| 1 John 4:14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.
John 4:42 And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world. 1 Timothy 4:10 For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, especially of those that believe. |
In what sense is Jesus the "Savior of the world?" The last verse above says He is the Savior of "all men, especially those who believe." In what sense is Jesus the Savior of those who do not believe?
Or is He not yet the Savior of the world?
That depends on
I am an "optimillennialist." I believe the big picture of human history since the first Christmas 2000 years ago has been upward: less violence, higher standard of living, increased knowledge of God.
I don't deny that there have been ups and downs in various geographies, and I don't deny a feeling that things are down in the United States.
I am an "optimillennialist" by faith -- seeing that in the Bible -- not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).
As I read about "salvation" in the Bible, I do not see an emphasis on the question "Where will I go when I die." I see an emphasis on optimism: an upward trend in terms of peace, prosperity and knowledge of God. I have discussed this definition of "salvation" here:
The idea that "salvation" is more "this-worldly" than "next-worldly" offends many Christians. The idea that "the government" is not our "savior" -- the bringer of this-worldly "salvation" -- also offends many patriotic Christians, as well as secularists.
Harvard Professor Steven Pinker has advocated a controversial thesis that mankind is much less violent now than at any time in human history. This comes as a shock to Christian "pessimillennialists," who view history as a crumbling waiting room for the Second Coming of Christ.
I have reviewed one of Pinker's summaries of his book here. Pinker has unbounded faith in the State, and in the religion of Secular Humanism, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Secular State is the greatest single cause of violence in the world today and throughout history. The idea that the world is getting less violent confirms in my mind the Biblical truth that Christ is the "Prince of Peace" and that since He came to earth, the earth has been getting more peaceful, in proportion as members of His Body have been faithful to the "Great Commission" (Matthew 28:18-20).
Here are links to three critical reviews of Pinker's book (left-hand column), and our review of the reviews (right-hand column.
1. John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war | Books | The Guardian
| John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray – and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong |
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| For an influential group of advanced thinkers, violence is a type of backwardness. In the most modern parts of the world, these thinkers tell us, war has practically disappeared. The world’s great powers are neither internally divided nor inclined to go to war with one another, and with the spread of democracy, the increase of wealth and the diffusion of enlightened values these states preside over an era of improvement the like of which has never been known. For those who lived through it, the last century may have seemed peculiarly violent, but that, it is argued, is mere subjective experience and not much more than anecdote. Scientifically assessed, the number of those killed in violent conflicts was steadily dropping. The numbers are still falling, and there is reason to think they will fall further. A shift is under way, not strictly inevitable but enormously powerful. After millennia of slaughter, humankind is entering the Long Peace. | If I had time, I would collect a few articles documenting the preference of the mainstream media for violent stories to lead with. | |
| This has proved to be a popular message. The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing that the past was more violent than we tend to imagine. Tribal peoples that have been praised by anthropologists for their peaceful ways, such as the Kalahari !Kung and the Arctic Inuit, in fact have rates of death by violence not unlike those of contemporary Detroit; while the risk of violent death in Europe is a fraction of what it was five centuries ago. Not only have violent deaths declined in number. Barbaric practices such as human sacrifice and execution by torture have been abolished, while cruelty towards women, children and animals is, Pinker claims, in steady decline. This “civilising process” – a term Pinker borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias – has come about largely as a result of the increasing power of the state, which in the most advanced countries has secured a near-monopoly of force. Other causes of the decline in violence include the invention of printing, the empowerment of women, enhanced powers of reasoning and expanding capacities for empathy in modern populations, and the growing influence of Enlightenment ideals. |
The myth of the "noble savage" has been an article of faith for Secular Humanists for centuries.
