The surprising decline in violence | Steven Pinker

Summary

スティーブン・ピンクヤー氏は、現代の私たちが生きる時代が人類史上最も平和な時代であると主張し、20世紀のアウシュヴィッツのような集団虐殺を通じて、人類の暴力性についての新たな理解を得たと語ります。しかし、彼は考古学者ローレンス・キーリーの研究を引用し、狩猟採集社会の戦争死亡率を示すグラフを紹介。また、中世以降の暴力の減少を歴史的に示し、国連の統計に基づく国内紛争や民族対立、軍事クーデターの減少を指摘します。さらに、冷戦終結後の民間戦争や大虐殺の激減、1960年代以降の殺人事件の減少をFBIの統計で示します。暴力の減少の理由について、ホッブズの理論、生命の価値の高まり、協力の利益、共感の拡大など、複数の要因が考えられると述べ、暴力の減少は私たちが何を正しく行ってきたかを問うべきだと結論づける。

Takeaways

• 📉 暴力は長い歴史の中で減少している。20世紀にわたって目撃された大虐殺は、現代の暴力の恐ろしさを印象づけましたが、史実に見ると、人類の過去はもっと暴力的であったと述べています。
• 🌐 現代性は暴力をもたらしたと一般的に考えられていますが、実際には長い歴史の中で暴力は減少しているという視点を提供しています。
• ⛓ 国家による暴力の独占は、より平和的な社会をもたらす可能性があるとホッブズは主張しています。集権的な国家が暴力を抑制し、平和をもたらす作用があるとされています。
• 🔍 報道の向上は、戦争や暴力の事件がより明確に認識される理由の一つであり、それが人々の認識に影響を与えています。
• 🧠 認知的幻想は、具体的な出来事が思い出せればそれが起こりやすいという考え方で、暴力的な事件が平和的な死に方よりも印象的に記憶に残ることがあります。
• 📈 経済的・技術的な発展は、生活の質を向上させ、人々の命の価値観を高めることで暴力を減少させている可能性があります。
• 🤝 協力や非暴力が双方に利益をもたらすゼロサムゲームの増加は、取引や平和的な共存によって人々が互いに利益を得られる状況が増えた結果と見なされます。
• 🌱 シンガーの「拡大する圏」の理論によれば、共感の範囲が歴史を通じて拡大し、人種、性別、他者への共感を広げてきたとされています。
• 📚 教育、ジャーナリズム、小説、旅行、識字は、他人の生活を投影し、かつて非人種として扱われていた人々に対する人々の道徳的考慮を増やす可能性があります。
• 📉 中世ヨーロッパから現代にかけて、殺人事件は大幅に減少しており、16世紀にピークして以来減少傾向にあります。
• 🕊️ 国連の統計によれば、1945年以降、ヨーロッパやアメリカでは国家間戦争、民族間の暴力事件、軍事クーデターが激減していると報告されています。
• ⚖️ 暴力の減少には何らかの理由があると考えていますが、その理由は不明であり、ホッブズ理論、生活の価値の高まり、協力による利益、共感の拡大がその要因とされる可能性があります。

Q & A

20世紀に何が人々の意識に深く刻まれ、私たちの自己認識を変えましたか？

20世紀には、アウシュヴィッツ強制収容所などの画像が人々の意識に深く刻まれ、私たちが誰であるか、どこから来たのか、そしてどのような時代に生きているのかについての新しい理解を与えてくれました。

スピノザが述べた「国家」とは何を意味するでしょうか？

スピノザが述べた「国家」とは、合法的な暴力の使用権を一つの民主的機関に委ねることで、その国家が攻撃の誘因を減らすことができるという理論です。なぜなら、何らかの侵略行為が行われると、それに応答して厳しい報復が下されるため、攻撃の利益はゼロになるからです。

暴力が減少したと述べる根拠は何ですか？

暴力が減少したと述べる根拠は、長年にわたって観察された社会的な暴力の減少、中世から現代にかけての殺人事件の統計的減少、1945年以降のヨーロッパとアメリカズでの国間戦争の減少、そして冷戦終結後の世界的civil warsとgenocidesの減少などです。

