing

23:25

to explain in America is Differences

23:27

in homicide rates. Uh-huh. He knows he

23:29

uses a slightly older statistics But if

23:31

you look up murder rates in

23:33

Maine, it's two per hundred thousand

23:35

So roughly on par with Western

23:37

Europe in Mississippi, it's 24 per

23:40

hundred thousand Okay There are places in America

23:42

where the homicide rate is roughly the same

23:44

as Oxford in the Middle Ages

23:46

If you recall JD Vance already explained

23:49

this this is the impact of

23:51

the Scots-Irish Dude, dude, dude, this

23:53

is where we're getting I

23:56

was gonna like to need you with your hand to

23:58

this. No, I I can see racism

24:00

coming a thousand miles

24:02

away. All right? He

24:04

then starts talking about the culture of

24:07

honor in the South. Okay.

24:10

Hell yeah. So here is his explanation

24:12

of the specific culture in

24:14

the American South that explains

24:17

current crime rates. In

24:20

this part, he's talking about the researchers

24:22

that he is citing who are then citing somebody

24:24

else. The first colonists in the

24:26

South were influenced by David Hackett Fisher's Albion

24:29

Seed, a history of the British colonization of

24:31

the United States. They zeroed

24:33

in on the origins of the first

24:35

colonists from different parts of Europe. The

24:37

northern states were settled by Puritan, Quaker,

24:40

Dutch, and German farmers, but the interior

24:42

South was largely settled by Scots-Irish, many

24:44

of them sheepherders who hailed from the

24:47

mountainous periphery of the British Isles beyond

24:49

the reach of the central government. Nothing

24:52

may have been an exogenous cause of

24:54

the culture of honor. Not only does

24:57

a herder's wealth lie in stealable physical

24:59

assets, but those assets have feet and

25:01

can be led away in an eyeblink

25:04

far more easily than land can be stolen

25:06

out from under a farmer. Herders

25:09

all over the world cultivate a

25:12

hair trigger for violent retaliation. Herders.

25:14

So contemporary Southerners are no longer

25:16

shepherds. Little mores

25:18

can persist long after the ecological circumstances

25:20

that gave rise to them are gone,

25:23

and to this day Southerners behave

25:25

as if they have to be

25:27

tough enough to deter livestock rustlers.

25:31

Yeah, that's what I've always said about Southerners. I

25:33

always tell them, calm down, you don't have

25:35

a flock to protect. Let's

25:38

just speak like rational descendants

25:40

of the Dutch. I looked into this

25:42

book, Albion Seed. It appears to

25:44

be relatively well regarded as

25:47

a description of cultural differences in

25:49

the United States like before the revolution.

25:52

But the problem with Pinker using

25:54

this is that he is then

25:56

citing two other researchers who take

25:58

this theory and apply

26:01

it 300 years later

26:03

and they apply it to homicide

26:05

rates. Albion Seed, this original

26:07

project, didn't talk about

26:09

homicide rates. If you read the

26:12

bunkers of Albion Seed and

26:14

Pinker's argument specifically, you

26:16

read this stuff and you're like, it was a herding

26:18

culture in the American South. But every

26:21

region of Europe includes herding populations.

26:23

There's mountainous regions of Switzerland and

26:25

France and Germany and those people

26:28

also emigrated. And if you look

26:30

at the actual differences between like

26:32

Scots-Irish immigrants in various regions of

26:35

the United States, they're not that

26:37

different. We're not talking about like

26:39

100% and 0%. Herding

26:43

culture is... This is... I'm sorry, this

26:45

is one of the weirdest explanations. I

26:47

know. I will accept this explanation

26:49

as to like why border

26:51

collies have a lot of energy. But

26:54

beyond that, I'm very skeptical. Like

26:56

there's some guy at a fucking

26:58

gas station screaming at another dude

27:00

over who gets to use the

27:02

pump. And Steven Pinker's like,

27:04

yeah, your ancestors were herders for sure.

27:07

Great, great, great, great. Grandpa was a herder.

27:10

I'm always very skeptical of

27:13

explanations for violence that are

27:15

not like, shall we

27:17

say, poverty forward. Right. Because culture

27:20

is this very abstract thing. Violence

27:23

is this very discreet thing. You need

27:25

to tie one to the other. And

27:27

I think that requires more work than

27:29

like, yeah, I'm getting violence vibes out

27:32

of Mississippi. Totally. And the researchers that

27:34

Pinker is citing here had

27:36

this theory that like people

27:38

from moist hilly regions would

27:40

commit more homicides than people from

27:43

dry plains. That I agree with.

27:46

You wouldn't be laughing at that if

27:48

you knew some moisture hilly people. Trust

27:51

me. But then various people have

27:53

gone back and kind of rerun the numbers and

27:55

it turns out that once you adjust for poverty,

27:58

the difference goes away. What? Oh,

28:00

yeah, poor people commit more homicides than

28:02

rich people. Imagine being poor and also

28:04

wet all the time climbing up hills

28:06

You'd want to kill someone Steven Also,

28:09

the universality means that this chapter should have

28:11

been called everybody heard everybody

28:14

cry Boo The

28:17

whole section was just leading up to that here

28:19

It's like the Donkey Kong thing Well, everybody hurts

28:21

one makes sense because I can just see you

28:23

sick in bed Looking at the ceiling listening to

28:25

that song on repeat over and over again. True.

28:27

Taking a break only to play Donkey Kong 64 So

28:30

that is his explanation of

28:33

regional disparities. He then has

28:35

to explain disparities over

28:38

time Uh-huh So this is the

28:40

section of the book where Pinker

28:42

explains the crime rise of the 1960s

28:44

and the crime fall of the 1990s Which

28:47

you and listeners may be familiar with because this comes

28:50

up in like every third episode that we did, right?

28:52

Basically his whole kind

28:54

of civilizing process theory The

28:57

problem is that it can't really

28:59

explain massive spikes in violence, right? Because like we

29:02

were good at resisting our impulses and then we became

29:04

bad at it and then we became good again He

29:07

has to tack on some sort of other

29:09

explanation For why all of

29:11

a sudden in the 1960s Americans started killing

29:13

each other way more Right

29:15

once you start identifying more as an

29:17

American and less as a Scotsman Then

29:20

your violent tendencies fade away The

29:23

beginning of his explanation is basically the lack of

29:25

social trust, right? So he says the

29:27

civil rights movement exposed a moral blot

29:29

on the American establishment And as critics

29:31

shone a light on other parts of

29:33

society more stains came into view Among

29:36

them the threat of a nuclear holocaust

29:38

the pervasiveness of poverty the

29:40

mistreatment of Native Americans the many illiberal

29:43

military interventions, particularly the Vietnam

29:45

War and later the Despoiliation

29:48

of the environment in the oppression of

29:50

women and homosexuals So he

29:52

uses some weird words, but basically people

29:55

are looking around and seeing like the

29:57

societal break. He's saying institutional trust is

29:59

low flow. That's one

30:01

way of putting it, it seems. He says

30:03

as the civilizing process was entrenched, in

30:06

the 1960s you then have this informalizing

30:09

process, where we stop looking to

30:11

the upper classes for the kind

30:13

of mores of resisting impulses, we

30:15

become more interested in giving in

30:18

to our impulses. So here is the

30:20

section where he lays that out. The

30:23

civilizing process had been a flow of

30:25

norms and manners from the upper classes

30:27

downward, but as western

30:30

countries became more democratic, the

30:32

upper classes became increasingly discredited

30:34

as moral paragons, and hierarchies

30:36

of taste and manners were

30:39

leveled. The informalization affected

30:41

the way people dressed as

30:43

they abandoned hats, gloves, ties,

30:45

and dresses for casual sportswear.

30:48

It affected the language, as people started

30:50

to address their friends with first names

30:52

instead of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss.

30:54

And it could be seen in countless

30:57

other ways in which speech and demeanor

30:59

became less mannered and more spontaneous. We're

31:01

not emulating rich people anymore. The leveling

31:03

of hierarchies and the harsh scrutiny of

31:05

the power structure were unstoppable and in

31:08

many ways desirable. But one of

31:10

the side effects was to undermine the

31:12

prestige of aristocratic and bourgeois lifestyles that

31:14

had, over the course of several centuries,

31:17

become less violent than those of the

31:19

working class and underclass. Instead

31:21

of values trickling down from the court,

31:23

they bubbled up from the street. This

31:27

is a disconcerting explanation.

31:30

The argument here is that,

31:32

look, some of – sure,

31:35

questioning social hierarchies is

31:38

good in some ways. But

31:40

one downside is that the

31:42

upper class rules – I think

31:45

that he's mistaking metaphor for reality. He

31:47

has this whole thing about etiquette norms

31:50

throughout the Middle Ages and the early state period where

31:52

people, they stopped spitting all over the place,

31:54

they stopped bringing their knives to dinner, et

31:56

cetera. And that's kind of an interesting metaphor

31:58

for the way – people learn

32:00

to resist their impulses. But then he

32:03

basically looks at the 1960s and he's like the

32:05

etiquette was changing. But the etiquette is not

32:07

necessarily perfectly correlated to rates of violence.

32:09

You can have very good etiquette and

32:11

also kill people and vice versa. This

32:14

informalization process has continued and crime

32:17

rates fell again in the 1990s. I

32:19

don't want to cast Pinker as a conservative

32:22

necessarily but I will say that this

32:24

is something that if you read

32:26

a lot of conservatives on, especially

32:28

conservatives from several decades ago, they

32:31

seem to believe very deeply that

32:34

the aesthetics of formality are like

32:36

part of the social glue that

32:38

binds us. Of course, what

32:41

it actually is, is a claim to

32:44

the top of the social hierarchy, right?

32:46

Because you're someone who was raised with

32:48

a certain type of etiquette and

32:51

you are making the claim that that type

32:53

of etiquette is not simply a

32:56

set of norms in your community. It

32:58

is the correct way to do things. And if

33:01

you do not do things like this, there

33:03

are downstream effects. So this is, what

33:06

we just read was like the good part of

33:08

this chapter, Peter. Here is where he gets into

33:10

more evidence that people

33:12

were giving into their impulses. A

33:15

prime target was the inner

33:17

governor of civilized behavior, self-control,

33:20

spontaneity, self-expression, and the defiance

33:22

of inhibitions became cardinal virtues.

