The Procrastinating Angels of Our
Nature, or How Violence Has Been Transformed and Postponed: A critique of
Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined
People in the country, people on the land,
Some of them so sick they can hardly stand.
Everybody would move away if they could.
It’s hard to believe but it’s all good.
- Bob Dylan, It’s all Good (2009)
Abstract
The best-selling book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined received generally positive reviews upon its release in 2011. The book attempted to overturn the popular notion that the present is more violent than the past. This critique considers that Pinker made a strong case, but only within his limited discussion of changes in society’s tolerance of acts of direct violence and his analysis of statistics on direct violence (war and crime), which are good only if one assumes that the data on levels of past and present violence are reliable, or even knowable. More importantly, the book ignores important changes in the nature of indirect, or structural, violence that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and the decline of direct violence. In so doing, it draws attention away from other forms of suffering that are pressing concerns of the modern age − labor abuses, poverty, ecological destruction, famine, and failed economic models among them. In particular, this paper highlights the exploitation of energy resources as a possible factor in both the decline of direct violence and in the increase of indirect violence. Energy resource exploitation has played a central role in human development, but it has also caused enormous ecological harm and human suffering. This article concludes that these negative side-effects of modernity must be accounted for, lest pronouncements about the decline of violence seem Panglossian to those not receiving its benefits.
Since the publication of The Language
Instinct in 1994, Steven Pinker has gained recognition as one of the
preeminent intellectuals of our times. Prospect magazine
placed him at number three in its 2013 World Thinkers poll. [1] He has
impressed readers by the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to write
articulately and persuasively about language, psychology, and biology, as well
as in many fields in the humanities. In his latest work, The Better
Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, [2] Pinker analyzed an
impressive volume of historical data in order to present a very persuasive
argument. The book received largely positive reviews in the mainstream press
when it was released in 2011, as most reviewers decided he made a convincing
case that demolishes the popular, pessimistic notion that we live in an age of
increasing violence, and that things are generally going from bad to worse.
Pinker’s thesis has received so much attention that it has become somewhat of
an established truism.
Those who wrote negative reviews found that the
book glossed over the sins of colonialism and hegemony, and exaggerated the
violence of pre-industrial times. One such review by Edward S. Herman and David
Peterson described it as “an outstanding snow job,” with a message “well geared
to the demands and drift of Western imperialism.” [3]
I might have found Pinker’s thesis more
convincing if I hadn’t been personally jolted out of my complacency and
sensitized to what it is like to be the collateral damage of the modernity that
Pinker celebrates. I read the book while living two hundred kilometers downwind
of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and my perspective made me think that Pinker
ignored much suffering in the modern world by focusing only on what is called
direct violence; essentially war and crime statistics.
The sharp increase in the exploitation of energy
resources that came with the Industrial Revolution was not considered by Pinker
to be a factor in the decline of war and crime, or a possible cause of
increases in other forms of suffering. I argue below that the exploitation of
energy sources is a key factor that Pinker failed to account for, both in the
decline of the direct violence that he describes, and in the rise of structural
violence that he fails to discuss; such things as economic inequality and
ecological damage. In short, this book doesn’t explore the possibility that modernity
kills few but oppresses many, [4] that we have decreased direct violence in
exchange for a greater degree of structural violence and problems that future
generations will have to reckon with. Furthermore, after the publication of
Pinker’s book, other researchers took up the task of doing a deep analysis of
the historical statistics on violence. In a paper published in 2015, the
authors did a thorough statistical study, and concluded:
We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last
2,000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and
unreliability of historical data… All the statistical pictures obtained are at
variance with the prevailing claims about “long peace,” namely that violence
has been declining over time… To conclude our paper, one may perhaps produce a
convincing theory about better, more peaceful days ahead, but this cannot be
stated on the basis of statistical analysis—this is not what the data allows us
to say. Not very good news, we have to admit. [5]
The term structural violence, developed by Johan
Galtung in 1969, [6] goes back further to the earliest days of Marxist theory.
Engels wrote that the relations between the bourgeoisie and the working poor
were described by English working men as a slow and indirect “social murder.” [7]
The term referred also to the destruction of “nature” (what we would now call the
ecosystem) because capitalism exploits nature as it does human resources, and
the violence against nature affects the people who sustain themselves by it.
More recently, the NASA scientist James Hansen has applied the language of
genocide to the ecological crisis by calling the climate-change cover-up a
“crime against humanity.” [8]
The negative reviews blasted Pinker for being
wrong about violence, but didn’t concede that his analysis may be valid within
its limited scope, to the extent that statistics on violence in the distant
past or in distant outposts of the modern world can be considered reliable at
all. What really seemed to bother them was the neglect of the broader
definition of suffering mentioned above; such familiars of the modern age as
ecological destruction, labor abuses, overpopulation, superpower proxy wars,
and so on. Pinker should, ironically, welcome this criticism because it supports
his point that society has become more vigilant about questioning all
assumptions about its ethical values. Optimistic findings about the decline of
violence will not go un-scrutinized!
One cannot fault Pinker for a lack of
thoroughness in his research, nor do I argue that the book is not a valuable
contribution to peace studies. It’s a bit much to say he wrote his book as a
servant to the demands of Western imperialism. We can assume that he wrote this
book with good intentions, hoping to create an understanding of ways that
violence can be reduced. In particular, his descriptions of the common
cruelties of the past should be read by anyone who might romanticize it or take
for granted the many ways we no longer tolerate the sorts of violence that used
to be accepted as inevitable aspects of the human condition.
Nonetheless, it is somewhat perplexing that he
tries to do this while remaining detached or neutral about the issues of the day
that inflame public opinion—such matters
as the corrupting influence of private enterprise on politics, US foreign
policy, or the ecological crisis. People who are concerned about such things
are dismissed as pessimists who can’t see how good everything is getting. It is
good for a scientist to be impartial, but the problem is that we all know that
this is a fallacy. Books such as this are shaped by personal biases, so they
might as well be openly declared. Remaining aloof on contemporary conflicts and
controversies invites the suspicion that the author might be “catering to the
demands of Western imperialism,” intentionally or not.
An example of Pinker’s cautious neutrality can
be seen in what he said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at The
Economist’s “World in 2013 Festival.” He contends that an
excess, not a lack, of morality is sometimes the problem. Most acts of murder,
and most wars and atrocities, are committed to defend moral principles, not to
obtain resources or security. When speaking of the specific example of the
Middle East, he said:
We often wonder why
the Israelis and Palestinians can’t just do what is obvious to the rest of the
world as the solution to the problem in the Middle East—a two-state solution,
perhaps with some financial compensation to prop up a nascent Palestinian
state… the reason that doesn’t work is that it violates some commitments to
sacred values that extremists on both sides hold. The more you point out the
financial and everyday advantages of living in peace, the more they feel it’s
compromising these values that may not be compromised if you’re going to be a
moral person. [9]
There is some obvious truth in this argument,
but it conveniently ignores the fact that in conflict resolution more is
involved than merely addressing the excess of moralizing on both sides.
Conflicts of this scale don’t conclude with pat statements saying it takes two
to make a quarrel or blame must be shared all around. Instead, after conflicts
are resolved, historians and international tribunals usually come to a
consensus that finds one side was the perpetrator. One side had the advantage
of power, the ability to deny vital resources to the people it violated, or the
ability to halt violence. In the cases where international agencies succeed in
holding trials, perpetrators are convicted, one side pays reparations, and
lesser criminals are sent back to live among their victims and join the process
of restitution and reconciliation. No reasonable person makes excuses that the
Nazis, Pol Pot or extremist groups in Rwanda were merely trapped, along with their
opponents, in a standoff based on commitments to irrational moral principles.
