20120612_SP

Source: BBC Radio 4 PM Programme

URL: N/A

Date: 12/06/2012

Event: Steven Pinker on the long-term reduction of violence in the world

Credit: BBC Radio 4

People:

• Eddie Mair: BBC journalist and presenter of PM
• Steven Pinker: Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

Eddie Mair: There are conflicts and wars that make it onto PM every night, and you could be forgiven for feeling pretty distraught about the state of humanity. But what about this? It's claimed that the world became a more peaceful place in the last year. The Global Peace Index, produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace, showed its first improvement in two years. For the first time, Sub-Saharan Africa was no longer the world's least peaceful region, losing that distinction to the Middle East and North Africa. Every other region showed some kind of improvement. The survey studied 23 indicators, ranging from measures of civil unrest and crime to military spending and relations with neighbours. It's all music to the ears of Steven Pinker, a psychologist whose book, The Better Angles of Our Nature [sic], argues that violence has been in decline for thousands of years.

[Start of previously recorded interview.]

Steven Pinker: Rates of violence haven't gone down to zero. There are always enough violent incidents to fill the evening news. What the news doesn't report is all the places on Earth that aren't having terrorist attacks or civil wars on that particular day. We have no way of intuitively estimating how many parts of the world are peaceful, and so our impressions are going to be that the world is always going to hell, even if, globally, the rate of violence is going down.

Eddie Mair: What factors should we take into account to get a more balanced picture of violence in the world?

Steven Pinker: The Global Peace Index is trying to do that, so that they take into account all the parts of the world that aren't violent, as well as the ones that are. And they're becoming more media-savvy, so that there are events like the release of this year's Global Peace Index that give news organisations an event to report.

Eddie Mair: But you've had a look further back into history and compared previous times to more recently. What does that teach you?

Steven Pinker: The trends of the last 20 years are part of a number of reductions in violence that the world has witnessed, over the long term. They include the enormous decline in rates of interpersonal violence in European countries since the Middle Ages. A contemporary Englishman has about one fiftieth the chance of being murdered as his medieval ancestor. The fact that since World War II rich, powerful countries have thought the better of going to war with each other every few years, which they did for centuries - and then after World War II they thought that it wasn't such a great idea. The reduction in civil war and war between countries over the last 20 years is not really a historical anomaly, but is one of a number of trends of decreasing violence over the decades and centuries and millennia.

Eddie Mair: How should we view this moment, then?

Steven Pinker: We can't relax - there are obviously parts of the world that are still experiencing horrific violence. But we should appreciate that it is possible to reduce rates of violence.

Eddie Mair: If your analysis is right and the world is becoming a less violent place, why would that happen? Is that anything to do with the fact that for, in recent generations for the first time in human history, we've had the ability to annihilate the entire planet at the touch of a few buttons?

Steven Pinker: I don't think that has been the main cause. It can't explain the reduction in civil wars, to say nothing of lowering of rates of homicide within countries, where - you know, two guys in a bar aren't going to be deterred by the threat of nuclear annihilation. So I don't think that's the main cause of the reduction in violence. Part of it is better governments, governments that realise that their first responsibility is to keep their own citizens from each other's throats. Another is opportunities for economic cooperation and trade - when it becomes easier to buy stuff, you're less tempted to steal it. And as you trade with more and more of the world, the other people become more valuable alive than dead.

Eddie Mair: Is it possible we're just becoming more civilised?

Steven Pinker [laughs]: I think that's - it sounds old-fashioned to put it that way, but there is something to that.

[End of previously recorded interview.]

Eddie Mair: Steven Pinker, a psychologist - and his book is not the title I gave it. It is The Better Angels of Our Nature. I'm 46.