33:25

If it feels good, do it, commanded a

33:27

popular lapel button. Do it

33:29

was the title of a book by

33:32

the political agitator, Jerry Rubin. Do it

33:34

to your satisfied, parentheses, whatever it is,

33:36

was the refrain of a popular song

33:38

by BT Express. The body

33:40

was elevated over the mind. Keith

33:42

Richards boasted, "'Rock and roll is music

33:45

from the neck downwards.' And

33:47

adolescence was elevated over adulthood. Don't

33:50

trust anyone over 30," advised the

33:52

agitator, Abby Hoffman. Hope

33:54

I die before I get old, sang

33:57

the who in my generation. This is

33:59

just like a bunch of great. about pop music in the 1960s?

34:03

Just do it, said Nike. So

34:05

much is going on here, but like, what's

34:08

so fucking annoying is

34:10

people just grabbing on to a

34:12

couple elements of pop culture, and

34:15

just speaking as if they are

34:17

indicative of like this massive social

34:20

upheaval. The 60s were a little

34:22

stuffy, and people lost trust in institutions, so

34:24

the 70s were a little weird, and then

34:26

the 80s were stuffy again. Like, this is

34:28

just fucking happening constantly. One

34:30

of the patterns we will see next episode, especially, is you

34:33

notice as he's further back in history,

34:35

he does more kind of citing of

34:37

experts, he reads more widely, he's capable

34:40

of describing things with a lot more

34:42

nuance, but then as we get closer

34:44

to his own lifetime, it's

34:46

just a bunch of gripes. He has this

34:48

bizarre thing where he's like, in

34:51

1964, Martha Reeves and the Vindellas sang, "'Summer's

34:53

here and the time is right "'for dancing

34:55

in the street.' "'Four years later, the Rolling

34:57

Stones replied "'that the time was right for

35:00

fighting in the street.'" What

35:02

the fuck are you talking about, dude? I

35:05

am hyped for the rap

35:07

chapter. Let's go. No,

35:09

but this is the most amazing thing. So, if

35:12

he's going to use all these factors to explain the crime

35:14

rise in the 1960s, he

35:17

then also has to account for the massive drop

35:19

in crime in the 1990s. He

35:21

does something very similar to our show.

35:23

He's like, it's not really demographics, it's

35:25

not economics, this was a worldwide trend,

35:28

and a lot of the domestic stuff like

35:30

mass incarceration can't really explain why

35:32

this was almost universal. And then

35:34

after he discards all of these other

35:36

much more complicated factors, he then says,

35:38

look, the only thing left is

35:40

that the culture got more civilized. He

35:44

says, ultimately, we must look to a change

35:46

in norms to understand the 1990s crime bust

35:49

just as it was a change in norms that helped

35:52

explain the boom three decades earlier.

35:54

Sorry, but it's not that a

35:56

change in norms is not the

35:58

explanation. It's that the change... in

36:00

norms is the change. You're saying,

36:02

well, why did this norm change?

36:04

And he's like, well, that's because

36:06

of the change in norms. It's

36:09

not an explanation. It's not anything.

36:11

It's just a restatement of what

36:13

we already know. Right. I think

36:15

the good version of this argument,

36:17

which he's not quite making, is

36:19

that some underlying vibe shift affected

36:21

both crime rates and pop

36:24

songs in the 1960s, which

36:26

fine. But then, first of all, you

36:28

have to explain what caused

36:31

the underlying vibe shift. And then

36:33

you also have to explain why

36:35

a similar opposite vibe shift

36:38

in the 1990s affected crime rates,

36:40

but not pop music. So here

36:42

is where he finally addresses gangsta

36:44

rap. Let's go. And they're literal

36:47

forces. One way in which the

36:49

1990s did not overturn the decivilization

36:52

of the 1960s is in popular

36:54

culture. Many of the popular musicians

36:56

in recent genres such as punk,

36:58

metal, goth, grunge, gangsta,

37:01

and hip hop make

37:04

the Rolling Stones look like the

37:06

women's Christian Temperance Union. Hollywood movies

37:08

are bloodier than ever. Unlimited

37:10

pornography is a mouse click away

37:12

and an entirely new form of

37:14

violent entertainment, video games, has

37:17

become a major pastime. And

37:19

as the signs of decadence proliferated

37:22

in the culture, violence went down

37:24

in real life. The re-civilizing process

37:27

somehow managed to reverse the tide

37:29

of social dysfunction without turning the

37:31

cultural clock back to Ozzy and

37:34

Harriet. Somehow Palpatine returned. I love

37:36

that he lists off all of

37:38

these examples of the lack of

37:41

a causal link between pop culture

37:45

and actual violence. And

37:47

instead he sort of posits it as

37:49

a mystery. Right. And also

37:52

he discards explanations like changing

37:54

demographics, changing living standards, because

37:57

they don't explain the entire shift. But I think most of the

37:59

time, I think that those explain parts of it.

38:01

You don't need something... All

38:03

right, this is making me annoyed.

38:06

We're back to freakin' omics. We'll

38:08

just type in that section of

38:10

the episode. You don't need a

38:12

simple narrative explanation of something that

38:15

is incredibly complex, right? He has

38:17

this concept about like the civilizing

38:19

process, which is already like way

38:21

too vague and unquantifiable to be

38:23

particularly meaningful. And then

38:25

he's trying to like apply

38:28

it in the micro, right?

38:30

If you want to say

38:32

there is an enormous array

38:34

of different norms and institutional

38:36

shifts and technology, etc., that

38:38

all come together and caused

38:40

violence to decline drastically over

38:42

the course of thousands to

38:44

hundreds of years, and I

38:46

call that all the civilizing

38:48

process. I think that that

38:50

is fine. But when you start to

38:52

try to zoom in and you're

38:54

like, okay, people aren't wearing hats

38:57

and the Rolling Stones are singing

39:00

about this and that, you can't explain

39:03

decade by decade crime rates

39:05

based on an extremely

39:08

abstract notion that you've pieced

39:10

together based on like

39:13

layperson's archaeology and like,

39:17

you know, briefly reading the Magna Carta or

39:19

whatever the fuck. Personally, I'm

39:21

actually fine with just saying that the

39:23

reasons why homicides declined in the

39:26

1950s and 1950s are probably different from the reason

39:28

they rose and fell in the 1990s. I

39:31

don't need there to be one reason for crime. Like

39:34

one of the reasons America has so many

39:36

more murders than the UK is just for

39:38

a wash in guns. I don't

39:40

know that we're one sixth as good at

39:42

resisting our impulses. This is why he's sort

39:45

of like anchoring to one idea and it's

39:47

leading him astray. He's basically telling the story.

39:50

It's not just that the reason that

39:52

violence has declined historically is due to

39:54

the civilizing process. He's saying

39:56

that the reason violence declines period

39:58

is due to the to the

40:00

civilizing process. And therefore, every time

40:03

he sees a decrease or increase

40:05

in crime, he must ascribe it

40:07

to a decrease or increase in

40:09

civilizing. And that doesn't actually

40:12

mean anything, or at least it doesn't

40:14

mean anything discrete enough that it's a

40:16

real explanation of what's happening. So

40:19

you end up getting this very lazy,

40:21

very abstract explanation for something

40:24

that actually has very discrete

40:26

material causes. Not

40:28

that we have our arms around

40:30

those causes in full, of course,

40:32

but like certainly we know that

40:34

there are material inputs into crime

40:36

that can be impacted by public

40:38

policy and to

40:41

characterize all of that as

40:43

the civilizing process. It's

40:46

oversimplified in a way that I

40:49

think is counterproductive to actually solving

40:51

these problems. I will say

40:53

that, keep in mind, this book

40:55

gets worse as it goes along. It's a common

40:57

theme in our books that they

40:59

just get worse because I think a lot

41:02

of these guys have figured out that a

41:04

lot of reviewers aren't making it past

41:07

the third chapter or so. Every

41:09

Gladwell review is always like, the book opens up

41:11

with an anecdote about this. And then it just

41:14

sort of like trails off and it's like, well,

41:16

when are you going to get to the racist

41:18

plane crashes chapter? It's like the Duke Nukem shareware

41:20

where like the free level one is really good

41:22

and you're like, well, pay money to get like

41:24

the next nine levels and they're all just garbage.

41:28

The whole thing was just like tricking you into it. Another

41:30

video game reference dated to 1996 for

41:32

our listeners. I

41:35

have been on the couch for seven weeks. I

41:38

have to have some sort of hobby. Reading

41:40

Steven Pinker and playing video games is all

41:43

I know. The Duke Nukem shareware is such

41:45

a deep cut that I can't even believe

41:47

it. So this brings us to the second

41:49

major portion of Steven Pinker's book.

41:52

He began the book talking about the

41:55

decline in homicide over time. In

41:57

the next section, he talks about the decline in

42:00

state-sponsored violence. This is

42:02

another thing when you think about it at the most basic level,

42:04

it's like true, right? That we used to

42:06

burn witches of the stake. We used to

42:08

execute much larger numbers of people, right? Throughout

42:11

Western Europe, we have like thousands of people

42:13

being executed. You know, we had public executions.

42:16

He had long, really

42:18

gross descriptions of the actual tortures that

42:20

they did to people, you know, they

42:22

would like draw and quarter people, they'd

42:24

like pull out their fucking entrails, like,

42:26

right? Slavery as like, like Ben Shapiro's love

42:28

pointing out was like very widely practiced.

42:30

Not just white folks. This is their

42:33

all, this is their all slavers matter. They

42:36

bring it every time you talk about a slavery was bad. But then,

42:39

you know, I mean, we had like large scale

42:41

pogroms against Jews, you know, especially in

42:43

Western Europe, we had the murder of heretics and

42:45

non-believers, like the kind of mass murder of people

42:47

because they had the wrong religion. Right. Things were like

42:49

it is written into the law that like you

42:51

will be killed if you don't believe in Jesus,

42:53

right? Or like you will be enslaved and

42:55

that is totally okay as far as the

42:58

law is concerned. This is another category of

43:00

violence that humans have practiced on each other

43:02

and has very significantly declined over time.

43:04

It's like institutionalized violence. Yes, exactly. That's

43:06

a better, that's a better way of

43:08

putting it as usual. So he notes

43:10

that the, you know, the institution of

43:12

prisons started to be established in the

43:14

1500s. Burning of witches started

43:17

fading in the 1700s. Things

43:20

like the Crusades, these kind of large

43:22

scale religious mass killings started to fade

43:24

out in the 1600s. The

43:27

idea of like proportionality of criminal

43:29

punishment starts to emerge. I'm sorry,

43:31

I don't mean to get cocky, but put me

43:33

in 800 AD, I

43:36

would have thought of proportionality. I

43:39

would have been the first guy to do it. The

43:41

funny thing is you're basically doing what Pinker is doing

43:43

throughout the book. He's like, I'm smarter than these fucking

43:45

middle-aged weirdos. These people are gross. I don't spit on

43:47

the ground. And when Pinker is doing it, he's being

43:50

disgusting and cocky. And when I

43:52

do it, I'm being snarky and fun.

