Steven Pinker and Violence

As most people interested in the fields of psychology and linguistics will know, Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist best known for his tweaking of Chomsky's idea that children possess a generative or universal grammar. For Chomsky, this meant that all languages conformed to the rules of a kind of "proto" grammar that children possessed instinctively and could apply on the basis of just a few examples. Chomsky, however, didn't spend a lot of time describing where this ability came from: it was "innate" and all children possessed it. In some sense, it could be described as a by-product of mind. Now, Steven Pinker was not happy with such vagueness and developed the idea that children's innate grasp of grammar is a product of natural selection rather than mind per se. Natural selection developed the neural networks conducive to language acquisition when it became necessary for people to speak. On the basis of this flimsy distinction, Pinker came up with the idea that language is an "instinct". In essence, Pinker has been parasitic of Chomsky's ideas, but gives them a smart new twist which has succeeded in putting his name on the academic map. Pinker, in addition to his more serious work has written a lot of science for dummies type stuff. Now, he has a new book ready, entitled: "A History of Violence" and earlier this year he gave a taster of its theme at the TED conference in Monterey, California.

In this short talk, Pinker states his belief that violence has been on the decline for centuries and that today we live in the most non violent period in history. In order to back this up, he inundates his listeners with warped statistics. Apparently male Indians in America had a far higher risk of dying at the hands of another male than we have today. Who would ever have guessed such a thing? Of course, he doesn't take into account that all males in agricultural or hunter gatherer societies were liable to be called upon to defend the tribe. Furthermore, he ignores the way modern society divides human labour: there are particular groups concerned with enforcing law and fighting foreign armies. The deaths may be innumerable, but clearly in a world that has nearly quadrupled its population in the last hundred years, most males are not going to be killed. Pinker, of course, sets up his statistics in a particular and biased way. What would his graph have looked like if he'd counted up the dead killed in wars during the last millennium? Very different in fact! Lowest estimates conclude that more than 100 million people have died in twentieth century warfare. That's far more than in any other century of human history!

In his egotism, Pinker doesn't even bother to look at what past thinkers on the subject of human violence have had to say. In particular, he ignores Michel Foucauld's series of lectures given at the College de France in 1976 under the title, "Society Must be Defended". If he had studied Foucauld, he would have understood that in the modern age, violence has become institutionalized and often operates more on the level of threat: think of America and the Soviet Union during the cold war and the concept of MAD. A war never occurred because the consequences of what would have happened had both nuclear arsenals been released, were too awful to contemplate. In other words the THREAT of annihilation kept war at bay for 45 years! In today's world of modern technological societies, the ever present threat of violence to bodies is successful in preventing most people from breaking the rules

Pinker's analysis is superficial and wrong. Time magazine included this man in its list of the world's 100 most influential people. If that is true, then God help us all!