"The Enlightenment" was a resurgence of pagan Greco-Roman thinking. This has not been responsible for any increase in "religion and morality" which the Founders equated with civilization. Greece and Rome were sexually depraved and violent enslavers. |
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| Pinker was not the first to promote this new orthodoxy. Co-authoring an article with Pinker in the New York Times (“War Really Is Going Out of Style”), the scholar of international relations Joshua L Goldstein presented a similar view in Winning the War on War: the Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (2011). Earlier, the political scientist John E Mueller (whose work Pinker and Goldstein reference) argued in Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989) that the institution of war was disappearing, with the civil wars of recent times being more like conflicts among criminal gangs. Pronounced in the summer of 1989 when liberal democracy seemed to be triumphant, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” – the disappearance of large-scale violent conflict between rival political systems – was a version of the same message. | ||
| There is no reason for thinking human beings are becoming any more altruistic or more peaceful | ||
| Another proponent of the Long Peace is the well-known utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who has praised The Better Angels of Our Nature as “a supremely important book … a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.” In a forthcoming book, The Most Good You Can Do, Singer describes altruism as “an emerging movement” with the potential to fundamentally alter the way humans live. | Pinker is not persuasive concerning the decline of violence and the increase of "salvation," if indeed his facts prove that. | |
| Among the causes of the outbreak of altruism, Pinker and Singer attach particular importance to the ascendancy of Enlightenment thinking. Reviewing Pinker, Singer writes: “During the Enlightenment, in 17th- and 18th-century Europe and countries under European influence, an important change occurred. People began to look askance at forms of violence that had previously been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, duelling and extreme forms of punishment … Pinker refers to this as ‘the humanitarian revolution’.” Here too Pinker and Singer belong in a contemporary orthodoxy. With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as “Enlightenment values”. But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed. John Locke denied America’s indigenous peoples any legal claim to the country’s “wild woods and uncultivated wastes”; Voltaire promoted the “pre-Adamite” theory of human development according to which Jews were remnants of an earlier and inferior humanoid species; Kant maintained that Africans were innately inclined to the practice of slavery; the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham developed the project of an ideal penitentiary, the Panopticon, where inmates would be kept in solitary confinement under constant surveillance. None of these views is discussed by Singer or Pinker. More generally, there is no mention of the powerful illiberal current in Enlightenment thinking, expressed in the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, which advocated and practised methodical violence as a means of improving society. | It is important to make the distinction between Pinker's reported facts and the explanation of those facts. If there has indeed been an increase of "salvation" in the world, it may not be due the the force Pinker credits (Enlightenment Humanism).
For example, slavery, which Pinker abhors, was abolished largely due to Christians, like William Wilberforce. It was certainly not abolished by the Atheists who ran the gulag archipelago in the "former" Soviet Union. |
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| Like many others today, Pinker’s response when confronted with such evidence is to define the dark side of the Enlightenment out of existence. How could a philosophy of reason and toleration be implicated in mass murder? The cause can only be the sinister influence of counter-Enlightenment ideas. Discussing the “Hemoclysm” – the tide of 20th-century mass murder in which he includes the Holocaust – Pinker writes: “There was a common denominator of counter-Enlightenment utopianism behind the ideologies of nazism and communism.” You would never know, from reading Pinker, that Nazi “scientific racism” was based in theories whose intellectual pedigree goes back to Enlightenment thinkers such as the prominent Victorian psychologist and eugenicist Francis Galton. Such links between Enlightenment thinking and 20th-century barbarism are, for Pinker, merely aberrations, distortions of a pristine teaching that is innocent of any crime: the atrocities that have been carried out in its name come from misinterpreting the true gospel, or its corruption by alien influences. The childish simplicity of this way of thinking is reminiscent of Christians who ask how a religion of love could possibly be involved in the Inquisition. In each case it is pointless to argue the point, since what is at stake is an article of faith. | The Inquisition was not faithfully extracted from the pages of the Bible. It cannot be said that "eugenic" genocide is inconsistent with the tenets of the religion of Secular Humanism. | |
| Pro-Russia militants near the eastern Ukrainian city of Starobeshevo. Photograph: Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images | ||
| There is nothing new in the suggestion that war is disappearing along with the “civilising process”. The notion that the human capacity for empathy is expanding alongside an increase of rationality owes its wide influence to Auguste Comte, an almost forgotten early-19th-century French Enlightenment thinker. Comte founded the “religion of humanity”, a secular creed based on the most advanced “science” of the day – phrenology. While Pinker and Singer don’t discuss Comte, his ideas shape their way of thinking. For one thing, Comte coined the term “altruism”. Like Pinker and Singer, he believed that humankind – or at any rate its most highly developed portions – was becoming more selfless and beneficent. But he was also a sharp critic of liberalism who believed the process would end in an “organic” way of life – a “scientific” version of the medieval social order that, despite his hostility to traditional religion, he much admired. It was Comte’s virulent anti-liberalism that worried John Stuart Mill, another Enlightenment thinker who was in many other ways Comte’s disciple. Mill went so far as to suggest that the propagation of the species would in future become a duty to humanity rather than a selfish pleasure; but he feared that a world in which this was the case would be one without liberty or individuality. Mill need not have worried. Human beings continue to be capable of empathy, but there is no reason for thinking they are becoming any more altruistic or more peaceful. | Rushdoony and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have both written favorably about the medieval social order. Will and Ariel Durant called it "The Age of Faith." It was not a "dark" period, compared to Athens and the Roman Empire. | |
| The picture of declining violence presented by this new orthodoxy is not all it seems to be. As some critics, notably John Arquilla, have pointed out, it’s a mistake to focus too heavily on declining fatalities on the battlefield. If these deaths have been falling, one reason is the balance of terror: nuclear weapons have so far prevented industrial-style warfare between great powers. Pinker dismisses the role of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the use of other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas has not prevented war in the past; but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive. No serious military historian doubts that fear of their use has been a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Moreover deaths of non-combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of non‑combatants, whereas around half of the more than 50 million casualties of the second world war and over 90% of the millions who have perished in the violence that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category. | It is not the inanimate "nuclear weapons" which have minimized world wars. It is the mental and spiritual reflection on the power of man to destroy which has humbled the once-boastful enlightenment thinkers. It is also a triumph of the Free Market over doctrinaire Internatinonal Socialism (Communism), as the Soviet Union is no longer the imperialistic nuclear threat it once was.