43:54

Again, with this book, this is a trend

43:56

that I think everybody would acknowledge

43:58

existed, right? less likely to

44:01

be tortured by an agent of the

44:03

state now than you were in the

44:05

1500s. That's just true.

44:07

Right. His explanation is

44:09

basically mass literacy. I

44:12

did not know this going into this book, but you know,

44:14

by the 1700s, you had literacy rates

44:16

that were like 50%. We

44:19

started getting math literacy relatively quickly

44:21

after the invention of the printing press. Thinker

44:24

says, the growth of writing and literacy

44:26

strikes me as the best candidate for

44:28

an exogenous change that helped set off

44:30

the humanitarian revolution. The pokey little world

44:33

of village and clan, accessible through the

44:35

five senses and informed by a single

44:37

content provider at the church, gave way

44:39

to a phantasmagoria of people, places,

44:41

cultures, and ideas. And for

44:43

several reasons, the expansions of people's minds

44:45

could have added a dose of humanitarianism

44:47

to their emotions and their beliefs. Okay.

44:50

This is a time when you start

44:52

to get novels as mass entertainment, which

44:54

by definition are just telling stories about people who

44:56

are like a little bit different than you. Right.

44:59

And yet, really the beginning of like

45:01

what anyone would call like a marketplace of

45:03

ideas. Yeah. Once you have

45:05

math literacy, you can have philosophy. You start

45:07

having science. This is the first time you

45:09

can really debate things and have much wider

45:12

societal understandings. Right. You're

45:14

a guy who just learned how to read and then

45:17

you read a book that says like, tearing

45:19

people apart limb from limb is bad. And

45:21

you're like, huh. Hang on. What's going on

45:23

here? All of this resulted in an expanding

45:25

sense of empathy among the population. So he

45:27

says, actually, let me send this to you.

45:29

Some of this progress, and if it isn't

45:32

progress, I don't know what is, was propelled

45:34

by ideas, by explicit arguments

45:36

that institutionalized violence ought to be

45:38

minimized or abolished. And some of

45:40

it was propelled by a change

45:42

in sensibilities. People began to

45:44

sympathize with more of their fellow humans and

45:47

were no longer indifferent to their suffering.

45:49

A new ideology coalesced from these forces,

45:51

one that placed life and happiness at

45:53

the center of values and that

45:55

used reason and evidence to motivate

45:57

the design of institutions. the

46:00

first green shoots of ideas that get

46:02

us modern democracies. You have

46:04

to go from a society where you're totally

46:07

indifferent to other people suffering. You

46:09

hear this phrase, life was cheap. People

46:12

were just dying all over the place. Infant mortality was like

46:14

half of the fucking babies died. You

46:16

have to go to a society where it's like,

46:18

well, wait a minute. Maybe babies dying is bad.

46:20

Maybe torturing other people is bad. You

46:22

have to sort of see these ideas in the

46:24

population and then those over time become these much

46:27

larger structures that we have now. I

46:29

don't feel like I'm smart enough

46:31

to argue the details

46:33

of like how the Enlightenment

46:36

changed our societies. I

46:39

do feel like whenever I hear Pinker

46:42

and some of his contemporaries talk

46:44

about it, it feels like

46:46

weirdly oversimplified, like something is

46:48

not getting explained, and I

46:50

can't quite put my finger on it. Yeah, I think

46:52

what you're going through right now is what I went

46:54

through during the reading of this book. So I read

46:57

almost all of the book, and then I started reading

46:59

like the critiques and the reviews of the book. When

47:01

I first read this, I was like, ah, we're not

47:03

really going to debunk this on the show because like,

47:05

of course, right? You start reading about other people, and

47:08

then your mind expands to like, oh, hey, maybe

47:10

like poor people aren't poor because they're like a

47:12

lesser species of human, maybe like it's circumstances, right?

47:15

You expand your circle of empathy,

47:17

and then as I started reading the

47:19

responses to this, I realized that I think

47:21

there's – I think an

47:23

underrated form of bias is that all

47:26

of the books that you read are

47:28

written by writers, right? And I

47:30

think as a writer, I think I'm

47:32

biased to think that like it

47:34

was writing that brought us to the

47:36

sophisticated understanding, right? I think that

47:39

like I have a bias to think

47:41

that my work matters, and I think that ultimately that's

47:43

what Pinker is expressing too, that it's like, well, people

47:45

didn't know that torture was wrong, and they read something that

47:47

was like torture is wrong, and they're like, oh my God.

47:50

Yeah, you'll see a tweet that's like, oh,

47:52

that's my emotional support laundry pile, and you're

47:54

like, oh, other people also have a massive

47:56

pile of laundry they never quite put away?

48:00

I don't know if it's the humanitarian revolution, but

48:02

I would call this the TFW revolution. So

48:05

again, I found this very convincing, and then

48:07

I started reading people who know

48:09

more about the Enlightenment than I do

48:11

and seemingly than Pinker does. So

48:14

the biggest problem with this, and interestingly,

48:16

the researchers that came up with this

48:18

idea that it was basically novels and

48:20

mass literacy that created this

48:22

humanitarian revolution, She

48:25

admits very openly in her work that there's a

48:27

real correlation causation problem here, right? Because maybe people

48:29

started reading, and that gave them more empathy, but

48:31

maybe people had more empathy, so they started reading.

48:34

The other problem is just a timeline issue. So

48:40

this is an excerpt from

48:42

an article called The Decline

48:44

of Violence in the West from

48:46

cultural to postcultural history by Gregory

48:49

Hanlon. They really got to work on these titles, but

48:52

I'm going to send you this. In

48:54

common with many North American intellectuals under the sway

48:57

of 19th century idealism, Pinker

48:59

attributes major social changes to the appearance

49:02

of great books penned by courageous and

49:04

prescient authors. He

49:06

frequently cites the famous work by Cesare

49:08

Baccaria condemning torture and mutilation. But

49:11

since he has no apparent knowledge of criminal justice

49:13

history, he is unaware that magistrates had

49:15

largely phased torture out of their repertoire

49:17

100 years earlier. The

49:20

bloodthirsty God hypothesis gave way to

49:22

real progress after Locke advocated religious

49:24

toleration, he writes, but he ignores

49:26

the fact that neighbors had collaborated

49:28

on a daily basis with heretics

49:31

ever since the advent of the

49:33

Reformation, and that minorities usually evaporated

49:36

through intermarriage rather than by extermination

49:38

long before the English philosopher put

49:40

pen to paper. So timeline-wise, a

49:43

lot of the shifts that Pinker is

49:46

crediting to the Enlightenment actually happened before

49:48

the Enlightenment. And

49:50

oftentimes the Enlightenment was kind of giving people

49:52

reasons to explain what they were seeing. And

49:55

maybe this is what I sort of couldn't

49:57

put my finger on before when

49:59

I said this feeling. feels like an inadequate explanation.

50:02

But the idea that someone like Locke

50:04

was sort of the guy that thought of

50:06

this and then wrote it down and

50:09

everyone was like, oh shit. It's sort

50:11

of almost certainly untrue, right? What's

50:13

actually happening is that there are

50:16

all of these institutions and

50:18

norms colliding up against each

50:20

other and then people start

50:22

articulating what they're seeing

50:24

and experiencing, which might

50:26

have its own impact, but it's not the

50:28

spark that sets these things off. Right. I

50:31

think this is where it becomes much more obvious that

50:33

Pinker is speaking from his bias as a writer, and

50:35

maybe he's one of his other biases, because

50:38

he talks explicitly about ideas as

50:40

like an exogenous force. You have the static

50:42

society and then all of a sudden you

50:45

inject a bunch of new ideas into them

50:47

and then you get these massive shifts. But

50:49

one of the other historians that I spoke

50:51

to for this, Eleanor Yanega, points out that

50:53

arguments against slavery had been around for hundreds

50:55

of years at this point and Christians had

50:57

gone out of their way to prohibit slavery

50:59

of Christians. People absolutely

51:01

knew that this was a barbaric

51:04

institution. And over and

51:06

over again, other historians have pointed out

51:08

that a lot of these shifts that

51:10

he's talking about as moral or ideological

51:13

were much more logistical. The

51:15

other thing that really struck

51:17

me in Philip Dwyer's response

51:20

to Pinker's book is that it

51:22

is true that European cities started

51:24

banning public executions in the 1700s and

51:26

1800s, but

51:28

it doesn't appear that this was

51:30

for moral reasons. It was basically

51:32

because the cities were becoming more densely

51:35

populated and the crowds were too

51:37

large and rowdy. It was like a football game.

51:39

They banned public executions from London to

51:41

move them to the suburbs. This is

51:43

something I'm wondering if we're going to get

51:46

into it all, but I've

51:48

heard it said

51:50

several times that a lot of

51:52

the antiquated forms of torture that

51:54

we read about and are disgusted

51:56

by are actually mythical? They're

51:59

sort of like... urban legend almost and don't

52:01

really exist. Or like there's maybe the

52:03

sparsest piece of documentation that maybe this

52:05

once existed and then someone extrapolated an

52:07

enormous amount from that. It's like those

52:09

sex things that you start in high

52:11

school like give her the dirty Sanchez.

52:14

Right, right, right. Or like the rusty

52:16

dragon or whatever. It's like no one's ever actually

52:18

done that. It's exactly like

52:20

that. It's also, I mean, one of the other

52:22

researchers points out that instead of

52:24

referring to actual historians in this section,

52:27

one of his main sources

52:29

is a coffee table book

52:31

of torture implements. Right. Like

52:33

this is what they used to do to pull out

52:36

your entrails and like that stuff is kind of funny

52:38

and like it's good color to talk about in the

52:40

book, but it doesn't tell you anything about the prevalence

52:42

of these things or whether these implements were actually being

52:44

used. Right. I think one

52:47

of the reasons why historians get so

52:49

like worked up about this book, I mean, part of

52:51

it is like ego that like Pinker is not

52:53

citing their work, but part of it is just

52:55

like the weird sloppiness that he has of like

52:58

these long descriptions of how ugly and gross

53:00

tortures were. But then he doesn't pick

53:02

up the phone for like five minutes to be like, hey,

53:04

dude, what's this happening a lot? Right. I

53:07

also think that another way that actual

53:09

academics are at a disadvantage is that

53:11

this massive shift from

53:13

kind of barbarism to civilization or

53:15

whatever, there just isn't

53:17

a clean explanation of it. Right.