Pinker could look to a colleague that he admires
as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, John Trivers, who published
a book on a similar theme concurrently with The Better Angels.
Trivers managed to blend a study of the psychology of self-deception with a
biting critique of the false historical narratives that have been constructed
by modern imperial powers. [10] The result is that the reader is left with no
suspicion that the author had a hidden political agenda because the author’s
views were laid bare, without detracting from the discussion of the science of
self-deception. The downside of this approach is that Trivers’ decision not to
conceal his views meant that even the New York Times’ positive
review found it “too shrill.” [11] His book didn’t receive as much attention or
sell as well as popular non-fiction that strives to avoid controversy.
Pinker sets out to prove that the decline in
violence is real by going over an impressive amount of historical data, then
testing his interpretations for falsifiability. He investigates all possible
causes of the decline of violence and eliminates any reason that can’t be
backed up by the data or logic. Because he is an evolutionary psychologist, one
might expect him to make the case for genetic change or selective pressure on
societies that became less violent. It could be that certain cultural and
natural environments had a domesticating effect, whereby more aggressive
individuals reproduced less successfully. Perhaps he feared the backlash from
critics who would wince at any hint of biological determinism, so he was
careful to steer clear of explanations that resorted to inter-group biological
differences. He concluded there was insufficient evidence of a biological
change that made humans less violent. He concludes that all of humanity has the
same potential for rapid transformation in its values and behavior, but not its
genetic constitution. [12]
Pinker dismisses rising affluence as a cause of
declining violence, then by the end of the book concludes that there were
primarily just two things that brought about the decline. One was The
Enlightenment, the period when 18th-century European and American philosophers
used reason to argue against the cruelty of entrenched religion, hereditary
privilege, and customary beliefs about such things as the treatment of women,
children, and minorities. Pinker finds that the other cause of the decline of
violence was technology, in particular communication and transportation, which
spread the new values. He claims that greater literacy and travel led to a
rapid expansion of the boundaries of empathy, as increasing numbers of people were
able gain new levels of compassion toward people outside of their very limited
social worlds.
Did exploitation of energy sources reduce some
types of violence and increase others?
It seems obvious that energy enabled these
technologies, which in turn had a pacifying effect on society, but Pinker never
addresses energy exploitation as an ultimate cause. He considers many possible
causes and eliminates the ones that don’t stand up. He says democracy could
have been a cause of the decline of violence, but he notes that democratic
reform was often the goal, not the cause, of struggles to expand rights and
moral considerations of the neglected segments of society. Prosperity is also
dismissed as a cause because it has a “diffuse influence” [13] on society. According
to Pinker’s view, surplus wealth could be spent on many things, so it wouldn’t
necessarily lead to prosperous societies spending their surplus on, for
example, universal education and health care rather than on palaces. I would
suggest that the outcome might inevitably lead to prosperity being shared more
widely—precisely because I’ve read Pinker’s previous books on human nature (The
Blank Slate, How the Mind Works). He convinced me that while our species is
hard-wired to compete, it has also evolved toward greater levels of altruism
and cooperation. Energy and technology must have made the decline of violence
inevitable rather than an outcome of choosing to follow the path of reason.
Pinker disregarded energy in this book perhaps
because he presumed its effects were too obvious to state. He frequently
mentions technology as one of the causes of the decline of violence, but
doesn’t pursue the idea very far. Thus the negative impacts of technology are
not explored. For example, rare earth minerals, as vital components of cell
phones, have enabled the modern expansion of empathy happening through
information technology, but the devastating damage of rare earth mining is not
discussed. The energy industry has well-known ecological impacts.
Unfortunately, these downsides are not considered as a countervailing
influences on the positive trend in the incidence of war and crime.
Although Pinker paid no attention to energy
in The Better Angels of Our Nature, he seems to be aware of its
importance. Two years after its publication he is now supporting the nuclear
industry on his twitter account. He has publicized screenings of the nuclear
industry’s film Pandora’s Promise, [14] and tweeted supportively about
a New York Times editorial [15] entitled “Fear vs. Radiation:
The Mismatch.” Lamenting the damage done not by radiation but by hysterical
fear of radiation, he commented on this editorial, “A textbook case of the
psychology of fear.” [16]
It is not clear why Pinker would so readily
discount the legitimate concerns the public has about the poisons that have
spilled out of Fukushima Daiichi, and about nuclear energy in general. Such
editorials don’t exemplify the expanding circle of empathy that led to the
decline of violence. Work by numerous scientists and reputable organizations
has refuted the views expressed in Pandora’s Promise. In addition,
robust moral and scientific arguments have been made against the views
expressed in what has become a genre in nuclear discourse—the editorial noting
that no one died because of the accident at Fukushima (which is, in fact, not
true) and that the ignorant masses were suffering from radiophobia—the disease
of the statistically illiterate who simply refuse to accept that the global
nuclear industry has a firm, benevolent hand on the situation. [17] Tom Burke,
writing in The Ecologist, summed up the widespread distaste for
this attitude toward the people affected by the nuclear disaster: “This cynical
focusing of public attention on the absence of immediate deaths from Fukushima
was a contemptible effort to divert attention from its real consequences.” [18]
Pinker seems to have lent his support to the
pro-nuclear cause without his usual thorough investigation of the evidence on
both sides of the issue. When he was dealing with apparently crucial questions,
such as the possible existence of genes for high intelligence in Ashkenazi
Jews, Pinker delved into the matter with a 3,400-word analysis [19] of the
methodology and reasoning underlying the research paper Natural History
of Ashkenazi Intelligence.[20] He presented a detailed analysis of the
seven hypotheses of this research paper. About this research he asked, “How
good is the evidence for this audacious hypothesis? And what, if any, are the
political and moral implications?” However, there is no indication in his
public statements that he has done a serious analysis of the claims made by
nuclear energy proponents. In fact, he seems to be coyly avoiding getting
caught in the crossfire of the nuclear energy controversy.
About the question of Ashkenazi intelligence he
concludes that the researchers...
… provided prima
facie evidence for each of the hypotheses making up their theory. But all
the hypotheses would have to be true for the theory as a whole to be true—and much
of the evidence is circumstantial, and the pivotal hypothesis is the one for
which they have the least evidence. Yet that hypothesis is also the most
easily falsifiable. By that criterion, the CH&H story meets the standards
of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be
mistaken.
If Pinker had applied the same rigor to the
important questions about nuclear energy, he might have discovered that the
pro-nuclear argument is “tentative and could turn out to be mistaken.” The
World Health Organization studies on radiation (the basis of the argument in
the New York Times editorial), have all been distorted by the
interests of the nuclear lobby. The IAEA, the UN agency with a mandate to
promote nuclear energy, has the authority to overrule any WHO research on
questions related to nuclear energy. Pinker would surely concede the point that
the UN is compromised by the veto power of the five Security Council members
who often put their interests (two of which are nuclear energy and nuclear
weapons) above global welfare. He described the UN as the reason we shouldn’t
hope a world government would fix our problems. “The Security Council,” he
wrote, “is hamstrung by the veto power that the great powers insisted on before
ceding it any authority, and the General Assembly is more of a soapbox for
despots than a parliament of the world’s people.” [21]
I can find no publications in the academic or
popular press in which Pinker examines the controversies surrounding research
on radiation and the feasibility of nuclear energy as a solution to global
warming. The Chernobyl accident is never mentioned in The Better Angels,
and Fukushima happened six months before the book was published—time enough to have inserted a few
extra sentences to the one paragraph in the book about nuclear energy.