古代文明の戦争に対する期待はどのようなものでしょうか？

古代文明の戦争に対する期待は、男性を殺し、子供も殺し、処女であれば生き残らせることができるという、非常に残酷な考え方でした。これは聖書の記述からも見ることができます。

中世の社会で犯罪に対する罰としてよく使われる方法は何でしたか？

中世の社会では、身体的傷害や拷問が犯罪に対する罰として日常茶飯事でした。軽い違反に対しても、舌を切り落とす、耳を切り落とす、盲目になる、手を切断されるなど、残酷な罰が与えられました。

暴力の減少の原因として挙げられる4つの説明は何ですか？

暴力の減少の原因として挙げられる4つの説明は、Thomas Hobbesの「国家」理論、生活の安易さによる生命的価値の変化、協力や非暴力が双方に利益をもたらすゼロサムゲームの増加、他者への共感の拡大である「拡大する圏」の理論です。

Robert Wrightが述べたゼロサムゲームとは何ですか？

Robert Wrightが述べたゼロサムゲームとは、特定の状況下で、協力や非暴力が双方に利益をもたらす状況を指します。例えば、貿易の利益や平和dividendなど、他人が生きている方が自分にとってもvaluableであるため、自己利己的な理由で暴力が減少する理論です。

Peter Singerの「拡大する圏」とは何を指しますか？

Peter Singerの「拡大する圏」とは、進化によって与えられた共感の能力が、歴史上、村から部族、国家、人種、男女、さらには他の知性生物へと拡大してきたという理論です。これは、他者への共感を広げる力であり、暴力の減少に寄与しているとSingerは主張しています。

暴力の減少が示す意味は何ですか？

暴力の減少は、なぜ平和が成立するのか、そして私たちが何を正しく行ってきたのかを尋ねるべき重要な意味を持ちます。私たちは何か正しいことをしているため、それが何であるかを知ることが重要です。

なぜ多くの人が暴力の減少について誤解しているのですか？

多くの人が暴力の減少について誤解している理由には、報道の改善、認知的な幻覚、意見と主張の市場の動向、先住民に対する罪悪感、また私たちの基準が行為の変化を上回っていることで常に過去の暴力が見受けられるなどがあります。

Steven Pinkerはなぜ暴力の減少を信じているのですか？

Steven Pinkerは、長い歴史の中で観察された統計的証拠と、学際的な理論に基づいて暴力の減少を信じています。また、彼は私たちが非暴力を促進する技術や社会構造を通じて、他者との共感を高めることができると述べています。

歴史上、暴力が増加したとされる中世の時代の犯罪に対する罰はどのようなものでしょうか？

歴史上、暴力が増加したとされる中世の時代の犯罪に対する罰は、身体的傷害や拷問、残酷な死刑など非常に厳しいものでした。小さな違反に対しても、身体の一部を失うなど、現代の私たちには考えられない罰が与えられました。

Outlines

00:00

📜 20世紀の暴力と平和の歴史

20世紀は、アウシュヴィッツのような集団虐殺を通じて人々の意識に深く刻まれ、私たちが誰であるか、どこから来たのか、そして生きている時代について新たな理解を与えてくれました。しかし、21世紀に入ってからも、ダルフールの続発的な虐殺やイラクの日常的な恐ろしい事件を目の当たりにしました。これにより、現代性は私たちに恐ろしい暴力をもたらし、もともとは調和のとれた状態であったとされる先住民のように、私たちは危険を冒してそれから離れているという共通の理解が生まれました。しかし、本セッションでは、その一般的な理解が誤っていると証拠を提示し、実は私たちの祖先は私たちよりも遥かに暴力的であり、長い間暴力は減少していると述べます。また、今日、私たちの種族の存在の中で最も平和的な時代を生きている可能性が高いと結論づけます。

05:04

📉 暴力の減少とその歴史的観点

暴力の減少は、千年単位から年単位まで様々なスケールで観察可能です。特に16世紀の理性の時代の始まりに、暴力の減少の転換点がありました。西欧においては、特に英格兰とオランダで啓蒙時代に暴力の減少が顕著に観察できます。考古学者ローレンス・キーリーの研究により、狩猟採集社会の戦争による男性死亡者の割合を示したグラフが提示され、現代の社会的紛争と比較して、原始的な調和のとれた状態という考えに疑問を投げかけます。また、聖書に記載されている古代文明の戦争の記述や、中世から現代までの社会的に認められた暴力の形態の減少についても触れています。