53:20

One of the other historians that I talked

53:23

to, Doug Thompson, he points out that, you

53:25

know, Pinker is almost exclusively talking about Western

53:27

Europe here, but the rise of state structures

53:29

and the reduction of homicide and torture,

53:31

etc., was a universal shift in

53:33

other places too. This also

53:36

happened in China and the Middle East

53:38

and India and all over the place,

53:40

oftentimes like a thousand years before it

53:42

happened in Western Europe. And so Pinker

53:45

is doing this weird thing where he's

53:47

trying to tell this like universal human

53:49

story of like how we went from

53:51

like apes to civilized people. But

53:54

he's only using one case study of

53:56

Western Europe, which is kind of a

53:59

weird outlier. compared to other regions

54:01

of the world that did this. And then a lot

54:03

of the data in his own case study doesn't

54:06

even really match his explanation.

54:09

I forget where I read this now, but at the same

54:12

time these like, you know, John Locke, all these trees,

54:14

he's on like individual rights were coming out. England

54:16

increased the number of crimes for which you could get

54:18

the death penalty. At the same time, they were actually

54:20

reducing the number of people executed. But

54:22

still, it's like that doesn't actually indicate a

54:24

shift among powerful leaders.

54:27

It's just kind of a mystery. And like that doesn't make

54:30

for a good airport book. Having a

54:32

simple, easy to follow narrative will

54:35

always be very pleasing to people. Even

54:38

if it's essentially incorrect or at

54:40

best oversimplified, which is why so

54:42

many like experts and historians, et

54:44

cetera, will never publish a good

54:47

book. Right. Because

54:49

it's a completely different skill set. So

54:51

those are the like logistical problems

54:54

with Pinker's explanation for

54:56

the decline of barbarism being due to

54:58

the Enlightenment. There's also a philosophical problem.

55:01

He is talking about the Enlightenment told

55:04

the population that like all humans

55:06

are deserving of dignity and it's

55:08

wrong to torture. And of

55:10

course this was happening at the same time as colonialism.

55:13

And a lot of this was happening

55:15

at the same time these thinkers were propping up

55:18

the continued existence of slavery. What?

55:21

This is the first time hearing about this. It's

55:24

a little bit weird to say like, oh,

55:26

well, these guys were right about everything. We

55:28

all learned to like respect the rights of

55:30

humanity and whatever, but like there

55:33

were kind of huge myopia

55:35

as part of this. And so this

55:38

is an excerpt from a very good review

55:40

in the New Yorker. Pinker

55:42

is virtually silent about Europe's bloody

55:44

colonial adventures. There's not even

55:46

an entry for colonialism in the book's

55:48

enormous index. This is a

55:50

pretty serious omission, both because of the scale

55:53

of the slaughter and because of the way

55:55

it troubles the distinction between savage and civilized.

55:58

What does it reveal about the impulse control? of

56:00

the Spanish that even as they

56:02

were learning how to dispose of their

56:04

bodily fluids more discreetly, they were systematically

56:06

butchering the natives on two continents. Or

56:09

about the humanitarianism of the British that as

56:11

they were turning away from such practices as

56:14

drawing and quartering, they were shipping

56:16

slaves across the Atlantic. He also

56:18

doesn't really cover the

56:20

way that enlightenment thinking was used

56:22

to defend eugenics. A

56:25

lot of these people had like really gross

56:27

ideas about races like Carl Linnaeus who came

56:29

up with this classification system for species of

56:31

like the family and the order and the

56:33

genus and all that stuff. Also

56:35

classified races as like according

56:37

to their basically to their superiority and

56:39

inferiority. And what happened during this time

56:42

was, you know, there were religious justifications

56:44

for racism why there had to be

56:46

this pre-existing hierarchy of superiority. And

56:48

then as we get the scientific revolution, they

56:50

use scientific justifications for the same outcome, right?

56:52

Like, oh, it's not because they're heretics. It's

56:55

because, oh, they're closer to apes in like

56:57

evolution. I don't want to create too much

56:59

of a straw man, but I feel like there's this

57:01

like undercurrent of Western

57:04

chauvinism running through a lot

57:06

of these conversations where they

57:08

want the narrative to be that

57:10

like things were very rough

57:13

before some very smart white boys

57:15

had some very good ideas and

57:17

things kind of turned on a

57:19

dime. And yes, change was slow

57:21

and is slow, but it's

57:24

predicated on these ideas from

57:26

British and French aristocrats 200

57:29

something years ago. It's a

57:31

sort of denial of the context in which

57:33

these men lived, right? That things were changing

57:35

around them as they were writing and that

57:38

perhaps they did have new ideas, but also

57:40

many of those ideas were articulations of things

57:42

that they were seeing. There's something

57:44

that feels like a little bit hero worshipy about

57:46

the way that some of these nerds talk about

57:48

the Enlightenment, I guess, that sort of doesn't sit

57:51

right with me. What I found

57:53

in reading a lot of the historical scholars

57:55

about Pinker's work was that what

57:57

he's trying to do throughout... is

58:00

set up this dichotomy between us

58:02

now and kind of pre-enlightenment,

58:05

pre-civilization people, right? So

58:07

he says that people in the Middle Ages were gross,

58:10

right? They spit on the floor. And this whole idea

58:12

of like life was cheap, right? People lost their babies

58:14

and they didn't give a shit. You just – you're

58:16

at dinner and somebody gets stabbed at the next table and

58:18

you don't care. He's trying

58:20

to set up this false dichotomy, but what

58:22

actual scholars of the time

58:24

say is that like people were totally capable of

58:27

empathy. Right, right. People cried when they lost their

58:29

babies. It was like really traumatic for them. It

58:31

was not, quote unquote, normal to be

58:33

surrounded by death all the time. They

58:35

felt the same kinds of trauma and depression

58:37

as we did. And there

58:39

is this really gross line of

58:42

like barbarism during these times, but there's also

58:44

a long tradition of like charity. A lot of

58:46

people used the church to say like, oh, we must

58:48

give alms to the poor. That was

58:50

existing at the same time. And what

58:52

Pinker's really trying to do is he's trying

58:54

to set up this ideology where

58:56

we're just constantly congratulating ourselves. Like,

58:59

well, thank God we're not like that. I don't spit

59:01

on the floor. But people who

59:03

are more familiar with the time say

59:05

that, you know, people back then were capable

59:08

of empathy, but they were selective about who

59:10

they extended it to. And that's what we

59:12

do now. Right. I don't want

59:14

to make like a morally relativistic argument, but

59:16

like prison conditions in the United States

59:18

are extremely bad, right? We have like very

59:21

endemic rape in prison. And that's

59:23

something that like they joke about in PG-13 movies. And

59:27

it's not that we're incapable of empathy. It's

59:29

that we don't extend our empathy to men

59:31

being raped in prison because we think it's

59:33

kind of funny that they're being feminized and

59:35

we think, they probably deserve it because they're in prison

59:37

for one reason or another. Right.

59:40

And the fact that things, you know,

59:42

gross punishments are less severe, less

59:44

likely now than they used to

59:46

be fair enough. But I think

59:48

it's actually more important to

59:50

draw the similarities between us

59:53

and previous human beings, not to congratulate

59:55

ourselves, but to think about all of the ways that

59:57

we're making the same mistakes that humans have been making

59:59

for 10,000 years. You know, I

1:00:01

don't want to step outside of the bounds

1:00:04

of my knowledge here, but

1:00:06

like the human brain hasn't evolved

1:00:08

a massive amount in the last

1:00:10

500 years or whatever. Right. We're

1:00:13

dealing with people who are essentially us. Right.

1:00:16

It feels like what Pinker is trying to

1:00:18

do is draw a really fine

1:00:21

line where there really isn't

1:00:23

one. Right. And so,

1:00:25

I think that's a really important element

1:00:27

of the old racist thinkers who are sort

1:00:30

of like there are savages and then there

1:00:33

are civilized people. And he might not use

1:00:35

that terminology, but that's what he's evoking to

1:00:37

me here. Yeah. Is

1:00:40

like we used to be like this and now we

1:00:42

are like this. Right. In the process, hand

1:00:44

waving away all of the mass violence that exists right

1:00:46

now and avoiding what

1:00:50

happens if we are now

1:00:53

in the, you know, basking in the glow

1:00:55

of enlightenment ideas. Yeah. And I

1:00:57

don't want to be too hard on Pinker. I

1:00:59

think we all have limitations intellectually. And I think

1:01:02

for somebody like Pinker who comes

1:01:04

from Scotch Irish heritage, I

1:01:07

think the oblong cranium is prone

1:01:09

to vengeance. So the

1:01:11

next thing that Pinker talks about is war. Okay.

1:01:15

Hell yeah. We've talked about how

1:01:17

humans do violence to each other. We've

1:01:19

talked about how states do violence to

1:01:21

their own people. But what about states

1:01:23

doing violence to other states? Okay. He

1:01:26

has a section called The Long Peace, which

1:01:28

is about the startling decline of

1:01:30

interstate war since World War II.

1:01:35

Controlling for World War II. Yeah, since the

1:01:37

big war. He says, now

1:01:39

we're ready for the most interesting statistic since

1:01:41

1945. Zero.

1:01:44

Zero is the number that applies to an

1:01:46

astonishing collection of categories of war during the

1:01:48

two-thirds of a century that has elapsed since

1:01:50

the end of the deadliest war of all time. I'll

1:01:52

begin with the most momentous. Zero is

1:01:55

the number of times that nuclear weapons have been

1:01:57

used in conflict. Zero is the number

1:01:59

of interstate wars. that have been fought between

1:02:01

countries in Western Europe since the end of World War

1:02:03

II. Keep in mind that up

1:02:05

until that point, European states had started

1:02:07

around two new armed conflicts per year

1:02:10

since 1400. Zero is the

1:02:12

number of interstate wars that have been fought since 1945

1:02:15

between major developed countries, the 44

1:02:17

with the highest per capita GDP.