Alternatively, the disaster might have caused Pinker to consider deleting the
paragraph altogether. Nuclear energy is not an essential topic in his book, but
since Pinker made brief mention of the Three Mile Island accident, and argued
that the irrational fear it generated needlessly drove America away from
nuclear energy and worsened global warming, it would seem germane to discuss
these subsequent tragedies. Since he chose to broach this topic, he owes
readers a more thorough discussion of subsequent nuclear disasters and a more
vigorous defense of his conclusion that Three Mile Island “probably had no
effect on cancer rates” and it “halted the development of nuclear power in the
United States and thus will contribute to global warming from the burning of
fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.” [22]
The Better Angels includes hundreds of references, but none
for this claim about cancer rates. It seems more like an opinion the author
picked up from casual conversation with nuclear engineers, and it’s an unusual
lapse from a scholar who is usually meticulous about referencing. The one note
in the paragraph refers to the work of John Mueller, a researcher specializing
in risk perception, who is also known for his counter-factual history of
nuclear weapons, in which he claims that they had no meaningful impact on the
course of history. [23]
In previous books, Pinker has had a keen eye for
ways that the social sciences were led astray by prevailing, fashionable
theories. Confirmation biases have often led researchers to design studies that
produce the desired conclusions. One example he has discussed is the debunking
of Margaret Mead’s work on adolescence in Samoa. [24] Contrary to her conclusions,
it turned out that teenagers there really weren’t that different from teenagers
in the West. Years later, the research subjects admitted they thought her
obsession with sex was strange, so they started to make up stories to please
her. So that’s fine. Very amusing. In this case, whether Mead was right or
wrong, we can say with more certainty that the mistake probably had no effect
on cancer rates. It’s always fun to poke fun at academics getting things wrong
when they fail to see the simple truths that common folk know too well.
However, it is worth asking what motivates Pinker to repeatedly reveal such
foibles only in the social sciences, but not in other disciplines that he looks
on favorably.
When it comes to questions about nuclear energy,
the stakes are high, involving effects on the environment and human health for
thousands of years into the future. If there were self-reinforcing beliefs
among a few hundred anthropologists, certainly there could be biases in the
health studies sponsored over six decades by the trillion-dollar
military-industrial complex. This problem has been revealed and studied in
depth by many qualified scientists working outside the industry (listed below).
Witnesses who lived through Three Mile Island at
close range saw their pets and farm animals suffer sudden ailments, and the
people themselves reported their rashes, fatigue, and digestive disorders to
independent researchers such as Aileen Mioko Smith. [25] Stephen Wing, an
epidemiologist, did research on cancer rates and came to different conclusions
than did government-sanctioned research. [26] He argued that the official
findings depended on faulty logic because they simply ignored evidence that
didn’t fit the standard model. Wing argued that the old model had to be
reassessed because his research showed the “collision between evidence and
assumptions.”
Nonetheless, even the official view states that
13 million curies of radioactive gasses were released in the accident, and
based on what is known about the effect of radiation on living tissue, that is
a lot of radiation. It is actually implausible that this had no impact on the
health of organisms in the vicinity. Saying the accident “probably had no
effect on cancer rates” is a matter of optimistic interpretation, not fact.
Almost no individual case of cancer can ever be attributed to a definite cause,
so anyone can believe whatever he wants about the effects of a nuclear
accident, or smoking tobacco, or virtually any toxin for that matter.
The same “probably-no-effects” claim could be
said of almost all carcinogens. Considered one by one for their effects on
cancer rates, they would each have no clear effect, as it would be lost in the
effects of all the other substances, as well as in confounding factors such as
genetics and the mobility of the population. All these causes are responsible,
and so none of them are responsible, but this does not absolve the people who
are responsible for the release of known toxins into the environment. Nor does
it resolve the question of how a society should deal with them. Unfortunately,
Pinker fails to discuss any of the complexities of the nuclear energy debate,
nor does he acknowledge, in his usual even-handed and impartial fashion, that a
large body of scientific studies has arrived at conflicting conclusions about
the health impacts of nuclear energy and nuclear accidents.
In addition, it is spurious to claim that the
fear of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island worsened global warming. Such
counter-factual arguments can be refuted by positing different
counter-factuals, which are also, admittedly, not worthy of serious
consideration. When we decide to make up stories about the things that could
have been, we can say anything. No evidence is required. Nonetheless, if the
other side wants to argue this way, it is valid to respond that the decision
not to exploit nuclear energy had no impact on global warming. Only the
decision to burn more fossil fuel contributed to global warming. At every step
of the way, it would have been possible to burn less, invest in renewable
energy, improve infrastructure, retrofit buildings, or commit to any of
numerous other conservation options. In any case, nuclear energy does have a
considerable carbon footprint, a fact that advocates like to ignore. [27]
Furthermore, there is no way to know how many
additional nuclear accidents were averted by the decision to stop building
nuclear power plants. If you really want to talk about past hypotheticals,
let’s say all the Great Lakes and the agricultural lands of North America were
saved from the same fate as the rice farms of Fukushima Prefecture. But if
readers prefer that my hypotheticals be less hyperbolic, I’ll simply say that
the only thing that saved Three Mile Island from being an enormous disaster was
luck. It was fortunate that as a pressurized water reactor (PWR), it had an
adequate outer containment structure. Many of the American nuclear power plants
that existed at the time were boiling water reactors (BWR), and over twenty of
these still operate today. Fukushima Daiichi reactors 1, 2 and 3 were BWR, and
they all suffered disastrous explosions because venting failed and the
beautiful sky-blue outer containment structures utterly failed to provide the
defense in depth that the nuclear industry had always boasted of.
In the past, Pinker has been clever at
deconstructing many of the unfounded but cherished assumptions of the
progressive left, and it is all well and good to debunk what needs debunking.
Yet when it comes to nuclear energy, he seems to have abandoned his usual
caution in order to lend his authority as a “leading thinker” to a policy he
favors. His status has perhaps tempted him to espouse opinions on matters that
others are better qualified to discuss. Pinker has recently made appeals to
scholars in the humanities that they have nothing to fear from the
participation of scientists in their specialties. [28] Few people would
disagree, in principle, with this argument for better cross-disciplinary
cooperation, but this facile treatment of nuclear energy proves that in
practice there are good reasons for specialists to not welcome passing tourists.
Historians, activists and scientists who have spent their lives researching the
social and biological impacts of nuclear technology do not appreciate the
casual judgments made by a star intellectual who will be taken as an authority
on the issue by a mass audience. Pinker weighs in on this issue as one of the
world’s leading thinkers, but he is a casual visitor to land he has made little
effort to understand.
Pinker seems to have linked anti-nuclear
scientists and activists with his personal observations of leftist naiveté,
like the people who thought peace would reign during the Montreal police
strike, or a professor who thought the Vietnam War was motivated by a desire to
corner the world market in tungsten. [29] However, the popular resistance to
nuclear energy isn’t one of these issues where a clever realist with a
counter-intuitive argument is going to make a bunch of granola-eaters look like
scientifically illiterate dupes. Scientists, such as Alice Stewart, John
Gofman, Ian Fairlie, Chris Busby, Yuri Bandashevsky, Alexi Yablokov, and many
others, [30] have spent decades of their lives researching the health effects
of radiation and have come to conclusions that disagree with those of the IAEA
and the nuclear industry. They belong to or have worked with such organizations
as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the European Committee on
Radiation Risk, Greenpeace, Green Cross, the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research, the International Institute of Concern for Public
Health, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Radiation and Public
Health Project. Call their findings “controversial” if you like, but the
anti-nuclear movement, and the popular dislike of being forced to live in
nuclear contamination cannot be contemptuously dismissed as a “textbook case of
the psychology of fear.”