The real cause of "collateral damage" is "archists." |
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| If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars. Neocolonial warfare in south-east Asia, the Korean war and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Vietnam war, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, covert intervention in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the invasion of Iraq, the use of airpower in Libya, military aid to insurgents in Syria, Russian cyber-attacks in the Baltic states and the proxy war between the US and Russia that is being waged in Ukraine – these are only some of the contexts in which great powers have been involved in continuous warfare against each other while avoiding direct military conflict. | But Pinker's point is that direct military conflict has been avoided. | |
| While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive. Rather than a contest between well-organised states that can at some point negotiate peace, it is now more often a many-sided conflict in fractured or collapsed states that no one has the power to end. The protagonists are armed irregulars, some of them killing and being killed for the sake of an idea or faith, others from fear or a desire for revenge and yet others from the world’s swelling armies of mercenaries, who fight for profit. For all of them, attacks on civilian populations have become normal. The ferocious conflict in Syria, in which methodical starvation and the systematic destruction of urban environments are deployed as strategies, is an example of this type of warfare. | I'd like to see some numbers here: the claim is that war "between well-organized states" (like Germany and the U.S.) is not more destructive than "many-sided conflict in fractured or collapsed states that no one has the power to end." The admission here is that large centralized states, while they have the power to murder hundreds of millions of people, also have the "authority" to call an end to the war, whereas "many-sided conflicts" -- which are conflicts between various factions who all want to become "well-organized states" -- can't be terminated by the large centralized state.
But they can be terminated by missionaries. Free markets only spring up where missionaries have been -- Christian missionaries, of course, but also missionaries for Free Markets, which depend not upon war, but upon the "zero-aggression principle." |
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| It may be true that the modern state’s monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror. With increasing historical knowledge it has become clear that the “Holocaust-by-bullets” – the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in the Soviet Union, during the second world war – was perpetrated on an even larger scale than previously realised. Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing an important role. Peacetime deaths due to internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million. Along with fatalities caused by state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably broken and shortened. How these casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear. Pinker goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may be “apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history” (the italics are Pinker’s). However, there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision. |
Mao: more than 76 million. |
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| Estimating the numbers of those who die from violence involves complex questions of cause and effect, which cannot always be separated from moral judgments. There are many kinds of lethal force that do not produce immediate death. Are those who die of hunger or disease during war or its aftermath counted among the casualties? Do refugees whose lives are cut short appear in the count? Where torture is used in war, will its victims figure in the calculus if they succumb years later from the physical and mental damage that has been inflicted on them? Do infants who are born to brief and painful lives as a result of exposure to Agent Orange or depleted uranium find a place in the roll call of the dead? If women who have been raped as part of a military strategy of sexual violence die before their time, will their passing feature in the statistical tables? | Important questions. Also important: are these atrocities committed by Freed Markets, or by States? | |
| There is something repellently absurd in the notion that war is a vice of ‘backward’ peoples | ||
| While the seeming exactitude of statistics may be compelling, much of the human cost of war is incalculable. Deaths by violence are not all equal. It is terrible to die as a conscript in the trenches or a civilian in an aerial bombing campaign, but to perish from overwork, beating or cold in a labour camp can be a greater evil. It is worse still to be killed as part of a systematic campaign of extermination as happened to those who were consigned to death camps such as Treblinka. Disregarding these distinctions, the statistics presented by those who celebrate the arrival of the Long Peace are morally dubious if not meaningless. |