1:02:19

Today, we take it for granted that war

1:02:21

is something that happened in smaller, poorer, and more

1:02:23

backward countries. Zero is the

1:02:25

number of developed countries that have expanded their territory

1:02:27

since the late 1940s by

1:02:29

conquering another country, and zero is

1:02:31

the number of internationally recognized states

1:02:33

since World War II that have

1:02:35

gone out of existence through conquest.

1:02:38

Okay. Do you want to debunk this, Peter? Do you have some

1:02:40

wars in mind? Do you have a couple wars?

1:02:44

There's something very weird about the

1:02:47

sort of like Eurocentrism of this is

1:02:49

face up, and so almost

1:02:53

not worth pointing out, but part

1:02:55

of the reason that war is

1:02:57

not happening so much in Western

1:03:00

countries is because war is happening

1:03:03

by Western countries to

1:03:05

non-Western countries, right? In

1:03:07

his defense, he does have an entire chapter about

1:03:09

wars in poorer states. Okay. And

1:03:12

he says that wars between countries just globally

1:03:14

are like much rarer than they used to

1:03:16

be. What we mostly see in poor countries

1:03:19

is civil wars. One of the things

1:03:21

that's really interesting when you look at the actual numbers is

1:03:23

that civil wars have become far less

1:03:25

deadly over time. So he says, in

1:03:28

1950, the average armed conflict killed 33,000 people.

1:03:31

In 2007, it killed less than a thousand. And

1:03:34

I'm going to send this to you. He

1:03:37

notes that we also have far fewer

1:03:39

genocides. So he has a

1:03:41

chart, which is based on

1:03:43

a database of killings by state

1:03:45

actors around the world since 1900. Okay.

1:03:49

This is just a chart of deaths

1:03:51

per year. Deaths per hundred thousand per year. This is

1:03:53

per capita deaths. Yeah. Some spikes

1:03:55

aside, you had a massive spike in worldwide

1:03:57

deaths. during

1:04:00

the World War II era, and then it

1:04:03

sort of climbs downward

1:04:05

pretty continuously to the

1:04:07

present day with small spikes for

1:04:10

like Cambodia, the genocide

1:04:12

in Pakistan, genocide in Rwanda, but

1:04:14

still nothing even remotely close to

1:04:17

World War II. And so we're

1:04:19

in an era of unparalleled peace.

1:04:22

So the thing is, I think

1:04:24

that people have just sort

1:04:26

of like a basic allergy to

1:04:28

like talking about this and admitting to it,

1:04:30

because it feels like you're sort of celebrating or

1:04:32

like you're implying that things like this will never happen

1:04:34

again. But this

1:04:36

is accurate, right? Like if you look

1:04:38

at the deaths in sort of large scale

1:04:40

genocides, they have reduced, right?

1:04:43

He says, the two decades since the end of

1:04:45

the Cold War have been marked by genocides in Bosnia,

1:04:47

225,000 deaths, Rwanda, 700,000 deaths, and Darfur, 370,000 deaths. These

1:04:54

are atrocious numbers. But as the graph shows,

1:04:56

they are spikes in a trend that is

1:04:58

unmistakably downward. The first decade of the new

1:05:00

millennium is the most genocide free of the

1:05:02

past 50 years. And

1:05:05

so you compare that to like anything like the Holocaust, 6 million

1:05:07

people, we're nowhere near that. And

1:05:09

he's also right that like, for most

1:05:11

of human history, like Germany and France were at

1:05:13

fucking war with each other. And we don't

1:05:16

have like, that's kind of unthinkable now. And

1:05:18

even in the conflicts that do take

1:05:20

place, the fact that deaths are so reduced

1:05:23

is like a pretty big deal. He

1:05:25

goes through the reasons for this, as

1:05:28

far as the reason why there's fewer

1:05:30

conflict deaths, that is almost

1:05:32

entirely just better medical care. You

1:05:34

know, for essentially all of human history,

1:05:37

including now, the majority of deaths in

1:05:39

war are not like direct battlefield deaths.

1:05:41

It was mostly like wounds getting

1:05:43

infected, right? And then you

1:05:46

have disruptions to populations, you have the spread

1:05:48

of like typhus and tuberculosis

1:05:50

and disruptions of food

1:05:52

supplies. And he notes that

1:05:54

during a Korean War, 4.5% of the population died

1:05:56

from disease and started starvation

1:06:00

per year. And even in

1:06:02

like the most horrific conflicts that we have now, like the Civil

1:06:04

War and Democratic Republic of Congo, it's

1:06:06

nowhere near that. It's like 1%

1:06:08

of the population over the entire conflict.

1:06:10

This is something where if he's making the case

1:06:13

that like as a human being, you're much less

1:06:15

likely to die of violence than you were

1:06:17

as a hunter gatherer. I think on

1:06:19

the most basic level, that is absolutely fucking

1:06:21

true. But that is like 95% because of

1:06:24

just better medical care. It also seems

1:06:26

to be distinct from the sort of

1:06:28

like almost moral case that he's been

1:06:30

making, right? That like that there has

1:06:32

been a shift in our

1:06:34

collective thinking that has led to less

1:06:36

violence as opposed to like, yeah,

1:06:39

we figured out bacteria a little bit. The thing

1:06:41

is I am front loading the explanation of medical care. This

1:06:44

is something that he does mention in the book. I don't

1:06:46

want to say that he's completely eliding this, but this is

1:06:48

like fifth or sixth on his

1:06:50

list of reasons. I would put

1:06:52

this like the number one most important reason why we

1:06:54

see fewer conflict deaths now and fewer civilian deaths. The

1:06:57

way that he describes it, why

1:06:59

there's so much less conflict now

1:07:01

is his first explanation is the

1:07:04

Enlightenment. Naturally. In 1948, we got the

1:07:06

Universal Declaration of Human Rights and he's

1:07:08

a boring... He's chalking it up to

1:07:10

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The

1:07:12

thing is as somebody who worked in

1:07:15

human rights for 11 years, I do

1:07:17

think it's like the most adorable thing

1:07:19

in the book that he thinks it

1:07:21

like matters. They're like, oh, states now

1:07:24

say we're not going to violate human rights. It's like, yeah,

1:07:26

they say that. Like

1:07:32

Putin is just reading it like damn,

1:07:35

they got me on this. Well, he has a

1:07:37

bunch of other stuff. Most of these are actually

1:07:39

like fairly convincing and fairly interesting. One

1:07:42

of the other reasons we haven't seen anything

1:07:44

on the scale of World War II since

1:07:46

is because World War II was so fucking

1:07:48

bad while pointing guns at each other like

1:07:51

reservoir dogs. I'm just like, I'm going to

1:07:53

take things chill. He also lists the international

1:07:55

order. The fact that we don't have the

1:07:57

borders on the map moving around constantly. thing

1:08:00

that is like a man-made institution

1:08:02

but we forget how kind of new this

1:08:04

is, right? The conquest was

1:08:07

a huge part of just being a country,

1:08:09

more like most of settled human history and

1:08:11

since World War II we have an international

1:08:13

order where a violation of sovereignty is like

1:08:15

a huge fucking deal. Part of that is

1:08:17

also the stakes, right? It's

1:08:21

not that the international order created norms

1:08:23

in a vacuum, right? It

1:08:26

created a system through which the stakes

1:08:29

for invasion are like maybe

1:08:31

the United States invades you back,

1:08:33

right? Exactly. If you fuck around

1:08:35

you will in this new international order find

1:08:37

out and that sort of has kept

1:08:39

people at bay. Oh totally.

1:08:41

And I also think another thing is he calls

1:08:43

it globalization of trade but I think it's

1:08:45

more like the shift to a knowledge

1:08:48

economy. I think in previous eras like

1:08:50

territory was just a much bigger deal, right?

1:08:52

In other words, now if you think of

1:08:54

Germany invading Denmark, what the fuck is Germany

1:08:56

going to get? There's not like

1:08:58

gold underneath Denmark. It's like a population that would

1:09:01

fucking hate you and that's

1:09:03

not where your GDP comes from anymore. So

1:09:06

this thing of like pillaging territory

1:09:08

and taking back land, that just

1:09:10

doesn't matter as much. He mentioned

1:09:12

this briefly. I actually think this is like super

1:09:14

interesting and important is that the

1:09:16

changing conception of states of

1:09:18

what does your country do for

1:09:20

you? It used to really be like much

1:09:22

more kind of nation ethnicity focused as you

1:09:24

know bringing us back to the glory

1:09:26

of our empire, promoting us

1:09:28

as like the superior beings on

1:09:31

the world stage whatever. All this

1:09:33

kind of jingoistic bullshit. The conception

1:09:35

of states now are much more as just

1:09:37

like provider of social services and provider of

1:09:39

welfare. Like people in Germany are not like

1:09:42

I need Germany to expand to like glorify

1:09:44

the German people. It's like I want a pension

1:09:46

when I retire. Not the country I would have used as an

1:09:48

example but I hear you. Yeah that's probably a bad answer.

1:09:53

The way that we think of states now, you

1:09:55

don't have a lot of domestic constituencies

1:09:57

for like America must take over Canada.

1:10:00

Trust me, I've tried to rally the

1:10:02

support. It does not come. And then, you

1:10:04

know, we talked about this with the Fukuyama episode, but also

1:10:06

just the rise of democracies around the world. Now

1:10:08

most of the world lives under

1:10:11

at least nominally liberal democracies. Right.

1:10:13

And then the final one, I've been

1:10:15

so nice to him for most of

1:10:17

this episode. We're going to get

1:10:19

into his final reason why wars

1:10:22

and genocides have declined. And this

1:10:24

is the decline of ideology.

1:10:27

God damn it. So there's less ideology now.

1:10:29

This one's designed to make me mad. I

1:10:31

can feel it. He's going to use the

1:10:33

M word. He's going to use the M

1:10:35

word briefly. The appearance of Marxist ideology in

1:10:37

particular was a historical tsunami that is breathtaking

1:10:39

in its total human impact. It

1:10:41

led to the mega murders by... It

1:10:43

was actually deka mega murders, but I changed

1:10:45

it to make it easier to read. It

1:10:50

led to the mega murders by Marxist

1:10:52

regimes in the Soviet Union and China.