In the initial months after Fukushima, many news
organizations ran editorials similar to the one in The New York Times (cited
above), but that was because the full meltdowns and the full severity of the
catastrophe were not admitted to until later when the news cycle had moved on
and forgotten the issue. After that, the Pollyannas became noticeably quiet.
The timing of the New York Times editorial was interesting
because it showed the reappearance of the trope right at a time when a lot of
bad news was leaking out of Fukushima. It callously dismissed the official
abuses that people in Fukushima have had to live with, and it mistakenly framed
the fear of radiation as a failure to properly assess risk. I’ve lived in Japan
since 2011 and seen very little fear and panic (in fact, a little more concern
might be in order), but I have seen a lot of resentment in people who would
prefer to not live on contaminated land and eat contaminated food. They would
prefer to not be exposed to any level of Strontium-90 nor any of the other
toxic fission products that life on this planet did not evolve with. The “fear”
is actually anger at and distrust of the institutions that caused and later
mismanaged the catastrophe. After repeated lies by the operators of the
Fukushima Daiichi plant—and the
complicity of governments, the global nuclear industry, and the IAEA in those
lies—the mistrust is well
deserved.
Perhaps Pinker has supported nuclear energy
because, since publishing The Better Angels of Our Nature in 2011,
he has stated that he is “a fan of modernity” [31] and is eager to grasp at an
apparent solution to energy problems so that moral progress and the decline of
violence can continue. Unfortunately, he didn’t devote any attention to
energy and the ecological crisis in his book. In the concluding pages of it, he
even suggests that ecological sustainability is something for which we have
“nostalgia” as part of our habitual but erroneous “loathing of modernity.” [32]
I tried to give a sympathetic reading to the context of these words. I suspect
he really didn’t want to say what his wording suggests. He is, after all, scientifically
literate. He must know the human race will have no “modernity” without a
sustainable environment (in denying the effects of Three Mile Island, he did
state an acceptance of the reality of global warming), but this passage really
does imply that ecological sustainability is something that only sentimental
dupes long for, something that should be traded away for the benefits for
modernity.
Energy, your slave
Although Pinker’s quiet support of nuclear
indicates he is now thinking about the role of energy in bringing about the
“long peace” and other such positive trends in rates of violence, the book he
published two years ago was primarily focused on various non-technological
causes of progress, such as the effect of the rise in literacy rates. When
people began to read about others who lived in distant times and places,
empathy expanded. Yet here too he overlooks the underlying factors that enabled
these changes. There had to be printing presses and distribution networks.
People needed light in the evenings to read, and the use of energy sources in
various applications had freed people from drudgery and given rise to a class
of people who had the leisure to read, travel, and enjoy new entertainments.
 |
| I found The Energy of Slaves only after having written this essay. It provides a thorough introduction to the writers of previous centuries who first noted the connections between slaves and machines. From the blurb: "Many North Americans and Europeans today enjoy lifestyles as extravagant as those of Caribbean plantation owners. Like slaveholders, we feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion, and now that half of the world's oil has been burned, our energy slaves are becoming more expensive by the day. What we need, Nikiforuk argues, is a radical new emancipation movement." |
Instead of acknowledging these causes, Pinker
places his emphasis more on what seems to be a magical transformation in human
thinking, which is odd for an intellectual who wrote so much about human nature
before this. Suddenly, he sounds a little like the post-modern philosophers and
cultural determinists he railed against in earlier books. [33] Now he seems to
say that we changed because culture, or the will to employ reason, imposed a
transformation on human nature. Pinker finds that the greatest cause of the
decline of violence is that we made, as a product of The Enlightenment, a
commitment to reason, which he claims is like a ride on an escalator that we
must take to whatever height its conclusions lead to.
It would be instructive to also consider a real
escalator when we contemplate the reasons for the decline of violence. If it
were not for the exploitation of energy resources, this convenient people-mover
would have to be powered by servants, slaves, or draft animals (requiring
servants or slaves to tend them) turning wheels and gears. Without our modern
technologies for energy exploitation, the only way to obtain many comforts
would be to put others to work providing them.
Toward the end of the book, Pinker makes the
cautiously optimistic conclusion that the downward trend in violence is not guaranteed,
but can continue if we are careful. He refers to other contemporary optimists
who have come to the same conclusion. He cites as an example Matt Ridley’s
book The Rational Optimist, [34] but he doesn’t mention an
interesting discussion of energy that this author presented. Ridley makes the
direct connection between our increasing exploitation of the earth’s stored
energy and the decreasing exploitation of humans.
Ridley sees a causal connection in the fact that
the rising exploitation of fossil fuels in the 19th century coincided with the
decline of slavery, a decline in the number of working poor who did arduous
labor, and a steady increase in leisure time and standards of living:
Thanks mainly to new
energy technologies, what took a textile worker twenty minutes in 1750 took
just one minute in 1850… It made it possible for fewer people to supply more
people with more goods and more services—in Adam Smith’s words, to make ‘a
smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work’. There was a
steep change in the number of people that could be served or supplied by one
person, a great leap in the specialisation of production and the diversification
of consumption… This is not to make you love coal and oil, but to drive home
how much your Louis Quatorze standard of living is made possible by the
invention of energy-substitutes for slaves. [35]
This difference between “labor” and “work”—the actual
application of energy to transform and move objects in the real world—was more
evident to laborers of the past who experienced the relief brought by
mechanization. Modern people take it for granted, with no memory of the
transition.
To clarify his point, Ridley asks the reader to
contemplate how many man-hours of pedaling on an exercise bicycle, attached to
an electrical generator, would be necessary to supply the energy needs of the
average person alive in the early 21st century. Not to worry, he’s done the
math. It’s 150 men pedaling around the clock, with many more required to meet
the average consumption of First World countries. “These are your slaves,” he
declares, referring to fossil fuels and other energy sources. Ridley also makes
the point that energy is not concerned only with conveniences like escalators
and hot water. It also accelerated fertilizer production (with its harm to
oceans and freshwater supplies), pesticide use, and the mechanization of
agriculture, inviting unforeseen disasters like the loss of pollinating insects
and postponing the day when civilization reaches its Malthusian limits. [36]
Ridley points out also that in order for anyone
to have the luxuries provided by these hired pedalers, these servants would
have to be needy enough to do the work. If they had any disposable wealth, they
too would be looking for servants to work them. In order for a few people to
have their desires for comfort fulfilled, they would have to oppress many
others. Thus, if stored energy supplies became scarce, the demand for
“luxuries” (which might be only what we now consider basic necessities, such as
hot water) would lead to more inequality. We easily ignore such truths because
no one alive today has memories of the age before automobiles. We have lived
large for 200 years on energy supplies that took millions of years to form. No
modern society yet lives entirely on energy sources produced above ground in
real time from renewable sources.
Ridley’s thought experiment is somewhat absurd,
and the numbers may be off a little, but it makes a striking point about how we
have massive stores of energy at our disposal without having to break a sweat,
or having to make others break a sweat, to get the benefits that come from
them. It is not entirely a coincidence that the industrial world began to find
slavery morally intolerable just as a new economy based on fossil fuel was
emerging.