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| The radically contingent nature of the figures is another reason for not taking them too seriously. (For a critique of Pinker’s statistical methods, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay on the Long Peace.) If the socialist revolutionary Fanya Kaplan had succeeded in assassinating Lenin in August 1918, violence would still have raged on in Russia. But the Soviet state might not have survived and could not have been used by Stalin for slaughter on a huge scale. If a resolute war leader had not unexpectedly come to power in Britain in May 1940, and the country had been defeated or (worse) made peace with Germany as much of the British elite wanted at the time, Europe would likely have remained under Nazi rule for generations to come – time in which plans of racial purification and genocide could have been more fully implemented. Discussing the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which nuclear war was narrowly averted, Pinker dismisses the view that “the de-escalation was purely a stroke of uncanny good luck”. Instead, he explains the fact that nuclear war was avoided by reference to the superior judgment of Kennedy and Khrushchev, who had “an intuitive grasp of game theory” – an example of increasing rationality in history, Pinker believes. But a disastrous escalation in the crisis may in fact have been prevented only by a Soviet submariner, Vasili Arkhipov, who refused to obey orders from his captain to launch a nuclear torpedo. Had it not been for the accidental presence of a single courageous human being, a nuclear conflagration could have occurred causing fatalities on a vast scale. | As a Calvinist, I don't believe in "accidents." I believe God has sovereign control over every nuclear button on earth. | |
| A screengrab from a video released by the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram on 13 July 2014. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images | I believe that the rise of Islamic extremism is going to foment a rise in Christianity, because the violence of the Jihadis is intolerable, but nobody wants to go back to the atheism of international socialism. | |
| There is something repellently absurd in the notion that war is a vice of “backward” peoples. Destroying some of the most refined civilisations that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged south-east Asia in the second world war and the decades that followed were the work of colonial powers. One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda was the segregation of the population by German and Belgian imperialism. Unending war in the Congo has been fuelled by western demand for the country’s natural resources. If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one reason may be that they have exported it. | What "refined civilizations" were destroyed in Southeast Asia? Is this "noble savage" thinking? Would the author of this article have been content to live in one of them? | |
| Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable. Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the most advanced society in the world. According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement, sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced state. | Prisons are unBiblical and should be abolished. If we follow Jesus the King and allow Him to be our Lawgiver, Judge and King (Isaiah 33:22), we will see both crime and incarceration decline.
The United States is the most evil and dangerous entity on the planet. I agree with the wit who said "If God does not judge fill in reprobate city or state , then He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology." That one city or state is just the tip of the iceberg. We have seen the secularization of the western nations in the last century, and it is only the gift of Divine Providence that government violence has not been 10x as great as it has. And yet to this point I haven't seen a clear refutation of Pinker's thesis, that violence today, as great as it was and could have been, was less than violence before the coming of Christ. |
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| It may not be an accident that torture is often deployed in the special operations that have replaced more traditional types of warfare. The extension of counter-terrorism to include assassination by unaccountable mercenaries and remote-controlled killing by drones is part of this shift. A metamorphosis in the nature is war is under way, which is global in reach. With the state of Iraq in ruins as a result of US-led regime change, a third of the country is controlled by Isis, which is able to inflict genocidal attacks on Yazidis and wage a campaign of terror on Christians with near-impunity. In Nigeria, the Islamist militias of Boko Haram practise a type of warfare featuring mass killing of civilians, razing of towns and villages and sexual enslavement of women and children. In Europe, targeted killing of journalists, artists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen embodies a type of warfare that refuses to recognise any distinction between combatants and civilians. Whether they accept the fact or not, advanced societies have become terrains of violent conflict. Rather than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred. |
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| Deaths on the battlefield have fallen and may continue to fall. From one angle this can be seen as an advancing condition of peace. From another point of view that looks at the variety and intensity with which violence is being employed, the Long Peace can be described as a condition of perpetual conflict. | ||
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| Certainly the figures used by Pinker and others are murky, leaving a vast range of casualties of violence unaccounted for. But the value of these numbers for such thinkers comes from their very opacity. Like the obsidian mirrors made by the Aztecs for purposes of divination, these rows of graphs and numbers contain nebulous images of the future – visions that by their very indistinctness can give comfort to believers in human improvement. | ||