1:10:55

And more circuitously, it contributed to

1:10:57

the one committed by the Nazi

1:10:59

regime in Germany. Very circuitously, I

1:11:01

would say. Pretty circuitously. Hitler read

1:11:04

Marx in 1913, and although he

1:11:06

detested Marx's socialism, his national socialism

1:11:08

substituted races for classes in its

1:11:10

ideology of a dialectical struggle toward

1:11:13

utopia. Some historians consider the two

1:11:15

ideologies fraternal twins. We're not doing

1:11:17

Marxism anymore. When you think of

1:11:19

the Nazis, you're like, man, too

1:11:22

much Marxism. When he says some

1:11:24

historians, he means Jonah Goldberg. That's

1:11:26

that citation. I don't know

1:11:28

what it is about these liberal intellectuals, like

1:11:30

the need to tie Marxism and Nazism to

1:11:33

one another. It's so weird. Hitler

1:11:36

substituted races for classes. What are

1:11:38

you fucking talking about? The whole

1:11:40

point of Marxism is the class thing. You can't just say he

1:11:42

replaced them with something else. Like, this doesn't

1:11:45

make... Oh, football is sort

1:11:47

of like... It's Marxism, but you replace

1:11:49

classes with teams. This is the thing I

1:11:51

was like, should I make Peter read this?

1:11:53

Are we going to talk about this? This was the first

1:11:55

paragraph in the book where it was like, what

1:11:57

the actual fuck are you talking about? He

1:12:00

even mentions here Hitler detested Marxist

1:12:02

socialism. Hitler would not shut the

1:12:04

fuck up about how much he

1:12:06

hated communism. That was one of

1:12:08

his main driving fucking ideologies. Bear

1:12:10

the fucking first ones that go in

1:12:12

the poem. Look,

1:12:16

I'm not a fucking anthropologist.

1:12:18

So when you

1:12:20

tell me about the first, you know, whatever, 75%

1:12:23

of this book or whatever it is, I'm

1:12:25

like, yeah, it doesn't sound right, but OK.

1:12:28

Yeah. And then he says one thing that I know

1:12:30

a little bit about. And it's like way off. It's

1:12:34

just like a huge red flag in my

1:12:36

brain. You know what I mean? So the

1:12:38

next thing that Stephen Picker talks about in

1:12:40

his book is what you actually

1:12:42

mentioned earlier. Right. Can we

1:12:44

just take out World War Two

1:12:47

from the statistics? Right. Like, right.

1:12:50

For most people growing up now, it

1:12:52

sounds weird to say like, oh, the world is

1:12:54

becoming more peaceful. Obviously, people are going to be

1:12:56

like, what the fuck? What about World War Two?

1:12:58

Right. So the next section

1:13:00

of the book, and he really he really

1:13:02

goes into this in detail is if things

1:13:04

are getting better, why was the 20th century

1:13:07

the bloodiest century in human

1:13:09

history? Right. So here is

1:13:11

this. The

1:13:15

20th century was the bloodiest in history

1:13:17

as a cliche that has been used

1:13:19

to indict a vast range of demons,

1:13:21

including atheism, Darwin, government, science, capitalism, communism,

1:13:23

the ideal of progress, and the male

1:13:25

gender. Male gender. But is it true?

1:13:27

The claim is rarely backed up by

1:13:29

numbers from any century other than the

1:13:32

20th, or by a

1:13:34

mention of the hemoclysms of

1:13:36

centuries past. Hemoclysms is like this weird

1:13:38

made up word that basically means like

1:13:40

the bursting of a blood vessel and

1:13:42

has come to mean like this period

1:13:44

of mass deaths between basically World War

1:13:46

One and like the Mao dying. You

1:13:48

know, I think the sort of like

1:13:50

natural almost intuitive explanation of World War

1:13:52

One and World War Two is

1:13:55

sort of we had this confluence

1:13:57

of this old political order. and

1:14:01

incredible violent technology. And that sort

1:14:03

of culminates in a world war

1:14:05

that is bloodier than anything we've

1:14:08

ever seen, followed by another one.

1:14:11

And then we sort of all learn our lesson

1:14:13

in some way. A new international order is established

1:14:15

that sort of reckons with the fact that we

1:14:17

can all destroy each other. I've

1:14:20

heard that before, but what

1:14:22

I've never heard is like

1:14:25

the 20th century is the bloodiest in history. Well,

1:14:27

are you counting? That's all count. How many people

1:14:30

died in the 4th century, Peter? In the 13th?

1:14:32

Do you know? Do you even know, Peter? This is

1:14:34

a weird argument to make mostly because look, in some ways I think,

1:14:37

yeah, okay, it's true. If you're arguing

1:14:39

with me, that's true. I don't know how many people died

1:14:41

in most other centuries. You admit it.

1:14:44

But what I do know is that the World War II death toll

1:14:46

was like 70 million people or

1:14:48

something. I don't feel like

1:14:50

they were hitting those numbers back in 600

1:14:53

BC or whatever the fuck. But

1:14:56

Peter, the mistake that you're making... Talk

1:14:58

to me about Per Capita. There's

1:15:01

no fucking way. We're getting there. We're

1:15:03

getting there. There's no fucking way. I'm

1:15:06

sorry, but the...

1:15:08

There's just no fucking way that the... Hold

1:15:11

on. I'm trying to... I love that you're like, what's the

1:15:13

dumbest place he could go with this? Per

1:15:16

Capita rates. The only way to do

1:15:19

this is to be like, back when there

1:15:21

were eight people, one of them died. There's

1:15:24

no fucking way that

1:15:26

those percentages have been

1:15:29

matched in history. I

1:15:31

refuse to believe it. Oh, Peter. I refuse to

1:15:33

believe it. Peter, allow me to send

1:15:36

you a chart that lists the

1:15:38

population and the death toll

1:15:40

as a percentage of the global population.

1:15:42

God damn it. Peter says that to

1:15:44

truly understand whether or not the 20th century

1:15:46

is the bloodiest in history, you can't just call him

1:15:49

Peter. We have to look at all of the other

1:15:51

hemoclysms past. I will not be convinced by charts and

1:15:53

numbers on this. Okay. Okay.

1:15:56

So this is a...

1:16:00

Like a list of conflicts? A list

1:16:02

of atrocities. With sort of the

1:16:04

death toll and then the mid-20th

1:16:08

century equivalent death toll.

1:16:10

Yeah, so he's multiplied the

1:16:12

death tolls of all previous atrocities,

1:16:14

so they're expressed in 1950s numbers. Right.

1:16:17

And then he has an adjusted rank. So according

1:16:19

to his adjusted rank, the Second World

1:16:21

War is merely the ninth worst

1:16:24

atrocity in human history. The number one

1:16:26

worst atrocity adjusted for inflation is the

1:16:28

An Lushan Revolt of the eighth century.

1:16:30

Death toll was 36 million, but the

1:16:32

mid-20th century equivalent is 429 million. Because

1:16:42

the world population was less than one tenth of what it

1:16:44

is now. So you have to multiply it by more than ten.

1:16:47

A distant second is the Mongol

1:16:49

conquest of the 13th century, 278

1:16:51

million. After

1:16:54

it, it was 40 million to begin with. So

1:16:56

it's almost six times worse than World War II.

1:16:59

People talk about World War II, but they don't talk about the Mongol conquest.

1:17:01

As someone with Persian heritage, I do think about

1:17:03

that. Maybe you, okay, maybe you can explain it

1:17:05

more to other people. And someone who

1:17:07

played Age of Empires II. Number

1:17:10

three is the Mideast Slave

1:17:12

Trade. Not the Transatlantic Slave

1:17:14

Trade. No, no. Mideast Slave Trade. Which

1:17:16

had a death toll of 19 million adjusted for inflation,

1:17:18

and that's 132 million. Now

1:17:21

the interesting thing about this, and

1:17:23

which should completely disqualify it from this

1:17:25

list, is that it spans 1200 years.

1:17:31

Damn it, you noticed. I was going to lead

1:17:33

up to this. He also has the Atlantic Slave

1:17:35

Trade, which spans 400 years. Several

1:17:38

of these span multiple centuries,

1:17:40

which defeats the entire premise.

1:17:43

I found a really good review. It's

1:17:45

like, okay, Pinker, you want to

1:17:47

adjust by per capita? Let's adjust

1:17:49

by year, bitch. If we spread

1:17:52

out the Mideast Slave Trade across 1200

1:17:54

fucking years, and World War II across six

1:17:57

years, World War II is then again. the

1:17:59

fucking war so why are you controlling for

1:18:01

one thing but you're not controlling for this

1:18:03

other fucking thing right I was gonna look to

1:18:05

that one of them is also just Joseph Stalin

1:18:07

yeah one just says Joseph Stalin seems

1:18:10

to encompass like a wide range of

1:18:12

activities but the other thing

1:18:14

that's odd here is that he

1:18:17

had he's doing this by

1:18:19

atrocity rather than

1:18:21

by century which is what he initially

1:18:23

said so the second he

1:18:25

has the second world war and then Mao Zedong

1:18:28

which again just a guy Joseph

1:18:30

Stalin the first world war the Russian

1:18:32

civil war the Chinese civil war of

1:18:35

the 20th century all of

1:18:37

these occurring in the 20th

1:18:39

century but they're split up right

1:18:41

even though the whole point that he was

1:18:43

trying to make was not the bloodiest century

1:18:46

but he's splitting them up why what happens

1:18:48

when you add them all up also I

1:18:50

know nothing about this but Philip Dwyer mentioned

1:18:52

that he's also blending the Napoleonic wars with

1:18:55

the French Revolution like it's kind of

1:18:57

arbitrary what he's collapsing and expanding because

1:18:59

you could also just put like colonialism

1:19:01

on here and have that span like

1:19:03

two centuries and you have a massive

1:19:05

death toll right or you know he's

1:19:07

talking about this like what he calls this

1:19:10

hemoclism of the 20th century you could also

1:19:12

group all of that together right world war

1:19:14

one world war two Stalin Mao and then the

1:19:16

20th century would rock it up to the

1:19:18

top again I'm going to speculate wildly here do

1:19:20

it cook son cook this is a test a

1:19:24

test of my instincts the

1:19:26

only thing I know about the An Lushan revolt

1:19:28

is that it took place in China in the

1:19:30

eighth century you now know that it was the

1:19:32

eighth right that's right my gut instinct is that

1:19:35

a rebellion in China in the eighth century did

1:19:37

not kill 36 million

1:19:39

people two thirds of the Chinese

1:19:41

population at the time anchor informs

1:19:43

us I imagine that that is

1:19:45

indirect deaths rather than direct or

1:19:48

what is that just like the collapse of

1:19:50

China leads to the deaths of two thirds

1:19:52

of the population those are actually

1:19:54

fake deaths due to statistical

1:19:56

abnormalities so is my instinct right oh

1:19:58

yeah absolutely I mean I want

1:20:00

I want you know haters have said who

1:20:03

are these guys to criticize? Hey

1:20:06

criticize the works of

1:20:08

various talented authors my

1:20:10

instincts spot on the trick theater is

1:20:12

to stop Reading altogether. I

1:20:15

can just look at this number and know that it's

1:20:18

fucking wrong. Why would I write anything about it? Right

1:20:20

typically, I don't learn shit. The chart has a ton

1:20:22

of internal inconsistency But

1:20:25

that 36 million number just

1:20:28

jumped out to me immediately where I was

1:20:30

like what yeah, yeah, yeah, how well

1:20:32

okay? So to get into the

1:20:34

specific events and numbers that pinker

1:20:36

is using here First of all all

1:20:38

of the numbers on this chart do

1:20:41

not come from like actual Historians and

1:20:43

academics and he does not appear to

1:20:45

have double-checked them with any experts or academics They

1:20:47

come from a book called the great big book

1:20:49

of horrible things Ripley's believe it or

1:20:51

not horrible things It's I don't

1:20:54

want to like be mean to this guy, but it's by

1:20:56

basically just a random guy He's a librarian his name is

1:20:58

Matthew white and like in his spare time.