10:07

📚 暴力の歴史的減少と現代の誤解

暴力の歴史的な減少を示す統計データと歴史的証拠を紹介し、なぜ多くの人々が重要な問題について誤解しているのかについて考察します。報道の向上、認知的幻想、意見や主張市場の力学、先住民に対する罪悪感、西洋文化の良さを認めることの拒否、そして基準の変化が挙げられます。さらに、暴力の減少の理由として、トーマス・ホッブズの理論、生命の価値の高まり、非零和ゲームの概念、そして広がる圏の概念が提案されています。

15:09

🌐 暴力の減少の意味と未来への問い

暴力の減少は、平和の理由や私たちの行いが正しい理由を問うべき深远な意義を持つと述べます。また、暴力の減少が進む背景にある可能性のある要因として、相互作用の拡大、黄金の法則のロジック、コスモポリタニズム、歴史、ジャーナリズム、小説、旅行、そして識字の普及が挙げられます。これにより、他人の人生に共感し、自分以外の存在を人間として扱うことができるようになるという視点を紹介し、講演を締めくくります。

Keywords

💡暴力の減少

暴力の減少は、ビデオの中心テーマであり、スティーブン・ピンクヤーが述べる現代社会で暴力が過去よりも減少しているという主張です。これは、過去の狩猟採集社会や中世のヨーロッパの暴力レベルを現代の平和的な状態と比較することで示されます。

💡国家の力

国家の力は、暴力の減少に寄与した要因の一つです。トマス・ホッブズの理論によれば、国家が独占的に暴力の合法的使用権を持つことで、予期しない攻撃の誘因を減らし、平和をもたらすことができます。これは、中央集権国家の登場とホーミシデ率の低下との関連性を示しています。

💡報復と威嚇

報復と威嚇は、狩猟採集社会での暴力の原因の一つです。人々は隣人を先行侵攻し、自分たちが侵攻される前に攻撃することで、安全を確保temptationを減らすと考えていました。これは、ビデオ内で狩猟採集社会の暴力の理由として説明されています。

💡ゼロサムゲーム

ゼロサムゲームは、ビデオで提唱された暴力減少の要因の一つです。ロバート・ライトの理論によれば、技術の進歩が人々が取引や協力の利益を広く共有できるようにし、他人を生きておくことが自分にも利益をもたらすため、暴力を減少させることができるとされています。

💡共感の拡大

共感の拡大は、ピーター・シンガーの理論に基づく暴力減少の要因です。歴史上、人々は自分たちの村や部族の人々に対してのみ共感を持ち、それ以外の人々は非人間的に扱っていました。しかし、共感の範囲が徐々に拡大し、平和と協力の利益を感じるようになりました。

💡報道の改善

報道の改善は、暴力の減少の誤解の原因の一つです。現代のメディアは過去の戦争や暴力事件をより詳細に報道しているため、人々は現代の暴力に比べて過去の暴力が忘れられてしまいがちです。これは、ビデオ内で暴力の見方に対する人々の誤解の原因として触れられています。

💡コグニティブのillusion

コグニティブのillusionは、人々の暴力に対する認識の歪みを説明する概念です。具体的な事件が容易に思い出せるほど、その発生率が高いと感じがちです。これは、ビデオ内で、なぜ人々は暴力の減少を認識しないのかを説明する際に使用されています。

💡道徳の標準

道徳の標準は、過去の暴力行為を現代の目で見る際の重要な要素です。過去の暴力行為が当時の標準では普通であったとしても、現代の目では野蛮的と見なされます。これは、ビデオ内で暴力の歴史的な見方と現代の見方を比較する際に触れられています。

💡中央集権国家

中央集権国家は、暴力の減少の歴史的な例としてビデオ内で提唱されています。中央集権国家が成立することで、報復や威嚇による紛争を減らし、平和を促進したとされています。これは、ビデオ内でホーミシデ率の低下と国家の力との関連性を説明する際に用いられます。

💡平和の分母

平和の分母は、ビデオ内で提唱された概念で、暴力の減少だけでなく平和の理由も探求する必要性を示します。これは、私たちが何を正しく行ってきたかを知ることが、より多くの平和を築くための鍵を握している可能性があることを意味しています。

💡技術の進歩

技術の進歩は、ビデオ内で暴力の減少の要因として提唱されています。技術は人々がより遠くの人々と取引を行えるようにし、他人との共感を増やし、暴力行為を減少させることができるとされています。これは、ビデオ内で暴力の減少と技術の進歩との関連性を説明する際に用いられます。

Highlights

Images from Auschwitz and other 20th-century atrocities have shaped our understanding of humanity and violence.