| An obsidian mirror – ‘visions that by their very indistinctness can give comfort’. Photograph: Alamy | ||
| Plundered and brought to Europe after the Aztecs were conquered and destroyed by the Spaniards, one of these mirrors was used as a “scrying-glass” by the mathematician, navigator, magician and intelligence gatherer Dr John Dee. Described by Queen Elizabeth as “my philosopher”, Dee acted as a court adviser on the basis of his reputed possession of occult powers. Working with a “scryer” or medium, he claimed to discern “angels” pointing to letters and symbols, which he then transcribed. According to Dee, the archangel Michael appeared in one of these scrying sessions bearing a message about an ever closer relationship between divine and earthly powers. Commanding Dee to record what he was about to see, the angel produced some elaborate tables, which together constituted a revelation of a coming global order based on godly principles. | ||
| The divination Dee practised was of a distinctively modern kind. More than most at the time, he understood that the effect of the scientific revolution would be to displace humankind from the centre of things. Like many during the Renaissance – a period in history defined as much by the rise of magic as by that of science – Dee needed reassurance as to the importance of human action. Offering a vision of the future in their tables of figures, the “angels” confirmed that humans still had a central position in the cosmos. | ||
| More than four centuries later, there are many who need to be reassured of their significance in the world. The Elizabethans found in divination support for their belief that history contained a hidden design that would culminate in a new world order. Obeying the same need for meaning, modern thinkers look to numbers for signs that show the emergence of a world founded on rational and moral principles. They believe that improvement in ethics and politics is incremental and accretive: one advance is followed by another in a process that stabilises and strengthens the advances that have already taken place. Now and then regress may occur, but when this happens it does so against a background in which the greater part of what has been achieved so far does not pass away. Slowly, over time, the world is becoming a better place. | ||
| The ancient world, along with all the major religions and pre-modern philosophies, had a different and truer view. Improvements in civilisation are real enough, but they come and go. While knowledge and invention may grow cumulatively and at an accelerating rate, advances in ethics and politics are erratic, discontinuous and easily lost. Amid the general drift, cycles can be discerned: peace and freedom alternate with war and tyranny, eras of increasing wealth with periods of economic collapse. Instead of becoming ever stronger and more widely spread, civilisation remains inherently fragile and regularly succumbs to barbarism. This view, which was taken for granted until sometime in the mid-18th century, is so threatening to modern hopes that it is now practically incomprehensible. | Why is this pessimistic/cyclic view "truer?" | |
| Unable to tolerate the prospect that the cycles of conflict will continue, many are anxious to find continuing improvement in the human lot. Who can fail to sympathise with them? Lacking any deeper faith and incapable of living with doubt, it is only natural that believers in reason should turn to the sorcery of numbers. How else can they find meaning in their lives? Happily, there are some among us who are ready to assist in the quest. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to them by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves. | ||
| To give succour to the spiritually needy is a worthy vocation. No one can deny the humanistic passion and intellectual ingenuity that have gone into the effort. Still, there is always room for improvement. Whether they are printed on paper or filed on an e-reader, books do not provide what is now most needed: an instantly available sensation of newly created meaning. It is only modern inventions that can meet modern needs. At the same time, inspiration can be found in more primitive technologies. | ||
| A revolving metal cylinder containing a sacred text, the Tibetan prayer wheel is set in motion by the turn of a human hand. The result is an automated form of prayer, which the votary believes may secure good fortune and the prospect of liberation from the round of birth and death. The belief system that the prayer wheel serves may possess a certain archaic charm, with its sacred texts displaying a dialectical subtlety not often found in western philosophy. Still, it will be self-evident to any modern mind that the device is thoroughly unscientific. How much better to fashion a high-tech prayer wheel – an electronic tablet containing inspirational statistics on the progress of humankind, powered by algorithms that show this progress to be ongoing. | ||
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| Unlike the old-fashioned prayer wheel, the device would be based on the latest scientific knowledge. Programmed to collect and process big data, it would have the ability to deliver statistics that never fail to show long-term improvement in the human condition. If regress of any kind was happening, it would appear as a temporary pause in the forward march of the species. In order to ward off moods of doubt – to which even the most convinced believers in improvement are occasionally prone – the device would broadcast sound versions of the uplifting statistics. Best of all, the device would be designed to be worn at all times. | ||