1:21:00

He's curious Like what's the worst thing that humans have ever

1:21:02

done to each other? He's putting together these numbers and eventually

1:21:04

he publishes a book According to

1:21:07

historians basically all of these numbers are

1:21:09

like egregiously wrong Oh when

1:21:11

it comes to the Anushan revolt the

1:21:13

problem is it didn't kill two-thirds

1:21:15

of the Chinese population What happened was a

1:21:17

shitload of people died So the the actual

1:21:19

number that academics tend to use apparently is

1:21:21

around 13 million, which is still a

1:21:23

shitload Yeah But what happened is when a huge

1:21:26

number of people died the people who administer

1:21:28

the census also died So what

1:21:30

happened was it looks like two-thirds

1:21:32

of Chinese people died What

1:21:34

happened is they were just massively under counted

1:21:36

in the second count because the census administration

1:21:38

was completely destroyed So 36 million

1:21:40

people disappeared, but they just disappeared from

1:21:43

the count. They didn't actually die It's

1:21:45

actually the same with the Mongolian

1:21:47

conquests Basically 40 million people did

1:21:49

not die in the Mongol

1:21:52

conquest In fact Genghis Khan typically went out

1:21:54

of his way to kill as small a

1:21:56

number as possible because he wanted people around

1:21:58

to like administer his empire,

1:22:00

it doesn't make sense to do this kind of mass

1:22:02

killing. It appears that

1:22:04

what happened was the actual

1:22:07

like Mongol conquesters would typically

1:22:09

inflate the numbers afterwards basically to brag

1:22:11

like, oh, I killed 50 million people.

1:22:13

And then the victims of these, the people

1:22:15

left behind would also exaggerate to say like,

1:22:17

they're so terrible, they killed 50 million people.

1:22:20

So both kind of the quote unquote, good guys and

1:22:22

the bad guys have a reason to inflate the

1:22:24

body counts and these get written down. We just

1:22:27

don't have reliable numbers here. To the extent that

1:22:29

we can say anything, it's like roughly 11 million,

1:22:31

not 40 million. But also one of

1:22:33

the things I noticed in a lot of the

1:22:36

like academic dissections of this chart, this

1:22:38

chart is the subject of like more

1:22:41

like academic, just like, this

1:22:43

shitification than any other part of

1:22:45

this book, people fucking hate this chart. What

1:22:47

a lot of experts say is that for

1:22:50

large scale atrocities, even arguably for like World

1:22:52

War Two, getting a specific number is

1:22:54

not all that interesting of a project.

1:22:56

Yeah, Philip Dwyer has a section where he

1:22:58

talks about the the polionic wars. He says the

1:23:00

actual range is between 750,000 and 5 million people. So like

1:23:02

a five fold range. And what

1:23:07

we're actually talking about, he's talking about

1:23:09

these census records in Calabria, where 21,000

1:23:12

people disappear from the census in Calabria, but

1:23:15

we don't know if they were killed, or

1:23:17

they just left Calabria because there was a war

1:23:19

going on. You know, we've

1:23:21

talked before about this bizarre project

1:23:23

of like, who's killed more people, Christianity or atheism? And

1:23:25

it's like, what's at the end of that debate, right?

1:23:27

If you can prove one way or the other, what

1:23:30

does it really say? Right. It just isn't like a

1:23:33

thing that people who are interested in these actual

1:23:35

events, spend a lot of time doing. It's kind

1:23:37

of weird. It's like a it's like a

1:23:39

dick measuring contest for centuries. If what's interesting

1:23:41

about this, there is like a more nuanced

1:23:43

point to be made here that would be

1:23:45

very interesting, which is like, there

1:23:47

have actually been comparable centuries by some metrics,

1:23:49

right? I think that would be like a

1:23:52

fair point to make. But

1:23:54

instead, he pulls from one shitty

1:23:56

source plops down one of the

1:23:58

worst structured charts. I've ever seen in

1:24:00

my life and he's like here. Here's my

1:24:03

point that the 20th century is not the blood He is

1:24:05

it feels so Floppy

1:24:08

that he like calls the whole

1:24:10

point into question and like his whole

1:24:12

broader project into question It's another one

1:24:14

of those things like his discussion of

1:24:16

Marxism and Nazism where you're like It's

1:24:19

hard to take someone who makes this

1:24:21

mistake seriously on some level You

1:24:23

can you can forgive him for like

1:24:25

fudging the numbers or whatever didn't do

1:24:28

his due diligence But he explicitly rejects

1:24:30

the argument that the 20th century represents

1:24:32

some sort of culmination of world historical

1:24:34

trends He basically says that it doesn't count

1:24:36

right? So he has a whole section

1:24:38

about the nature of randomness He

1:24:40

said that like when the Germans were dropping

1:24:42

bombs on London during the blitz, you know,

1:24:45

the altitudes were so high They couldn't meaningfully

1:24:47

aim so essentially random where the bombs fall Yeah,

1:24:49

and by coincidence a lot of the bombs fell

1:24:51

on some neighborhoods Whereas other neighborhoods got no bombs

1:24:53

at all and of course people read patterns into

1:24:55

this right? They're like, oh the Germans are going

1:24:57

after like I don't cam dinner or something and

1:24:59

they're sparing Bloomsbury Whatever but like this is

1:25:01

just the nature of randomness things look like

1:25:03

patterns, but they're actually just

1:25:06

complete statistical flukes Uh-huh, and then

1:25:08

he explicitly says that this is what happened

1:25:10

with the 20th century by coincidence We got

1:25:12

Hitler we got Mao we got Stalin we

1:25:14

got World War one and two all this

1:25:16

stuff happened to take place in the same

1:25:19

century But it doesn't really like mean anything

1:25:21

It's so funny that you get someone like to

1:25:23

look at someone like Hitler one of like the

1:25:26

most studied characters in history And be

1:25:28

like this was so random This

1:25:31

is so random. So here is the

1:25:33

section where he lays the data This

1:25:37

underscores the difficulty of reconciling our

1:25:39

desire for a coherent historical narrative

1:25:41

with the statistics of deadly quarrels

1:25:43

and Making sense of the

1:25:46

20th century our desire for a good

1:25:48

story arc is amplified by two statistical

1:25:51

Illusions one is the

1:25:53

tendency to see meaningful clusters in randomly

1:25:55

spaced events Another is the bell curve

1:25:57

mindset that makes extreme values

1:26:00

Astronomically unlikely. So when we

1:26:02

come across an extreme events.

1:26:04

We. Reason: There must have been extraordinary

1:26:07

design behind it. That. Mindset makes

1:26:09

it difficult to accept that the worst

1:26:11

to events in recent history though unlikely,

1:26:13

were not astronomically unlikely. Even. If

1:26:16

the odds had been increased by the tensions

1:26:18

of the times, The war's did not

1:26:20

have to start. And once they did,

1:26:22

they had a constant chance of escalating

1:26:24

to greater deadliness, no matter how deadly

1:26:27

they already were. The two world wars

1:26:29

were, in a sense, horrifically unlucky samples

1:26:31

from a statistical distribution that stretches across

1:26:34

the vast range of destruction. And that's

1:26:36

what I have always said about world

1:26:38

words and. This.

1:26:41

Is. A bananas way to think about history, but like

1:26:43

a double bananas way to think about world. War

1:26:45

One and Two. This is the shit

1:26:47

happens. Theory of History Yeah, over a

1:26:49

long enough time, Like a thousand monkeys

1:26:51

are thousand typewriters. I kind of explanation

1:26:53

of history like what the fuck are

1:26:56

you talking about Dude, step stuff happens

1:26:58

in context and we want to understand

1:27:00

that context. What's this is like? intellectual

1:27:02

laziness manifests it as like math. She's

1:27:04

acting as if these are just like he was happen

1:27:06

over the course of time and like you know you

1:27:08

look across two thousand years and like this in a

1:27:10

few more war than the third century and than in

1:27:13

the a. Boy is is this level

1:27:15

of randomness able to explain the decline

1:27:17

of violence for exactly exactly. And

1:27:19

also. These. Wars specifically.

1:27:21

I'm a believer this is the fuck an obvious

1:27:24

the pointed out but it like world war one

1:27:26

came out of the diplomatic institutions that had been

1:27:28

set up. Over the course of the eighteen

1:27:30

Hundreds, right? All these weird. Diplomatic.

1:27:32

Alliances, the sept falling like dominoes. been like

1:27:34

this. dumb assassination happens rates, and then World

1:27:37

War Two happens As a result of World

1:27:39

War One, the international order that was set

1:27:41

up there, so much fucking resentment in Germany

1:27:43

is boiled over and then becomes a Nazi

1:27:45

regime. And like I know, that's like a

1:27:47

super fucking simplistic way to put it. But

1:27:49

it's like these two things explicit. We draw

1:27:52

upon recent history and they're also the the

1:27:54

first two wars that happen after the Industrial

1:27:56

revolution, right? The deadliness allow cost could not

1:27:58

have happened in any other. century, even

1:28:00

if Genghis Khan wanted to kill six

1:28:02

million people in six years, he couldn't

1:28:05

have done it because they didn't have

1:28:07

trains, they didn't have bureaucratic institutions. We

1:28:09

didn't have the ability as human beings to

1:28:11

do anything on this scale. If

1:28:14

you're talking about a long period where there's not a whole

1:28:16

lot of technological advancement, maybe

1:28:18

this argument holds up. But the

1:28:20

20th century atrocities, specifically he talks about

1:28:22

the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, could

1:28:24

only have happened in the 20th century.