One question Ridley fails to address is whether
slavery really has ceased to exist entirely. You may not greet your livery
servants (or your master) in the morning, but there are people in the Niger
Delta (to cite just one example) who are paying a heavy ecological price for
the oil exported from their lands to Western nations. [37]
If the cause of the decline of violence is thus
concealed by this sort of structural disparity, and if it seems instead to have
come from our commitment to reason, that’s because so far it has been mostly a
free ride with its effects kept out of sight from most of the beneficiaries. In
addition to the disparities of the present, ecological damage could be
considered the physical manifestation of global financial debt. The cost of
remediating environmental damage for future generations can never be paid off
in the present or near term, so the only response has been the irrational
decision to ignore the moral imperative of inter-generational equity. We double
down, borrow more, and push the day of reckoning farther into the future, as if
this can be done forever. Yet we know the costs of carbon and nuclear fuels
will be paid by future generations for a long, long time.
Although Pinker attributes the decline in direct
violence to the expansion of moral reasoning and critical thought, he never
fully explores the possibility that the satisfaction of basic material needs,
made possible by energy exploitation, was the most important factor. The point
is obvious enough to have been the subject of study in books such as Environment,
Scarcity, and Violence. [38] Pinker argues the opposite view by pointing to
the “resource curse”—the fact that resource-rich nations are often the poorest.
[39] In doing so he ignores the methods by which prosperous nations have found
ways to obtain the resources of the “cursed.” If it were so easy to fix a
“resource curse,” the people of Niger, for example, would have built nuclear
reactors and put French people to work mining uranium for them.
It is intuitively obvious that conflict
decreases when people feel that their own, and their neighbors’, basic needs
are met, and when they see their freedom from drudgery lifting. It might have
seemed outrageous when the Pope said in 2009 that the biggest advance for women
was the washing machine, [40] but the only way to prove him wrong would be to
take away all the gadgets from modern people and see what kind of social order
devolves. It wouldn’t be great for men, but it would likely be worse for women.
Nonetheless, the point that the Pope failed to make was that machines liberated
both sexes in ways we take for granted.
Although Pinker credits reason with the decline
of violence, he has at other times endorsed Hobbes’ philosophy in many of his
books. [41] Hobbes famously advanced the notion that without a strong authority
to enforce order, life is nasty, brutish, and short. When the state expands, it
forces citizens to forswear the right of vengeance, and imposes law and order.
Fear and enmity decline and the virtuous circle can take hold. However, again,
the exploitation of energy must have been a key factor that enabled states to
expand and project power over great distances.
To make a contrast with the security given by a
state, Pinker discusses the work of Napoleon Chagnon and other anthropologists
whose research showed that people in hunter-gatherer societies have a much
higher chance of dying by violence. This has been one of the great
controversies in the social sciences, as many anthropologists reject Chagon’s
findings and have criticized his methods. One of the strongest arguments
against the claim is that there are no pristine tribes to study. They have all
been affected by contact with industrial societies, not to mention the
anthropologists who study them, so the violence might arise from the pressure
on their territories and their desire to trade for weapons and other goods. But
even if it is true that they are more violent, it’s a value judgment to say
people in industrial societies have a better quality of life just because they
live longer or die in different ways. Chagnon insisted on this point when he
said, with the utmost respect for his subjects, “The real Indians get dirty,
smell bad, use drugs, belch after they eat, covet and sometimes steal each
other’s women, fornicate and make war. They are normal human beings. This
is reason enough for them to deserve care and attention.” [42]
Pinker argues convincingly against not
romanticizing the noble savage or the pastoral, pre-industrial life, but still
if we consider criteria other than lifespan and modern comforts, that nasty,
brutish, and short life in a rainforest may have been happier by some measures
than the life passed in offices and factories, and happier than what is in
store for people of the future. For a growing number of people in industrial
societies, the air-conditioned nightmare is not even air conditioned anymore. Many
inhabitants of decaying First World cities like, for example, Camden, New
Jersey, could be forgiven for thinking Hobbes’ words, “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short,” referred to the life that they know. [43] Urban decay and
environmental contamination are sorts of structural violence that did not
affect hunter-gatherers.
Since the financial collapse of 2008, the
disappearance of the middle class has been a recurring theme in political
discourse, and it’s not unusual to hear talk of an impending collapse of
capitalism that would rival the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The
professor of African and African-American studies, Henry Louis Gates, stresses
the connection between prosperity and peace:
Under Lyndon Johnson
we had guns and butter, we thought we had enough prosperity to put everybody in
the middle class, and as soon as that dream fell apart, people once again
started demonizing one another. Slavery was about economic relations, it was
easy to demonize a group of people who looked so starkly different. As scarcity
increases, so will racism. So will anti-Semitism. So will homophobia.[44]
This connection is, after all, rather intuitive
and obvious, so it is odd that it is not pursued as a cause of the decline of
violence in The Better Angels. The connection would seem to be in
line with Pinker’s support of a constrained vision of human nature and
realpolitik that can be traced back through Hobbes and Machiavelli to
Thucydides’ writing about the Peloponnesian War:
In peace and
prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not
find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes
away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings
most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.[45]
Journalist Chris Hedges observed the collapse of
the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s, and since the emergence of the Occupy movement he
has written about the similarities between then and now. Capitalism, by the
definitions it sets for itself in its own discourse, excludes even the
possibility of popular rejection of the system, so Occupy has never been taken
seriously by established media as an indication of a threat to the system, but
for Hedges and other observers, the mainstream media has all the credibility
of Pravda in the 1980s. The Occupy movement has all the
markings of a movement that will eventually ignite social transformation.
Hedges wrote recently:
The last days of
empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging
forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental
self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and
Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and
depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I.
And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts
and morons to steer it to destruction… If we had any idea what was really
happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack Obama, whose
signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands of Wall Street, the
fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex and the security and
surveillance state… The populations of dying empires are passive because they
are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling
toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane,
retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure
self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out. As a species,
Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed
by hope”… It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.[46]
Pinker was wise enough to make cautious
conclusions in order to avoid being cast with those who are “doomed by hope.”
His tables and charts showing the decline of violence, limited as they are to
war and crime, are convincing, but he is careful to note they are all
open-ended. There is no guarantee the downward trend in violence will continue.
He concedes that one nuclear blast could reverse all progress, but one could
argue that ecological crises and political incompetence could have the same
effect, just more slowly. So far in the 21st century, there has been growing
alarm about the worsening of the ecological crisis, a steady erosion of civil
rights due to the “war on terror,” a global financial crisis, and constant war
in the Middle East.
The mood among many journalists, activists, and
social scientists is not at all optimistic. The geophysicist Brad Werner tried
to convey the sense of urgency by claiming, in a conference session entitled
“Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and
Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism,” that the science leads
to the inescapable conclusion that the only hope is in the successful
resistance to the prevailing system of global capitalism. [47]
The role of energy in the decline of violence
seems evident in the apprehension that we all have about global warming,
nuclear legacies, and various other related ecological problems. As much as
protest movements have been against the “one percent,” they are also movements
in which everyone is against his own energy-dependent job and his own energy
consumption habits. No one could ever conclusively prove what caused such a
thing as the global decline of violence, but this fear of losing energy
supplies seems to speak to a fear that the result will be an increase in
deprivation and conflict.
Many people in Japan recognize the dilemma
presented by their energy crunch, which may be a harbinger of things to come
for other developed nations. The anti-nuclear movement has often extolled the
virtues of Japan’s agrarian past, [48] but the thought of going back to it also
evokes much dread. We know the nation could very well be destroyed by another
nuclear calamity, but still the ruling party, industrialists, and a sizable
minority of citizens want to flip the reactors back on. “But we need the
energy!” they cry, as if to say they would rather risk being dead than being
poor. Aside from the obvious threat to the interests of industries and
financial markets, individuals fear (incorrectly, because there are
alternatives to nuclear and carbon) the loss of energy supplies would mean a loss
of jobs and individual comfort, and greater poverty and inequality. We fear
that the road back to the slow life would be chaotic, insecure, and violent.