| It would not be the first time that science has been used to bolster faith in the future. Nineteenth-century disciples of Comte’s religion of humanity practised a daily ritual in which they tapped the parts of their heads that according to phrenology embodied the impulses of altruism and progress. In order that they would never forget the importance of cooperation, they were instructed to wear specially designed clothing with buttons down the back that could be accessed only with the help of other people. Twenty-first century believers in human improvement can surely find a better way to practise their faith. Reciting out loud numbers broadcast by their amulets, they can exorcise any disturbing thoughts from their minds. For so long shrouded in myth and superstition, meaning in life can at last be produced by modern methods. | These paragraphs are all guilt-by-association. We are relentlessly told tale after tale of foolishness, as though somehow Pinker is guilty of the same foolishness. That proposition has not yet been proven. | |
| There may be some who object that meaning cannot be manufactured in this way. It reveals itself in hints and intimations, these reactionaries will say – the shadow that reminds of mortality; the sudden vista that reveals an unimagined loveliness; the brief glance that opens a new page. Such objections will count for nothing. The advance of knowledge cannot be halted any more than the pursuit of human betterment can be permanently thwarted. Responding to the creative incentives of an unfettered marketplace, a state-of‑the-art tablet generating meaning from numbers will soon render the prayer wheels of the past obsolete. | Nope. It was not proven. Just a vague association. | |
| • John Gray’s The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom is published by Allen Lane. John Gray will be in conversation with Will Self at Islington Assembly Hall, London N1 on 18 March. Tickets £15. |
2. Quodlibeta: Steven Pinker's Medieval Murder Rates
| Tuesday, November 15, 2011 | |
Steven Pinker's Medieval Murder Rates |
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In a highly problematic passage from Steven Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ the professor highlights the fact that homicide rates have plummeted across Europe since the 13th century. He does this with reference to the work of sociologists and historians such as Ted Robert Gurr and Carl I Hammer which show that murder rates dropped sharply across the centuries – 14th century England was about 95% more violent than the present era. What conclusions does Pinker draw from this? He seems to be pushing some theory by Norbert Elias which states that a civilizing process occurred. Medieval people were boorish, animalistic and lacking in habits of refinement. According to Pinker: |
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| ‘over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions.’ | See Tom Woods: This is Christianization in action. |
| By contrast according to Pinker | |
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| Now at this point once again I have to jump to the defence of the poor benighted medievals. Unlike Steven Pinker I am a regular watcher of the ‘Maury Povich’ show in the United States (for UK readers the immediate point of reference is the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’) and I have been on numerous pub crawls in UK city centres. All of the gross practices highlighted by Pinker are in evidence – one might say omnipresent - in modern society so it makes little sense to rat on our ancestors for displaying them. Perhaps Pinker needs to spend less like in the urbane, sophisticated environment of Cambridge Massachusetts and more time somewhere like Calton Glasgow. Then he might not have as much confidence in the voodoo like properties of Peter Singer's ‘empathy circle’. | |
| So what to make of Pinker’s historical data? Well, from the start I would expect to see a drop in homicide rates across the centuries for four reasons. Firstly societies have gradually increased centralised power in the state and established a monopoly on violence. Secondly courts of law have become more effective as venues for settling disputes, thereby making the use of violence unnecessary. Thirdly schooling and education have introduced a greater civility – perhaps this counts as a ‘civilising process’? Fourthly, it is now much harder to kill people due to modern medicine and the emergency services. Wounds which would previously have been fatal and resulted in homicide now result in grievous bodily harm*. A Saturday night in Newcastle which in previous centuries might have resulted in a bloodbath now simply results in the A&E being clogged with aggressive drunks. It would therefore not be surprising if homicide rates were higher before these variables developed – what would be surprising is if they were lower. *This is perhaps the most important point. For example Randolph Roth author of American Homicide argues that given modern medicine—emergency response, trauma surgery, antibiotics, and wound care—three out of every four people murdered before 1850 would probably survive today. |
