On Violence in History

158 Pages·2020·4.85 MB·English

by  Philip Dwyer (editor), Mark S. Micale (editor)

On Violence in History

On Violence in History
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Edited by
Philip Dwyer
Mark S. Micale
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
Published in 2020 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2020 Berghahn Books
Originally published as a special issue of
Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, volume 44, number 1.
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congresss Control Number: 2019042146
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78920-464-3 hardback
ISBN 978-1-78920-465-0 paperback
ISBN 978-1-78920-466-7 ebook
Contents
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•••
•••
List of Illustrations vii
Preface viii
Philip Dwyer and Mark S. Micale
Introduction
History, Violence, and Steven Pinker 1
Mark S. Micale and Philip Dwyer
Chapter 1
The Past as a Foreign Country:
Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Pinker’s “Prehistoric Anarchy” 6
Linda Fibiger
Chapter 2
Were There Better Angels of a Classical Greek Nature?
Violence in Classical Athens 17
Matthew Trundle
Chapter 3
Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker:
Violence and Medieval England 29
Sara M. Butler
Chapter 4
The Complexity of History:
Russia and Steven Pinker’s Thesis 41
Nancy Shields Kollmann
vi • Contents
Chapter 5
Whitewashing History:
Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence 54
Philip Dwyer
Chapter 6
Assessing Violence in the Modern World 66
Richard Bessel
Chapter 7
The “Moral Effect” of Legalized Lawlessness:
Violence in Britain’s Twentieth-Century Empire 78
Caroline Elkins
Chapter 8
Does Better Angels of Our Nature Hold Up as History? 91
Randolph Roth
Chapter 9
The Rise and Rise of Sexual Violence 104
Joanna Bourke
Chapter 10
The Inner Demons of The Better Angels of Our Nature 117
Daniel Lord Smail
Chapter 11
What Pinker Leaves Out 128
Mark S. Micale
Index 140
Illustrations
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Illustration 4.1. Russia’s fi rst “spectacle of execution”: “The Execution
of Musketeers, Moscow 1698”. 48
Figure 8.1. Homicide rates in Europe, 1200–1830. 94
Figure 8.2. Homicide rates in European nations of the former
Soviet Union. 97
Preface
Philip Dwyer and Mark S. Micale
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S
hortly before the appearance of our special issue of Historical Refl ections/
Réfl exions Historiques at the beginning of 2018, Steven Pinker published
another book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and
Progress, which is essentially a response to those who criticized The Better
Ange ls of Our Nature. Bill Gates immediately declared the new volume “my
new favorite book of all time.” In it, Pinker presents himself as a champion
of the values of the Enlightenment because no one else was “willing to de-
fend them,” as well as a defender of progress. Intellectuals, Pinker writes
in Enlightenment Now, hate “the idea of progress”.1 By that he means, “the
Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the
human condition.”
Enlightenment Now has been heavily critiqued. If in The Better Angels we
are living in the most peaceful era in human history, life is simply getting
better in Enlightenment Now. In it, Pinker argues that “we” are much better
off due to “newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets over-
fl owing with food, clean water that appears with a fl ick of a fi nger and waste
that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who
are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of
the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture
available in a shirt pocket.”2
Much of that is debatable. Oxfam tells us that 1,000 children per day
will die of contaminated water; there are certainly a few countries where
sons are still sent off to war, where journalists are imprisoned or killed for
speaking truth to power, and many more where it is not safe for women to
walk the streets at night. According to a recent UNHCR report, there were
68.5 million forcibly displaced people in the world, including 25.4 million
refugees, approaching levels not seen since World War II. Pinker, in other
Preface • ix
words, has gone on the offensive, apparently eschewing the many well-
informed and often-valid criticisms made of The Better Angels of Our Nature,
and ignoring scholars who have pointed to any number of historical inaccu-
racies dotted throughout the book. In an interview conducted by a journalist
for the British newspaper, The Guardian, on the occasion of the appearance
of Enlightenment Now, Pinker doubled down, hitting back at his critics:
One of the surprises in presenting data on violence,” he says, “was the
lengths to which people would go to deny it. When I presented graphs
showing that rates of homicide had fallen by a factor of 50, that rates of
death in war had fallen by a factor of more than 20, and rape and domestic
violence and child abuse had all fallen, rather than rejoice, many audiences
seemed to get increasingly upset. They racked their brains for ways in which
things could not possibly be as good as the data suggested, including the
entire category of questions that I regularly get: Isn’t X a form of violence?
Isn’t advertising a form of violence? Isn’t plastic surgery a form of violence?
Isn’t obesity a form of violence?3
Pinker’s response is disingenuous and fails to engage the more serious crit-
icisms of The Better Angels, many of which can be found in our book. As we
learn in the following chapters, it is easy enough to critique how Pinker does
history as well as the types of data he uses, and the uses to which he puts
that data.
There are, furthermore, two larger implications to this kind of over-
arching history of which Pinker is probably not even aware. The fi rst has
to do with “authority,” or “voices of authority” if you like. This is more
than just a simple difference of opinion between squabbling academics. As
the Princeton historian, David Bell, pointed out in a recent article on truth
and democracy, “truth, and the authority to determine it, has always been
deeply contested, and that philosophers from ancient Greece onward have
wrestled in profound and troubling ways with how to distinguish objective
reality from human perception.”4 A question to the student, then, is how, in
the face of competing sets of data and confl icting interpretations, does one
determine who is “right?” The decisive point of difference may be in how
one side wields “historical facts” in support of its case, while the other pres-
ents more nuanced arguments that purport to understand the past in more
subtle ways.
The second has to do with the idea of “progress” in history, and what
historians do with overarching explanations of history such as Pinker’s. This
is not the place to marshal detailed evidence, but it is worth pointing out
that no Enlightenment thinker would have maintained that progress was
universal and absolute. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, was aware
that progress and regress can coexist. That may or may not be the case, but
as the human rights historian, Samuel Moyn, pointed out in a critique of
Pinker’s Englightenment Now, citing Immanuel Kant, “the problem of prog-
ress cannot be solved directly from experience… Even if it were found that