Despite recent genocides, the speaker argues that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history.

The decline of violence is observable at various time scales, from millennia to years, with a significant shift during the Age of Reason.

Lawrence Keeley's archaeological research shows that pre-agricultural societies experienced high rates of death due to warfare.

Biblical accounts and early civilizations also demonstrate that violence was not foreign to our ancestors.

Historical records indicate a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence, such as torture and mutilation, over time.

The rise of centralized states in Europe coincided with a decline in homicide rates, supporting the 'Leviathan' theory of governance.

Technological and economic advancements have led to an increased value on human life, reducing violence.

Robert Wright's 'Nonzero' theory suggests that cooperation and trade can lead to mutual benefits, reducing violence.

Peter Singer's 'Expanding Circle' theory posits that empathy has expanded over time to include more of humanity.

The decline in violence has profound implications, prompting us to question why peace exists and what societal factors contribute to it.

Cognitive biases and better reporting may skew our perception of violence, making it seem more prevalent than it actually is.

Standards of behavior have changed, and what may be considered violence today could have been a norm in the past.

The speaker proposes four plausible explanations for the decline in violence, including governance, value of life, cooperation, and empathy.

Technological advancements have increased moral consideration by allowing us to better understand the experiences of others.

The media's portrayal of violence may not accurately reflect the true decline in violent acts globally.

The speaker concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding the factors that have led to the decline in violence to replicate them.

Transcripts

Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp,

have been seared into our consciousness during the 20th century

and have given us a new understanding of who we are,

where we've come from and the times we live in.

During the 20th century, we witnessed the atrocities

of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda and other genocides,

and even though the 21st century is only seven years old,

we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in Darfur

and the daily horrors of Iraq.

This has led to a common understanding of our situation,

namely, that modernity has brought us terrible violence,

and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony

that we have departed from, to our peril.

Here is an example from an op-ed on Thanksgiving,

in the "Boston Globe" a couple of years ago,

where the writer wrote, "The Indian life was a difficult one,

but there were no employment problems,

community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown,

crime nearly nonexistent.

What warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic

and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter."

Now you're all familiar with this treacle.

We teach it to our children.

We hear it on television and in storybooks.

Now, the original title of this session was, "Everything You Know is Wrong,"

and I'm going to present evidence

that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong,

that, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are,

that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time,

and that today, we are probably living in the most peaceful time

in our species's existence.

Now in the decade of Darfur and Iraq,

a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene,

but I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture.

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon.

You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades

and over years,

although there seems to have been a tipping point

at the onset of the Age of Reason in the 16th century.

One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously.

It's especially evident in the West,

beginning with England and Holland around the time of the Enlightenment.

Let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 --

from the millennium scale to the year scale --

to try to persuade you of this.

Until 10,000 years ago, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers,

without permanent settlements or government.

And this is the state that's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony.

But the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley,

looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers,

which is our best source of evidence about this way of life,

has shown a rather different conclusion.

Here is a graph that he put together,

showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare

in a number of foraging or hunting and gathering societies.

The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die

at the hands of another man,

as opposed to passing away of natural causes,

in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea highlands

and the Amazon rain forest.

And they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die

at the hands of another man

to, in the case of the Gebusi, only a 15 percent chance.

The tiny little blue bar in the lower left-hand corner

plots the corresponding statistic from the United States and Europe

in the 20th century,

and it includes all the deaths of both World Wars.

If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century,

there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million.

Also on the millennium scale,

we can look at the way of life of early civilizations,

such as the ones described in the Bible.

And in this supposed source of our moral values,

one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare,

such as the following, from Numbers 31:

"And they warred against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses,

and they slew all the males.

And Moses said unto them, 'Have you saved all the women alive?

Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones

and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him,

but all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him,

keep alive for yourselves.'"

In other words: kill the men, kill the children.

If you see any virgins, then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them.

And you can find four or five passages in the Bible of this ilk.

Also in the Bible, one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment

for crimes such as homosexuality,

adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, talking back to your parents --

(Laughter)

and picking up sticks on the Sabbath.

Well, let's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude

and look at the century scale.

Now, although we don't have statistics for warfare

throughout the Middle Ages to modern times,

we know just from conventional history

that the evidence was under our nose all along

that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence.

For example, any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture

were routine forms of criminal punishment.

The kind of infraction today that would give you a fine,

in those days, would result in your tongue being cut out,

your ears being cut off, you being blinded,

a hand being chopped off and so on.

There were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment:

burning at the stake, disemboweling, breaking on the wheel,

being pulled apart by horses and so on.

The death penalty was a sanction for a long list of nonviolent crimes:

criticizing the king, stealing a loaf of bread.

Slavery, of course, was the preferred labor-saving device,

and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment.

Perhaps the most vivid example was the practice of cat burning,

in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire,

and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat, howling in pain,

was burned to death.

What about one-on-one murder?

Well, there, there are good statistics,

because many municipalities recorded the cause of death.

The criminologist Manuel Eisner

scoured all of the historical records across Europe

for homicide rates in any village, hamlet, town, county that he could find,

and then he supplemented them with national data

when nations started keeping statistics.

He plotted on a logarithmic scale,

going from 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year,

which was approximately the rate of homicide in the Middle Ages,

and the figure plummets down

to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year

in seven or eight European countries.

Then, there is a slight uptick in the 1960s.

The people who said that rock and roll would lead to the decline of moral values

actually had a grain of truth to that.

But there was a decline from at least two orders of magnitude in homicide

from the Middle Ages to the present,

and the elbow occurred in the early 16th century.

Let's click down now to the decade scale.

According to nongovernmental organizations that keep such statistics,

since 1945, in Europe and the Americas,

there has been a steep decline in interstate wars,

in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms

and in military coups, even in South America.

Worldwide, there's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars.

The yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year

from 1950 to the present.

And, as you can see, the death rate goes down

from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s

to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in this decade,

as horrific as it is.

Even in the year scale, one can see a decline of violence.

Since the end of the Cold War, there have been fewer civil wars,

fewer genocides -- indeed, a 90 percent reduction since post-World War II highs --

and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime.

This is from the FBI uniform crime statistics.

You can see that there's a fairly low rate of violence in the '50s and the '60s,

then it soared upward for several decades

and began a precipitous decline, starting in the 1990s,

so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960.

President Clinton, if you're here: thank you.

(Laughter)

So the question is:

Why are so many people so wrong about something so important?

I think there are a number of reasons.

One of them is we have better reporting.

The Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars

over the surface of the earth

than 16th-century monks were.

(Laughter)

There's a cognitive illusion.

We cognitive psychologists know

that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something,

the higher the probability that you assign to it.

Things that we read about in the paper with gory footage

burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying

in their beds of old age.

There are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets;

no one ever attracted advocates and donors

by saying, "Things just seem to be getting better and better."

(Laughter)

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples

in modern intellectual life,

and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good

about Western culture.

And, of course, our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior.

One of the reasons violence went down

is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time.

That's a process that seems to be continuing,

but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day,

things always look more barbaric than they would have been

by historic standards.

So today, we get exercised -- and rightly so --

if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in Texas

after a 15-year appeal process.

We don't consider that a couple of hundred years ago,

they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial

that lasted 10 minutes,

and indeed, that that would have been repeated over and over again.

Today, we look at capital punishment

as evidence of how low our behavior can sink,

rather than how high our standards have risen.

Well, why has violence declined?

No one really knows, but I have read four explanations,

all of which, I think, have some grain of plausibility.

The first is: maybe Thomas Hobbes got it right.

He was the one who said

that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty,

brutish and short."

(Laughter)

Not because, he argued,

humans have some primordial thirst for blood

or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative,

but because of the logic of anarchy.

In a state of anarchy,

there's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively,

before they invade you.

More recently, Thomas Schelling gives the analogy

of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement.