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| Before looking at Pinker’s figures I should point out how homicide rates are calculated, as n per 100,000 of population per annum. Basically you take the number of murders and divide it by the population size (of say Medieval Norwich). You then multiply this by 100,000 to give you the murder rate. Pinker has some figures from Gurr which show the murder rate in Medieval London as having homicide rates from of around 50 per 100,000 during the 14th and 15th centuries (the present figure is more like 1.8 per 100,000). He quotes a figure from Carl Hammer showing that the murder rate in 14th century Oxford was 110 per 100,000 which is astonishingly high given how sleepy and civilised the place is today (this murder rate - calculated based on 36 cases of homicide between 1342 and 1348 - is akin to that of cartel ridden Ciudad Juarez in Mexico). | |
| Are the figures accurate? Here we run into a number of problems. You might have noticed that the homicide rates are highly dependent on the population statistics. Michael Prestwich discusses this in Plantagenet England 1225-1360 (p507-508). One estimate he quotes is that London in the first half of the fourteenth century had a homicide rate of between 5.2 and 3,6 cases per 10,000 (equivalent to 52 per 100,000 and 36 per 100,000 meaning London was as violent as present day New Orleans). However this estimate was based on the population of London being 35,000 to 50,000. It’s become increasingly clear that these estimates are wrong. For example it’s clear that building densities around Cheapside were extensive by the end of the 14th
century – at levels not reached again until 1600 when the population was 100,000-200,000 including suburbs. According to Prestwich estimates of the city's population now reach as high as 107,900 to 176,000. At a population of 100,000 the murder rate would be 1.8 per 10,000 (18 per 100,000). This would make London’s murder rate equivalent to present day Atlanta or Pittsburgh. A slightly higher population estimate would make the murder rate equivalent to present day Boston across the Charles river from Stephen Pinker’s office – which seems unlikely. If that were correct then the question we would have to ask is why our present day cities are more dangerous than their equivalents in an age of comparative lawlessness** ?
**The issue of how violent Medieval society was is seriously hampered by lack of evidence. Alternative interpretations exist such as Phillipa Maddern’s ‘Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422-1442’ which argued that the allegedly violent landscape of East Anglia (then the most urbanised area of England) was in fact, remarkably free of criminal violence and that this model could be applied to the rest of the country. |
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| What of the Mexican murder rate for Oxford? Prestwich says that the high figure may be explained by the fact Hammer used coroners records to come up with his statistics. Unlike the present day these report the circumstances of a mortality and do not distinguish between murder, manslaughter or accidental death – hence you end up with an extremely wide range of possible rates***. Given the paucity of data – Pinker seems to have gone for the highest one in order to massage his thesis. Furthermore such records only cover a period of a few years and might reflect a one off crime wave ****.
***As an example of the difficulties with this approach the only surviving run of coroners’ records for England’s 2nd largest city Norwich are from 1263 to 1268. These document 36 cases, 14 seem to be accidental death or theft. In 5 the conclusion is more ambiguous – either the jury swore the death was accidental or the suspect was cleared by compurgation. That leaves 17 possible instances of murder over 5 years – a proportion of which could classed as manslaughter. If these were all murders the average rate per year given a population of 17,000 would have been 20 per 100,000 – a rate akin to Philadelphia in 2010. If half were murders the rate would be 10 which is slightly less than Boston. ****Oxford was undoubtedly a violent place in the Middle Ages. Of 29 coroners’ reports that have been preserved for the period 1297-1322, 13 are murders committed by scholars. Attacks on townspeople were sometimes countenanced and even led by officials of the university. For example in 1526 a Procter organised a riot in which many citizens were attacked and their houses looted. In 1355 in what became known as the ‘St Scholastic’s Day riot’ an argument in a tavern became a pub brawl which went on for the next 3 days. It began when a group of students at an inn near Carfax disapproved of the wine they were served. The inn-keeper having given them ‘stubborn and saucy language’ the clerks ‘threw the wine and vessel at his head’. The townspeople then seized the opportunity to arm themselves with bows and arrows and attack scholars. Gangs of academics and citizens clashed in the streets and academic halls were burned. Six students and scholars were killed. |
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| Any conclusions based on what little statistics we have must therefore be provisional and potentially unsafe. For example, according to Prestwich, the records show that there were ‘only three larcenies in Norwich in 1313, as against 703 in Bedford, Indiana (a town of similar size), in 1975’. It would be ill-advisable to read that statistic and go on to write a book called ‘The terrible daemons of our nature’ showing the slide into criminality of Western Culture – especially since 14th century crime reporting probably less quite a lot to be desired. |