There is a strong temptation to stick with the familiar evils, a choice that
renewable-energy advocate Amory Lovins describes as the false choice between
dying of oil wars, climate change, or nuclear holocaust. [49] Even if there is
no guarantee that another way based on efficiency and renewable energy would be
painless, or even successful, attempting it may be the only rational choice.
Manhattan Project scientists were never certain they would succeed, but in
order to gain the weapon that would lead to supremacy in the coming age, that
expensive gamble was deemed worthwhile. Why are we now so hesitant to invest
massively in a new energy paradigm?
Statistical Deaths
Ecological damage must surely be counted as a
form of violence, but Pinker never connects the decline of violence with the
suffering that arose from the exploitation of energy resources. This is a
reflection of a value that has become the norm. We have become desensitized to
the human suffering implied by what is euphemistically called “allowable risk,”
which really means the risk we allow ourselves to impose mostly on strangers
who are far away and out of sight. In a perverse way, direct violence has the
advantage of being its own deterrent. Normal people may have revenge fantasies,
but they have a complete revulsion to committing violence when it comes down to
spilling blood themselves, or even asking someone else to do it for them. Thus
we know the familiar sentiment: I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. But
this is not the case when we buy products built by child laborers on the other
side of the world, or when we fail to protest against governments that kill by
remote control. In some cases, statistical violence is self-inflicted. We
accept risks to our own bodies to get the benefits of modernity, but for the
most part, statistical violence is inflicted on people who don’t consent to or benefit
in the exchange. This harm is enormous and must be counted as violence, along
with the violence of crime and war, yet it gets no mention in the 696 pages
of The Better Angels of Our Nature.
The rebuttal to this charge might be that I’m
playing loose with the definition of violence, faulting the author for his
choice to write only about direct violence. I can only insist that resource
exploitation should be included in such a study because it coincided with both
an increase in structural violence and a decrease in direct violence. The
correlation makes for a hypothesis with prima facie evidence.
It meets the standards of a good scientific theory, even though it may be more
of a philosophical question beyond the reach of empirical proof. Science may never
find ways of categorizing certain types of suffering as violence, quantifying
suffering, and placing value on the trade-offs humanity has made in exploiting
energy resources. Unlike Pinker’s statistics on war and crime, the statistics
on death and disease caused by industrial toxins are unknowable. The effects of
bullets and knives are easy to see, but alpha particles don’t leave traces for
homicide detectives to discover.
Some cases of energy exploitation may not fit
the definition of violence, if we exclude trade-offs that are instances of
individuals accepting a risk to gain a necessity. When peasants in India cook
with charcoal because it is the only energy source they have, the harm is
self-inflicted, not an act of violence. They set themselves up for lung disease
in the distant future to have food in the present. Cavemen made similar
trade-offs, as do modern people in more prosperous nations when they drive to
work on highways.
On the other hand, the social structure that
gave peasants the limited choice between suffering lung disease and eating is a
kind of violence—the structural violence that Galtung described over forty
years ago. Other examples would be wells contaminated with uranium or
hexavalent chromium, or rural inhabitants forced to accept nuclear power plants
being built on their land. [50] I could list numerous examples of lower
socioeconomic groups having to live in the most damaged environments, but the
point should be obvious. This sort of violence is widespread and all the more insidious
because the torturer and the victim no longer have to face each other. It is
crucial to point out also that statistics on violence don’t cover repressive
arrangements that exist by threat of violence or deprivation.
Violence becomes apparent only when the oppressed react violently, but
oppression tends to be passively tolerated for a very long time.
Structural violence persists because of the
quest for profit or because of mistaken notions of national status and
security. With structural violence, responsibility could be pinned on
individuals, but usually it gets spread through institutions and corporations,
and the guilty go unpunished. The victims might be strangers on the other side
of the world. Responsibility is diffusely spread further among consumers and
citizens who benefit from the arrangements made for them by their governments
and corporations. Everyone is guilty, so no one is guilty. The radionuclides
are diluted so that everyone has to share the burden, but no one has figured
out how to make them disappear.
It may be impossible to quantify the global
damage caused by pollution, but scientists have of course tried. In October
2013, the WHO released a study estimating that air pollution, in addition to
its well-known impact on heart and respiratory disease, caused 223,000 cancer
deaths worldwide in 2010. [51] This is just a measure of one kind of pollution,
and it is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Much goes unaccounted for by WHO
surveys, especially when it comes to studies of nuclear accidents and military
tactics that implicate liability for specific entities that have final say on
UN pronouncements.
The official World Health Organization
conclusions on Chernobyl are a sad joke to the people who lived through its
aftermath, [52] and the travesty is being repeated this year as the WHO contradicted
independent reports and claimed there was no rise in birth defects related to
the use of depleted uranium during the Iraq War. [53] As noted above, it is WHO
studies that are trotted out in regularly recurring editorials that tell us
that “radiophobia,” not radiation, causes health to decline after a nuclear
accident.
In other news that appeared at the same time as
the WHO study, a report by the Walk Free Foundation found that 30 million
people worldwide live in slavery. [54] Modern slavery has many forms, and they
bleed seamlessly into labor conditions we wouldn’t call slavery but do, without
doubt, deprive workers of dignity and freedom—arrangements such as minimum
wages set below the poverty line, or entire nations depending on a workforce of
multi-generational “guest workers” who have no pathway to citizenship.
These reports and examples are just hints of the
damage caused by pollution and economic inequality, which have to be tallied as
forms of violence in any study of its rise and fall. However, one argument is
that the damage of industrial activities, slavery, and abusive labor practices
is outweighed by the overall gains. If there is a global increase in such
indicators as life expectancy, medical care, and living conditions, this is
progress. Nonetheless, it still amounts to trading some lives for others.
Superstitions supporting human sacrifice are a thing of the past, but
statistical violence implies that we still sanction it in a different form. In
statistical violence, the winners and losers are sometimes the same people (a
wealthy man getting cancer from the herbicides sprayed on his golf course), but
usually they are not. A few dozen children in Fukushima have thyroid cancer
this year because of the broken power plant that sold electricity to people in
Tokyo before they were born. Furthermore, the benefits of modernity have to be
considered with respect to the unknowable future consequences of the industrial
age. When these factors are considered, it becomes much more difficult to
conclude how much violence has declined. Or, if it has by some limited
definition, does it really matter?
We know there will be costs to pay in the future
because the future is actually already here. All we have to do is look at the
growing list of damaged environments and sacrifice zones. Aside from horrific
examples in the Third World, there are examples in the First World where the
chickens are coming home to roost.
Canada’s sacrifice zone in the Alberta Tar Sands
will be as large as Greece, and the promise of remediation made by the oil
industry is unrealizable for a cost that anyone is willing to pay. [55] There
are other sacrifice zones in the Gulf of Mexico, Chernobyl and Fukushima, in
addition to numerous other smaller chemical and radioactive sites that have to
be closed off for future use.
Farther away from the sacrifice zones, urban
dwellers die young because of particulate smog. Mercury and radioactive
contaminants are emitted in the burning of coal and oil, and they fall on the
oceans and end up in tuna. If all this damage is to be counted as violence, the
escalator of reason would force us to consider the violence done to other
species and to the earth itself.
