But all this shows is that the State plays an important role in reducing violence. As I’ll argue below, only when viewed in relation to the murderous violence pervading prehistoric societies and (more controversially) stateless tribal societies, does 20th century civilization look relatively peaceful in comparison. to the present, it would be utterly wrong to claim, as Pinker does, that the level of violence has generally been declining over time. Looking at the historical data from 500 B.C. If, on the other hand, we look at the percentage of people that died each year as a result of violence, then you could argue (using Pinker’s figures, which as I’ll show are badly flawed) the 13th and 17th centuries were more violent than the 20th, but even so, you’d still have to concede that the 20th century was still one of the most violent of the past 25 centuries in human history. It turns out that if we include all wars, atrocities and acts of murder, then the percentage of deaths that can be attributed to known acts of violence is highest for the 20th century. (b) the percentage of people that died each year, as a result of violence.
(a) the percentage of deaths in that period that can be attributed to acts of violence and The two relevant percentages in assessing the level of violence in a given time period are: Unfortunately, he seems to have problems in extracting these percentages from the historical data he presents. Pinker is right to focus on percentages, rather than absolute numbers, in evaluating the level of violence in various societies throughout history. Datasets relating to violence are included in their entirety, with no cherry-picking of the historical data. Pinker’s book deserves to be commended for its methodological fairness, in its approach to the historical data relating to violence. What Pinker gets right, and what he gets wrong
In this post, I’d like to critique Pinker’s methodology, his misuse of statistics, and his faulty figures relating to atrocities perpetrated in the past. In my previous post, I focused on the anti-religious slant of Professor Steve Pinker’s best-selling book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking Adult, 2011). Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Flipboard Print arroba Email
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