He says it, he repeats it, and he quantifies it. For almost fifteen years, the Canadian Steven Pinker, renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University, has been showing how violence around the world is constantly setting new records… on the decline. Armed with a wealth of data, an understanding of long time scales, and a detailed knowledge of the human mind in all its evolutionary wrinkles, Pinker sheds light on the gap between perception and reality. And he makes us understand how the idea of « decivilization » is a symptom of its opposite : a threshold of tolerance for brutality that is steadily lowered as violence, the real thing, is removed from our daily lives thanks to the progress sought and brought by the Enlightenment.
Le Point : In France, following three high-profile events : the death of three police officers killed by a hit-and-run driver, the death of a nurse stabbed by a schizophrenic, and the beating of his great-nephew during a demonstration against pension reform, the President Macron recently spoke of a process of « decivilization » gripping our country What does this word evoke in you ? Do you think it’s relevant to describe a real or perceived increase in crime ?
Steven Pinker : It’s a fallacy to invoke a trend based on a few shocking examples that were recently in the news. Even completely random events can come in clusters – especially random events, because only a non-random process would space them out ! And the human mind is vulnerable to the “availability bias,” in which we estimate risk by available images and events in memory. One should really look at the numbers before speaking of a “process” – for all we know, the rate of violence is unchanged, and this is just an unfortunately clustering.
Do you still see a general decrease in violence since the release of Better Angels ?
Better Angels discussed many kinds of violence operating over different time scales, so the answer depends. Worldwide, homicide rates have declined in the past decade in most countries, but not the United States. War deaths have gone up, because of the wars in Syria, Ukraine, and Ethiopia, though not to the levels of the 1940s-1980s. Deaths from terrorism have declined. Institutionalized violence such as capital punishment, mass incarceration, and the criminalization of homosexuality have continued to decline.
In this book, you describe how we can have the impression that violence is increasing, when in fact it’s our tolerance for violence that is decreasing. How do you explain this ?
As violence has not disappeared from the face of the earth (which it never will), there will be enough incidents on any day to fill the news, and that will stoke our availability bias (see above). When the rate of violence decreases, that will be invisible to journalism.
We tend to think that violence increases in the wake of pandemics and wars. The world has just experienced a pandemic, and the « long peace » has been seriously undermined by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Is the worst yet to come ?
This belief is wrong ! Violence decreased after the Spanish flu pandemic, and the HIV pandemic in Africa. And of course war deaths must decrease by definition when a war ends. And war is not contagious – the timing of wars is random (a “Poisson process”), though the overall rate can drift upward or downward.
Many deplore a rise in violence, noting an increase in incivility, especially in the political world, with the use of insults, threats, and “verbal violence. But isn’t the use of words rather than fists a sign of “civilization” ?
Indeed, it would be a sign of progress. But it’s not even clear that there has been an increase in incivility (it depends on the place and time scale). In earlier centuries physical fights would break out in legislatures and parliaments. And in Western workplaces, threats of violence will send an employee to a company’s Human Resources bureaucracy for anger management training. Again, I’d want to see data before interpreting any trend – we may be misled by examples.
While the rise in violence in France is still hard to quantify, many American cities have seen an increase in homicides, especially in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities, as municipalities have decided to take BLM’s « defund the police » slogan at face value. Do you think this portends a resurgence of urban violence ? And how do you feel about the fact that it took the obvious – that violence is bound to increase when police budgets are cut – for municipalities to back down ?
It does expose a pathology in elite intellectual discourse in the US – universities and the liberal press – that asking about the obvious connection between de-policing and crime is a taboo that could get one canceled. Whether the American crime increase after the Ferguson shooting in 2015 and the Floyd murder in 2020 (which were substantial) will get worse or better depends on whether voters (who are not part of the intellectual elite) empower political leaders to take crime seriously, such as Eric Adams, the mayor of New York.
It is widely believed that we need to organize degrowth, not only because, as in the days of the Club of Rome, there will not be enough resources, but also because it would be morally preferable not to change the climate or biodiversity too much, not to artificially create the earth, according to an imperative of « sobriety », as we say in France. But it is also a basic observation of behavioral science that violence correlates with a mismatch between resource availability and demographics. If we tighten our belts in the face of population growth, shouldn’t we be expecting a resurgence of tensions ?
Once again I’m not so sure about the basic observation – conventional wisdom is not the same as an established cause-and-effect relationship. But it is generally true that richer countries are safer both from crime and from civil war. And outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the demographic trend is for population leveling and shrinkage, not growth.
Is the English-speaking world familiar with the notion of the « civilization of manners, » based on the work of Norbert Elias, with the idea that passions would gradually be replaced by interests ?
No, not as much as it should be. Elias’s “Civilizing process” starting in the middle ages was caused by the centralization of justice (police and courts of law rather than personal vendettas, vigilante mobs, and contests of honor between warlords) and by the expansion of trade and commerce (so that it became cheaper to buy things than steal them, and other people became more valuable alive than dead). As a result, people inhibited their impulsive violence and need to exercise manners when dealing with government officials. It’s possible, of course, that a government can become so tyrannical that its oppression of the people is worse than the violent it protects against. That’s ideally what a well-balanced democracy should achieve – the government would exercise just enough of a threat of violence to deter people from preying on each other, without the government preying on the people instead.