Pinker makes passing mention of these larger
issues in the chapter in which he discusses the expanding circle of what we
find deserving of moral consideration. Our notion of animal rights, for
example, has expanded greatly in past decades, and he says it might yet widen
to consider “statistical lives.” [56] As I was reading this, I thought this
might be the start of the necessary discussion about the morality of letting
distant strangers suffer the effects of polluting industries and labor abuses,
but it was followed only by a brief mention of soldiers sent to wars by
civilians who accept that some of them will die. This is the only hint I could
find in the entire book where Pinker alludes to, but ultimately avoids, the
moral point made by Voltaire two centuries ago in Candide, in the words
of the abused slave of Suriname: “It is at this expense that you eat sugar in
Europe.”[57]
Instead of developing this discussion of
statistical lives and arguing more strongly for including it in our moral
circle, Pinker drops it and comes close being associated with Voltaire’s object
of satire, Dr. Pangloss, or what in modern terms appears as neoliberal economic
doctrine or “techno-optimism.” If global average incomes and life spans are up,
and crime and conflict are down, then all is for the best in the best of all
possible worlds, it seems. Pinker writes of “modernity’s gifts of life itself:
the additional decades of existence, the mothers who live to see their
newborns, the children who survive their first years on earth,” [58] but there
is no suggestion that such gains are often achieved through the sacrifices of
people of the present and future who will suffer the effects of uranium mining,
dam construction, tar sands development and so on. Somehow, this
ends-justify-the-means rationale doesn’t do justice to a book about moral
progress.
For the past twenty years, Pinker has written
brilliantly about topics as varied as language acquisition, irregular verbs,
cognitive science and now the history of violence. One can hope that he will
next pay some attention to other forms of violence and parts of the world where
there is no apparent decline of violence, places where people are paying the
price for the peace and comfort gained in other times and places.
Pinker teaches at Harvard, speaks at TED
conferences, and travels intensively on the lecture circuit at colleges in the
developed world. I can’t help but wonder if he would he have written a
different book if he had spent his sabbatical in a trailer park in West
Virginia coal country, or even just gone on a day trip from Boston to Woburn,
Massachusetts, to meet with the families that lost children to
pollution-induced leukemia in one of America’s more famous environmental
scandals. [59] After all, Pinker makes the case throughout his book that it was
the increased opportunities for perspective-taking, through travel and reading
of journalism, memoir, fiction, and history, that helped drive the expansion of
sympathy which drove the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New
Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. [60] Perhaps he could be a little less of a
Davos Man [61] and venture outside his comfort zone, perhaps to a venue such as
the World Social Forum.
In spite of all that I’ve written above, The
Better Angels of Our Nature is an important book that should be read
by anyone interested in making a more peaceful world. Although I think he
neglected an important aspect of his subject, Pinker has certainly shown that
he is devoted to building on the progress that has made certain kinds of
violence decline. One has to admit that statistics on crime and war are impressive.
Our tolerance for the cruelty of past ages has declined rapidly, so there is
reason for optimism. If I am correct that the decline in violence came
ultimately from the exploitation of energy sources, then it came at a steep
price that takes the edge off any enthusiasm for modernity. If humanity ever
finds a way to produce energy with less harm to the ecosystem and to the people
who sacrifice for it, then there may be a true decline of violence worth
celebrating.
Pinker is at his best when he reminds us of our
capacity for such change. Societies can transform unexpectedly when change
seemed for so long to be impossible. He writes about how just a few centuries
ago, an educated man in London wrote in his journal about going on an errand
across town, but made only passing mention of a public torture and hanging that
he saw while on his way. In the 1950s, it was widely believed that a nuclear
apocalypse was sure to come within the next decade. In 1980, no one would have
bet that the Berlin Wall would collapse before the decade was out. Pinker
points out convincingly that we have become less tolerant of abuses that were
once commonplace, so perhaps these values will stick with us when times get
tough and growing numbers of ecological refugees need help.
To these examples of rapid change, I would add
that our present energy paradigm could, and should, shift rapidly away from
carbon and uranium. Nuclear energy could fall from favor quickly once its
hazards are fully understood. We have had three major accidents (Three Mile
Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima) within 32 years. In addition, there are major
deficiencies in the proposals for implementing new (but actually old) reactor
designs. The waste legacy remains unsolved and is an immoral burden on future
generations. Nuclear energy is inseparable from the development of nuclear
weapons, and there is enough danger in dealing with just the hazards that have
been created so far. We haven’t really begun shutting down existing reactors
and getting nuclear waste out of contact with the ecosystem, and society is yet
to wake up to the enormous costs, and perhaps even the impossibility, of this
project. Then there is the cost of future accidents, which may come in the midst
of war, sabotage, natural disasters, or just a declining ability of countries
to manage this expensive and technically complex problem.
On April 20, 2011, as the Fukushima catastrophe
was still unfolding, and barely comprehended, Ban Ki-moon, the UN General
Secretary, stated during a visit to Chernobyl:
To many, nuclear
energy looks to be a relatively clean and logical choice in an era of
increasing resource scarcity. Yet the record requires us to ask painful
questions: have we correctly calculated its risks and costs? Are we doing all
we can to keep the world’s people safe? The unfortunate truth is that we are
likely to see more such disasters. The world has witnessed an unnerving history
of [near]* accidents. We have seen in Japan the effects of natural disasters,
particularly in areas vulnerable to seismic activity. [62]
(*It
seems that the minders in the UN nuclear bureaucracy decided to make their own
preferred interpretation of an inaudible segment of Ban Ki-moon’s speech. A
word was not clear in the audio perhaps, so they concluded he must have said
“near” accidents rather than “nuclear” accidents, even though “near” makes no
sense in this context. There is no ambiguity at all in the historical record.
Chernobyl and Fukushima were not “near” accidents. It is not clear what the
brackets are supposed to signify, but the word “near” appears strangely between
them on the UN website.)
A similar question can be asked about violence.
Have we correctly defined it and accounted for all of its causes? Does the
apparent decline in violence have any meaning if we have neglected to count the
violence of economic inequality and environmental destruction? When we consider
the uncertainties of interpreting the historical record, and the complete
uncertainties of the future, there is only room for limited optimism, based on
an understanding of the way that moral values have changed and certain forms of
violence have been reduced. Perhaps we have learned enough to comprehend the
scale of the challenge and the need for change. Soon we might see the energy
equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall: the rapid formation of taboos on
exploitive labor relations and industries we only recently found acceptable. Or
it may be a slow, painful transition like the abolition of slavery. With proper
attention paid to developing a renewable economy and renewable energy, the
decline in direct violence could be followed by a decline in structural
violence as well. That would be the kind of modernity worth being a fan of.
 |
| Children's playground in Fukushima. You can still live in the fallout zone, but just don't take your children to the park. |
Notes
[1] “World Thinkers 2013,” the results of Prospect magazine’s world thinkers poll,
April 24, 2013.
[2] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).
[3] Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Steven Pinker on the
Alleged Decline of Violence,” Dissident Voice, December 5, 2012.
[4] Chris Williams, “Violence Against Our Environment,” the Socialist, December 5,
2013. This article is cited as just one example of many essays that have
applied the terms of human conflict to the crimes against the environment, such
terms as violence, rape, atrocity, crimes against humanity, and the
suffix cide applied to eco.
[5] Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “On the
statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts,” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its
Applications 429, 252-260, 2016, DOI 10.1016/j.physa.2016.01.050.
[6] Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace
Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167-191.
Galtung coined this term that refers to social structures and institutions
preventing people from meeting their basic needs.
[7] Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns,” in Condition
of the Working Class in England, first
published in Leipzig, Germany, 1845; first English edition published in 1887 in
New York, according to www.marxists.org.
