Adumbration

This episode of Science Friday features Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker promoting the hypothesis that we live in a historically unique period of peaceability.  It is not the first time I've been exposed to this sort of analysis, so I will venture a few observations ...

The world view we may absorb from the media is replete with violence, death and destruction.  Rare is the day that our CNN and FoxNews, New York Times and Chicago Tribune headline new and continuing tragedies.  But I am probably not unique to observe that the evening news and other media outlets give a highly filtered perspective on the state of world culture.  Violence and conflict is the coin of that realm, because it is just not interesting to see page after page or continuous hours of stories about people getting along with each other, solving problems, creating new and wonderful things, and engaging in all the other mundane and bizzare and joyous and boring things that make up the majority of life on this planet.  In short, the evening news is not the best source for understanding of humanity.

So, what is Pinker's thesis?  My interpretation of it is that the data he has studied is for deaths by violence, although it may also encompass the effects of disease.  Everything from the barroom brawl that turns tragically deadly, to the Black Death.  Perhaps the barroom brawls of the last decades and century didn't usually rise to the level of killing each other as so much happened in further centuries past?  Certainly one must seek out situations where highwaymen are a fixture threatening any form of travel; these days one must be sailing somewhere like the Gulf of Aden to find any pirates, and even that sort of high seas danger appears to be on the downside of history.  I would not be surprised that the rich countries have it better in that regard of lower per capita death by violence, but the positive trends are worldwide.

Also, the data is for per capita death by violence.  Certainly many people continue to die at the hands of dictators and in individual killings, but world population exceeds 7 billions, and that makes the average individual risk be quite low, even accounting for those horrendous exceptions.

For another optimistic prognosticator, see Matt Ridley and The Rational Optimist.  Ridley is interviewed here by Russ Roberts. 

Of course we have to get through the next couple years in the mean time, and on that time scale I am not optimistic.  But this may be the point of these authors - the immediacy of our days clouds our vision of years and decades.