Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature"

This book was purchased at the local library's bookstore for $1 in early February and has proven to be a real eye-opener on the subject of this blog, in terms of the broad context of violence.

Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Pyschology at Harvard University, has been named one the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, as well as one the top 100 global thinkers by the journal Foreign Policy (his The Stuff of Thought is now in reading mix right now).

The Better Angels of Our Nature, which appeared in 2011, is massive, at a weighty 700 pages of text, but it takes on a large context of violence towards gays, ethnic minorities women, and animals and looks at the deep psychological aspects of violent behavior, including predatory, dominant, vengeful, sadistic and ideological motivations.

 
It looks how empathy, self-control, morality and reason are measured in comparison and contrast to what is referred to as the "civilizing process," as adapted from the work of Norbert Elias.  The thrust of the book is that, despite the millions of deaths caused by the two World Wars, genocidal actions by Turkey, the Nazis, and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, and other atrocities, violence has actually declined significantly over time and, in recent decades, has lead to what Pinker calls "the Long Peace."

Pinker is careful to say that he is not suggesting that the trends in the decline of violence will continue as they have been or that there won't be large-scale atrocities in our future, but is compelling in working with an array of studies that show just how much violent behavior has been mitigated of late.

In his third chapter, Pinker discusses violence in the American South and its "culture of honor," in which violent actions were part of a masculine code of "self-help justice" and a denial of allowing government "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force."  He quotes Eric Monkonnen, whose work has been alluded to in this blog relating to homicide statistics, and his statement that "the South had a deliberately weak state, eschewing things such as pentitentiaries in favor of local, personal violence."

For Southerners, "self-help justice depends on the credibility of one's prowess and resolve" and "an obsession with credible deterrence, otherwise known as a culture of honor."  That is, men in the South codified the idea that violence was legitimate "after an insult or other mistreatment."  Northerners were more likely to commit murder during robberies, but Southerners "in those sparked by quarrels" and "to protect home and family."

Notably, Pinker alludes to the fact that the Southern colonies were populated by large numbers of Scots-Irish "who hailed from the mountainous periphery of the British Isles beyond the reach of the central government" and that many came from a sheepherding economy, which may have facilitated the development of the "code of honor."  He notes that "herders all over the world cultivate a hairtrigger for violent retaliation."

Even if later Southerners were no longer heders, he continues, "cultural mores can persist long after the ecological circumstances that gave rise to them are gone."  He does note, though, that "the immediate trigger for self-help justice, then, is anarchy" in the absence of effective legal institutions or the acceptance of them.  Moreover, "honor has staying power because the first man who dares to abjure it would be heaped with contempt for cowardice and treated as an easy mark."

The discussion then turns to the American West and the fact that, even more than the South, it "was a zone of anarchy until well into the 20th century." Here the sheepherder is manifested as the cowboy with the culture of honor transplanted to the wide-open spaces of the western states and territories.  The self-help attitude based on honor also involved "drinking, gambling, whoring, and brawling."

Pinker writes that "in the American Wild West, annual homicide rates were fifty to several hundred times higher than those of eastern cities and midwestern farming regions."  More germane to the subject of this blog, "the criminal justice system was underfunded, inept, and often corrupt."

In this context, "self-help justice was the only way to deter horse thieves, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, and other brigands" and "the guarantor of its deterrent threat was a reputation for resolve that had to be defended at all costs."

Gold Rush California, Pinker continues, citing David Courtright's Violent Land, had "an average annual homicide rate at the time of 83 per 100,000."  An accompanying figure built on statistics from Randolph Roth's American Homicide showed that rates peaked in California at over 100 per 100,000 and then began a long decline that can be attributed largely to the "civilizing process."

A figure from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, adapted from American Homicide by Randolph Ross shows the peaking astronomical rate of homicide in California during the Gold Rush years of the 1850s and the dramatic decline since.

Meantime, as Courtwright noted, the staggering violence of the Gold Rush era "was exacerbated by a combination of demography and evolutionary psychology."  Significantly,

these regions were peopled by young, single men who had fled impoverished farms and urban ghettoes to seek their fortune in the harsh frontier.  The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.

There is also the matter of having some mitigation by the presence of women, be they mothers, sisters, aunts, or wives and the latter become especially important as Pinker highlights the concept of "cads versus dads."  That is, as young men marry and have families, they distance themselves from the competition from other males that leads to so much violent confrontation.

Then comes neurobiology through the pervasive influence of liquor on the weakening of self-control and Pinker observes that "many studies have shown that people with a tendency toward violence are more likely to act on it when they are under the influence of alcohol."

One element Pinker did not discuss was the technological advances in weaponry, specifically the introduction, just in time for the Gold Rush, of the Colt revolver in 1849.  Elsewhere in the book, though, he suggested that the weapon was not so much a factor in increase or decline of violence as the human characteristics that led to the decision to engage in or step back from violent activity.  It is true that among Spanish-speaking Californians, the weapon of choice was often more likely to be a knife or a sword, but the growing inventory of guns is certainly a factor in the prevasivenes of violence.

Pinker, despite the opportunity to play off the title of his book, did not mention Los Angeles in his book, but, clearly, many of the conditions that he discussed applied to this brawling little village as well as to other frontier communities he referenced including Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Leadville, Bodie and others.

Los Angeles from the 1850s to the 1870s had plenty of the saloons and grog shops, gambling dens, brothels and other institutions that fomented so much of the staggering levels of violence that wracked the town for so long.

It also, which would have played well to his other point about the "code of honor," as the region had a large proportion of Southerners in its populace.  As will be discussed in this blog in future posts, there was no shortage of incidents involving Southern men defending their honor through duels, brawls and gunfights.

El Monte, settled mainly by families from southern states who migrated over in the early 1850s and onward, was ground zero for much of this, whether it meant family feuds that happened in that community or elsewhere.  These included the King-Johnson feud of 1855 and the King-Carlisle gunbattle in Los Angeles a decade later.

However, it is worth noting that there was a change by the 1870s.  For example, the township of Los Nietos, straddling the San Gabriel River where today's cities of Downey, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier and Pico Rivera are located, saw a significant influx of Southerners by 1870--to the extent that the English-surnamed population leapt from two dozen in 1860 to over 1,100 a decade later, most of them from southern states.

Yet, there is little indication that violence there was anywhere close to what was experienced in El Monte or among its population, twenty or so years before.  Perhaps the anarchic conditions of the Gold Rush era had been replaced enough by the "civilizing process" so that its results could already be witnessed in Los Nietos.  Schools, churches, a greater proportion of women--these could be among a range of factors that were involved.

In any case, Pinker's book was a revelation when it came to thinking about the big picture dynamics of how violence has declined over the centuries.  For anyone who wants to know more about the role of violent behavior over time, though it will take a while, The Better Angels of Our Nature is definitely worth checking out.