[8] James Hansen, “20 Years Later: Tipping Points Near on
Global Warming,” the
Huffington Post, June 23, 2008. Hansen anticipates testifying
against energy company CEOs in future trials, but does so without a hint of
irony. Opponents of nuclear energy, which Hansen promotes as a solution to
global warming, might imagine a day when Hansen himself would be on trial for
the catastrophes caused by nuclear disasters.
[9] “Steven Pinker: Human Nature in 2013,” the Economist’s “World
in 2013 Festival,” December 8, 2012, as viewed on www.youtube.com.
[10] Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of
Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
[11] John Horgan, “Why We Lie,” a review of The Folly of Fools by Robert Trivers, the New York Times, December
23, 2011.
[12] Steven Pinker, 620.
[13] Steven Pinker, 476.
[14] Steven Pinker, tweeted on April 24, 2013 by @sapinker, visible
from a list of recent tweets seen at stevenpinker.com on December 28, 2013. He
offered no comment on the film, but the tweet was a promotion of an upcoming
screening of Pandora’s Promise at MIT, which would seem to be
an endorsement. Followers “favorited” the tweet and thanked him for it.
[15] David Ropeik, “Fear Vs. Radiation: The Mismatch,” the New York Times, October
21, 2013.
[16] Steven Pinker, tweeted on October 22, 2013 by
@sapinker, visible from a list of recent tweets seen at stevenpinker.com on
October 26, 2013.
[17] John Dudley Miller, “A False Fix for Climate
Change,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 11,
2013.
[18] Tom Burke, “Can We Risk Another Fukushima?,” the Ecologist, November 29,
2013.
[19] Steven Pinker, “The Lessons of the Ashkenazim: Groups
and Genes,” the New Republic,
June 17, 2006.
[20] G. Cochran, J. Hardy, and H. Harpending, “Natural
History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” Journal
of Biosocial Science 38, no. 5 (2006): 659–693.
doi:10.1017/S0021932005027069.
[21] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined, 284.
[22] Steven Pinker, 346.
[23] John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism
from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
[24] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New
York: Norton, 1997), 368. The author covers this subject in other books: The
Language Instinct and The Blank Slate.
[25] Aileen Mioko Smith, “Three Mile Island: The People’s
Testament,” Three Mile Island Alert, March 29, 1987.
[26] Steve Wing et al., “A Re-evaluation of Cancer Incidence
near the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant: The Collision of Evidence and
Assumptions,” Environmental Health Perspectives 105, no. 1
(1997): 52-57.
[27] Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Valuing the Greenhouse Gas
Emissions from Nuclear Power: A critical survey,” Energy Policy 36
(2008): 2940-2953.
[28] Steven Pinker, “Science is Not Your Enemy,” the New Republic, August 6,
2013.
[29] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined, 674. The police strike is mentioned on page
122.
[30] Ian Fairlie, “A 100 mSv Threshold for Radiation Effects?,” November 27, 2012,
accessed September 9, 2016, at http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/a-100-msv-threshold-for-radiation-effects/. I
will wade no further into the argument among
scientists and activists over the health effects of low-dose radiation. This
reference is given as an overview and a reference to further sources.
[31] “Steven Pinker: Human Nature in 2013,” the Economist’s
“World in 2013 Festival,” December 8, 2012, as viewed on www.youtube.com .
[32] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined, 692.
[33] Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the
Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics,
1994). A chapter is devoted to a critique of the “standard social science
model.”
[34] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined, 692.
[35] Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How
Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 236-237.
[36] Carlo Rotella, “Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From
Ecological Mayhem?,” the New
York Times, August 11, 2011. The views of Jeremy Grantham,
owner of a $100-billion asset-management fund, were described this way:
“Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty
much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about
unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial
Revolution…That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries...”
[37] John Vidal, “Nigeria’s Agony Dwarfs the Gulf Oil Spill.
The US and Europe Ignore It,” the
Guardian, May 30, 2010.
[38] Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity,
and Violence (Princeton
University Press, 1999).
[39] Steven Pinker, 674.
[40] Nick Squires, “Washing Machine ‘Did More to Liberate
Women Than the Pill’,” the
Telegraph, March 9, 2009.
[41] Steven Pinker, 31-57.
[42] Emily Eakin, “How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most
Controversial Anthropologist,” the
New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2013.
[43] Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction,
Days of Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2012). This book contains a
thorough and empathetic description of life in America’s economic and
environmental sacrifice zones. Chapter 2 covers Camden, New Jersey.
[44] Daniel D’Addario, “Henry Louis Gates: ‘Since Slavery
Ended, All Political Movements Have Been About Race’,” Salon, October 20, 2013.
[45] Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War,
trans. Richard Crawley (Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform, 2009) Chapter 10.
[46] Chris Hedges, “The Folly of Empire,” Truthdig,
October 14, 2013.
[47] Naomi Klein, “How science is telling us all to
revolt,” the New Statesman,
October 29, 2013. Klein’s article summarizes Brad Werner’s session at the Fall
Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, December 2012.
[48] Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams (1990) was
a collection of short stories depicting the director’s memorable dreams. After
one dream depicting a nuclear catastrophe, which seemed to presage what
happened at Fukushima, Daiichi, Kurosawa finished the film with an idealized
portrayal of a return to a pre-industrial village.
[49] Amory Lovins, “A 40-Year Plan for Energy,” March, 2012,
TED Talk at ted.com.
[50] P.K. Sundaram, “Koodankulam: Indian Democracy Under
Nuclear Threat,” DiaNuke.org, November 23, 2011.
[51] Kaye Spector, “Air Pollution Causes Cancer, World Health
Organization Says,” EcoWatch, October 18, 2013
[52] Alla Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: Crime Without
Punishment (Transaction
Publishers, 2011). There have been numerous research papers, books, and
articles written about the collusion between the IAEA and the WHO. This is a
thorough history of Chernobyl, told by a Ukrainian journalist and politician
who was on the ground from the beginning of the crisis. Eye-witness accounts
cast doubt on the claims that radiophobia and social factors caused most of the
health damage.
[53] Nafeez Ahmed, “How the World Health Organization Covered
up Iraq’s Nuclear Nightmare,” the
Guardian, October 13, 2013.
[54] Alex Smith, “30 Million People Still Live in Slavery,
Human Rights Group Says,” NBC
News, October 17, 2013.
[55] Niobe Thompson and Tom Radford (directors), Tipping
Point: The End of Oil, 2011. Dr. David Schindler, quoted in this film,
stated, “The costs of any reasonable reclamation are so high that there would
be no money made on the oil sands. I don’t think people realize how big the
sacrifice zone is going to be. It’s an area slightly bigger than Greece.”
[56] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined, 423.
[57] Voltaire, Candide (1759) chapter 19.
[58] Steven Pinker, 692.
[59] Dan Kennedy, “A Civil Action: The Real Story,” Boston
Phoenix, 1998. Kennedy describes the background not told by the film A
Civil Action, and notes, “Woburn is one of the birthplaces of the
Industrial Revolution. A toxic brew of chemicals has been floating through the
Aberjona River valley, which bisects Woburn, for more than 150 years.”
[60] Steven Pinker, 583.
[61] Akash Arasu, “The Evolution of the Davos Man,” the Huffington Post, January
22, 2013. Arasu says, “Davos Man was meant to refer to members of the global
elite who view themselves as completely international. They have no need for
the term ‘nationality’ and feel that governments are merely shadows of time
past to be used as facilitators in their global operations.”
[62] Ban Ki-moon, “Remarks
at ‘25 Years after Chernobyl Catastrophe: Safety for the Future’ conference,”
United Nations, www.un.org, April 20, 2011.