1:28:27

This must be the least satisfying way

1:28:29

to explain this away. He

1:28:32

has this major problem in his

1:28:34

theory, which is if

1:28:36

we currently live in a drastically

1:28:39

less violent time, why

1:28:42

in relatively recent history did we

1:28:44

see enormous spikes

1:28:46

of unparalleled violence? Huge

1:28:49

problem in his broad narrative

1:28:51

and his two explanations

1:28:53

are one, here's

1:28:56

a chart with just

1:28:58

manifestly inaccurate numbers that

1:29:01

explains that this is actually not that weird, and

1:29:04

two, statistically there

1:29:06

will be centuries where a

1:29:09

couple hundred million people die. It's beyond

1:29:11

lazy, it's bizarre. Well, what it is

1:29:13

is ideological. Similar to Marxism when

1:29:15

you think about it. This

1:29:19

is where he starts revealing

1:29:22

what his project is. As

1:29:24

we get closer to the present day and as we

1:29:26

get closer to the conclusions that he draws from all

1:29:28

of this history, this is where the

1:29:30

ideology comes into play. He also talks in the

1:29:32

section about we think that the

1:29:35

20th century was the bloodiest because we're not

1:29:37

adjusting by per capita. He also says

1:29:39

we have this recency bias. Of course we

1:29:41

reach for things that happened more or less

1:29:43

in living memory. But

1:29:45

I don't think it's a form of recency

1:29:47

bias to give those wars more prominence because

1:29:49

those wars created the order that we live

1:29:51

in today. They created the

1:29:54

understanding of genocide that we had. They created

1:29:56

the UN. They created the conditions we're living

1:29:58

in. It's not bias. to say

1:30:00

that World War II looms very large over

1:30:02

the political debates and the understandings of things

1:30:04

like history in the state that we have

1:30:06

now. The An-Lushan Revolt plays less of a

1:30:08

role in our current thinking. And so, of

1:30:10

course, we're going to focus on World War

1:30:12

II more than we focus on that. When

1:30:14

people call the 20th century the bloodiest in

1:30:16

human history, I don't even know that you

1:30:19

need to fucking adjust it per capita, right?

1:30:21

The fact that that many people were killed

1:30:23

in that short of a period of time,

1:30:25

that's the bloodiest. What's disconcerting

1:30:27

about this is like these events happened

1:30:29

recently enough that there are like very

1:30:31

direct lessons to be learned, right? About

1:30:34

the international order, about ideologies

1:30:37

that still exist, are still popular.

1:30:39

All of that stuff matters. To

1:30:41

chalk it up to randomness is

1:30:44

to mentally avoid the idea

1:30:46

that something like this could be prevented.

1:30:48

There's something weird about talking about this

1:30:50

as like a statistical anomaly in the

1:30:53

sense that you are sort of disconnecting

1:30:56

it from human

1:30:58

action in a way. You're saying that

1:31:00

this exists outside of our ability to

1:31:02

control history. And he's also misunderstanding

1:31:05

what people mean when they talk

1:31:07

about the 20th century as the

1:31:10

most bloody in history. He's trying

1:31:12

to reduce all of this down to numbers. It's like, do

1:31:14

you mean the most people died as a percentage? That's

1:31:17

not really what people mean, right? This

1:31:19

period is unique in human history

1:31:21

for the moral shift that it represents.

1:31:24

And so there's a

1:31:26

very eloquent kind of debate between

1:31:28

Pinker and this guy, Robert J.

1:31:30

Lifton, who's an author, who writes

1:31:32

into the New York Times to

1:31:34

try to correct Pinker's entire ideological

1:31:37

assumption underneath all of this. And I think

1:31:39

this is like just a really good way to put it, so… My

1:31:42

work has taken me to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and

1:31:44

I have come to see these two dreadful events

1:31:46

as largely defining our era. The

1:31:49

deaths over the last two centuries reflect a

1:31:51

revolution in the technology of killing. During

1:31:53

the 20th century, we saw the emergence

1:31:55

of extreme forms of numbed technological violence.

1:31:58

Those Who did the killing could be

1:32:00

completely… We we separated geographically and psychologically

1:32:03

from their victims. There. Is a

1:32:05

terrible paradox here. Doctor Pinker and others

1:32:07

may be quite right and claiming that

1:32:09

for most people alive today, life is

1:32:11

less violent than it has been in

1:32:13

previous centuries, but never have human beings

1:32:15

been and as much danger of destroying

1:32:17

ourselves collectively. Of. Endangering the future

1:32:19

of our species. Yeah. I mean

1:32:22

that's it's I'd as they get very

1:32:24

sharp way to put it, you know

1:32:26

I i think like to witness the

1:32:28

rise of nuclear arms. And.

1:32:30

Not. Sink that has

1:32:33

like something to say about.

1:32:35

The. Relative violence of our

1:32:37

times are like the relative peril of

1:32:40

our times. It's just intellectually vacuous. One

1:32:42

of the phrases I came across one

1:32:44

or the articles and I forget where

1:32:46

I got it. so apologies for stealing.

1:32:48

It is thinkers described as like toxic

1:32:50

optimism. Yeah, he just nothing like things

1:32:53

are great but it's a pretty big

1:32:55

deal for your theory set. Violence

1:32:57

is declining that the most recent centuries

1:32:59

the most violent. Year? Yes. And I

1:33:01

think when people talk about this moral

1:33:04

shift. They're not mistaken about so

1:33:06

many deaths per capita happen. They're talking

1:33:08

about the fact that with the rise

1:33:10

of the state, right? We We outsourced

1:33:13

the monopoly on violence to the state

1:33:15

actors. With that's given rise. To his

1:33:17

state violations, right of human beings, and

1:33:19

large scale state violations and ways that

1:33:21

we can harm each other on a

1:33:24

scale. That that mean we can go

1:33:26

long stretches with no violence and all

1:33:28

this and have profound violence Young Before.

1:33:30

World War One, Europe was coming out of

1:33:32

like a seventy year period of peace and

1:33:34

there was tons of prediction about like. Where

1:33:37

this new order like Going on the plumber

1:33:39

see the need? For war is over

1:33:41

When this industrialized earth is was extremely

1:33:43

com at the time and an every

1:33:46

other period of human history there have

1:33:48

been people predicting Ah yes, this piece

1:33:50

is lasting and so I don't wanna

1:33:53

fall into a kind of toxic pessimism.

1:33:55

I think that it it. It's easy

1:33:57

to sort of. The bunker stuff and like.

1:34:00

maybe swing a little too far and

1:34:02

be like, no, everything is terrible. It's getting

1:34:04

worse. We're all going to fucking die. That's

1:34:06

not really the argument here. It's more

1:34:08

just like, I'm perfectly happy admitting that

1:34:11

we live in a pretty cool time

1:34:13

of unprecedented peace and where there are

1:34:15

conflicts, fewer and fewer people die, but

1:34:18

that doesn't mean that it's going to last forever.

1:34:20

That doesn't mean that our minds have

1:34:22

completely changed. The idea that World

1:34:25

War I and II were sort

1:34:27

of like almost predictable in the

1:34:29

scheme of things, just based on

1:34:31

statistical variance, feels like it

1:34:33

cuts against his argument. The reason that

1:34:35

he makes it is so that he

1:34:37

can maintain the part

1:34:39

of his argument that is essentially

1:34:41

a narrative arc where we are

1:34:43

getting better. Right. His confidence after

1:34:45

what is at this point, 60

1:34:47

years of peace is just

1:34:49

completely unearned. We sort of glossed over it

1:34:51

earlier, but he also has this thing of the decade since

1:34:54

the Cold War have been the most genocide free in

1:34:56

history. It's like, we've only had like two decades since

1:34:58

the Cold War. He wrote his book in 2008. Right.

1:35:01

It's fucking dude, it's been 17 years. So

1:35:03

I want to end with a quote from the intro

1:35:05

to Philip Dwyer's book. I'm going

1:35:07

to send you this. Faith

1:35:10

in the decline of violence thesis is

1:35:12

widespread in the general public. The

1:35:14

popularity of better angels arose because it told

1:35:17

people something they already wanted to believe. And

1:35:19

Western societies belief in the decline of

1:35:22

violence is rooted in Hobbesian understandings about

1:35:24

the brutishness of primitive societies. It

1:35:26

is a prominent theme in some of

1:35:28

the earliest history textbooks first published more

1:35:31

than a century ago. Humans have

1:35:33

a bias toward believing that we live

1:35:35

in the most enlightened time. Yeah. It's

1:35:37

telling that Pinker's book has been taken

1:35:39

up by people like Bill Gates. Yeah.

1:35:41

A lot of people in the sort of

1:35:43

Davos set fucking love this book. Right. Because

1:35:45

it allows them to push back on progressive.

1:35:47

Right. Why are they so pessimistic all the

1:35:49

time? They're always complaining and it

1:35:51

allows them to congratulate themselves for the world

1:35:53

that they have built. Yeah. That doesn't mean that

1:35:56

Pinker is wrong on the merits. We've talked about lots of

1:35:58

ways in which his core thesis is correct. But

1:36:00

when you find yourself repeating something

1:36:02

that appeared in textbooks in the

1:36:05

1800s, you should be cautious. You

1:36:08

should think, is this true or is this

1:36:10

something I want to believe? I

1:36:12

feel like after digesting part one, I

1:36:14

have two broad critiques. One

1:36:16

is that he's claiming to

1:36:19

be representing a counter narrative,

1:36:21

right? He claims that the

1:36:24

dominant narrative is that things are bad

1:36:26

and things are getting worse. I

1:36:28

don't think that that's correct. Two,

1:36:31

his argument seems to

1:36:33

imply, if not outright state,

1:36:36

that like peace has the

1:36:38

force of history behind it.

1:36:41

That you can take your hands off

1:36:43

the wheel and things will

1:36:45

get better. I think that's a very

1:36:47

dangerous idea. A lot

1:36:49

of, you know, peace is forged, right? And

1:36:52

the movements in social structures

1:36:54

and institutions are forged by

1:36:56

people who want change

1:36:58

for one reason or another. And

1:37:01

I think to present the

1:37:03

idea that history moves itself

1:37:07

allows good people to step

1:37:09

back and bad actors to

1:37:11

be the only ones who are actually

1:37:13

driving history. It's the Davos view