Being a good American, he has a pistol in the nightstand,

pulls out his gun, walks down the stairs.

And what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand?

Now, each one of them is thinking,

"I don't really want to kill that guy, but he's about to kill me.

Maybe I had better shoot him before he shoots me,

especially since, even if he doesn't want to kill me,

he's probably worrying right now that I might kill him before he kills me."

And so on.

Hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought

and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first.

Now, one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence.

You don't strike first, but you have a publicly announced policy

that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded.

The only thing is that it's liable to having its bluff called,

and therefore can only work if it's credible.

To make it credible, you must avenge all insults and settle all scores,

which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta.

Life becomes an episode of "The Sopranos."

Hobbes's solution, "Leviathan,"

was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence

was vested in a single democratic agency -- a leviathan --

then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack,

because any kind of aggression will be punished,

leaving its profitability zero.

That would remove the temptation to invade preemptively

out of fear of them attacking you first.

It removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation

to make your deterrent threat credible,

and therefore, it would lead to a state of peace.

Eisner -- the man who plotted the homicide rates

that you failed to see in the earlier slide --

argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in Europe

coincided with the rise of centralized states.

So that's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory.

Also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence

in zones of anarchy, in failed states, collapsed empires,

frontier regions, mafias, street gangs and so on.

The second explanation is that in many times and places,

there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap.

In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common in one's own life,

one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others.

And as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant,

one puts a higher value on life in general.

This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne.

A third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game,

and was worked out in the book "Nonzero" by the journalist Robert Wright.

Wright points out that, in certain circumstances,

cooperation or nonviolence can benefit both parties in an interaction,

such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses

and both come out ahead,

or when two parties lay down their arms

and split the so-called peace dividend

that results in them not having to fight the whole time.

Wright argues that technology has increased the number

of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in,

by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas

over longer distances and among larger groups of people.

The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead,

and violence declines for selfish reasons.

As Wright put it,

"Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb the Japanese

is that they built my minivan."

(Laughter)

The fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book

called "The Expanding Circle," by the philosopher Peter Singer,

who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy,

an ability to treat other people's interests as comparable to one's own.

Unfortunately, by default,

we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family.

People outside that circle are treated as subhuman

and can be exploited with impunity.

But, over history, the circle has expanded.

One can see, in historical record,

it expanding from the village, to the clan, to the tribe, to the nation,

to other races, to both sexes and, in Singer's own arguments,

something that we should extend to other sentient species.

So the question is:

If this has happened, what has powered that expansion?

And there are a number of possibilities,

such as increasing circles of reciprocity

in the sense that Robert Wright argues for.

The logic of the Golden Rule --

the more you think about and interact with other people,

the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs,

at least not if you want them to listen to you.

You can't say that my interests are special compared to yours

any more than you can say

the particular spot that I'm standing on is a unique part of the universe

because I happen to be standing on it that very minute.

It may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, by histories

and journalism and memoirs and realistic fiction and travel and literacy,

which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people

that formerly you may have treated as subhuman,

and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life,

the sense that "There but for fortune go I."

Whatever its causes,

the decline of violence, I think, has profound implications.

It should force us to ask not just, "Why is there war?"

but also, "Why is there peace?"

Not just, "What are we doing wrong?"

but also, "What have we been doing right?"

Because we have been doing something right,

and it sure would be good to find out what it is.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: I loved that talk.

I think a lot of people here in the room would say

that that expansion you were talking about,

that Peter Singer talks about,

is also driven just by technology, by greater visibility of the other

and the sense that the world is therefore getting smaller.

I mean, is that also a grain of truth?

Steven Pinker: Very much.

It would fit both in Wright's theory,

that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation

over larger and larger circles.

But also, I think it helps us imagine what it's like to be someone else.

I think when you read of these horrific tortures

that were common in the Middle Ages,

you think, "How could they possibly have done it,

how could they not have empathized with the person

that they're disemboweling?"

But clearly, as far as they're concerned, this is just an alien being

that does not have feelings akin to their own.

Anything, I think, that makes it easier

to imagine trading places with someone else

means that it increases your moral consideration

to that other person.

CA: I'd love every news media owner to hear that talk

at some point, it's so important.

CA: Thank you. SP: My pleasure.