3. Quodlibeta: Steven Pinker and the An Lushan Revolt
| Sunday, November 06, 2011 | |
Steven Pinker and the An Lushan Revolt |
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| Most people – I think – if asked to name the bloodiest century in human history would probably say the 20th. I hasten to add this isn't the kind of question you get on history exam papers nowadays – you are more likely to get quizzed on ‘Household Formation, Lineage and gender relations in the early modern Atlantic world’ or something less bloodthirsty. | |
| In Steven Pinker’s new book, ‘The better angels of our nature’ the wild haired Harvard professor is having none of this. The preference for the 20th century is mere ‘historical myopia’. Instead when one roots around through the history books for forgotten wars and scales for the world’s population at the time – you find a whole set of lesser known conflicts that dwarf the toll for the first and second world wars. Pinker then presents a table showing the Second World War as merely the 9th most destructive atrocity of all time – lagging behind the Atlantic Slave Trade, the annihilation of the American Indians, Tamerlane’s conquests, the fall of Rome, the fall of the Ming dynasty, the Mid-east slave trade, the Mongol conquests and – most terrible of all – the An Lushan Revolt (something the majority of westerners have never even heard of). | |
| Now at this point one’s proverbial ‘Bullshit-o-meter’ should be sounding – anyone who claims that they have a reasonably accurate ‘death toll estimate’ for something like the Mongol Conquests is being ludicrously over-confident. Pinker’s table looks suspiciously like something that has been cut and pasted from Wikipedia. In fact the figures appear to have been lifted from a site called ‘Necromterics’ authored by Matthew White – a librarian and author whose somewhat macabre hobby appears to be calculating historic death tolls. His scholarly works include such essays as 'Which Has Killed More People? Christianity? or Gun Control' so it's a bit strange that Pinker would consider him the go-to man on the demography of Medieval China. | |
| The An Lushan Revolt, according to Pinker and White, wiped out something like 36,000,000 Chinese over the course of 8 years – a toll equivalent to two thirds (66%) of the Tang Empire’s population. If you scale for the mid 20th century’s population you would end up with an equivalent toll of 429,000,000 people. That would indeed be an astonishing high death rate – by comparison the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia killed around 13% of Russia’s population - over half the population in the regions and countries of Europe where there is data of useful quality died in the Black Death (perhaps the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world). To justify this Pinker and White refer to the fact that at the
peak of the medieval Tang dynasty, the census taken in the year 753 recorded a population of 52,880,488. After eleven years of civil war, the census of 764 gave a figure of 16,900,000. None of the figures cited on White’s site appear to come from Sinologists as far as I can see and no context is given for the low census figures*.
*In his recent book 'The great big book of horrible things' Matthew White goes with a 'more conservative' figure for the An Lushan revolt of 13 million dead - though he obviously didn't tell Pinker. |
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| Accordingly I have worked through a number of works such as the ‘Cambridge History of China Vol 3’, Mark Edward Lewis’s ‘The Chinese Cosmopolitan Empire – the Tang Dynasty’ and David Andrew Graff’s ‘Medieval Chinese Warfare’ to see if they can shed greater light on what is now claimed to be the greatest holocaust in human history. | |
| An Lushan was a garrison commanding general of mixed Sogdian and Turkish descent who rebelled against the Tang Dynasty in 755. This sparked a civil war across northern China for a period of eight years before the rebels were finally destroyed in 763. During this period of the two capitals of the Tang dynasty, the city of Chang’an was damaged and the city of Luoyang was burned. This suggests that the conflict was highly destructive but when assessing the impact there are a number of difficulties. | |
| Firstly, up until the modern age, population counts were sporadic and incomplete. The first full censuses were not made until 1790 in the United States and 1801 in Britain. In the medieval Chinese era, the government counted households and some or all of the people constituting them, but did not attempt a complete registration until 1953. This was for the purpose of levying troops or more commonly allocating tax burdens. Only a few landmark censuses from the pre-Song era are taken to be reasonably reliable and the taxation records are frequently disrupted by war and administrative chaos. The figures for number of households are held to be far more reliable than those for actual head count | |
| Secondly the census figures vary wildly depending on the contemporary level of government control. For example, in the reign of Taizong from 626 to 649, only 3,000,000 household were registered. Under the previous Sui dynasty (581-618) the figure had been 9,000,000 households. According to Richard Guisso in the Cambridge History of China this ‘sensational decline was not the result of catastrophic loss of life during the civil warfare of late Sui and early T'ang, but of simple failure by the local authorities to register the population in full. Even in the first years of Kao-tsung's reign only 3,800,000 households - certainly far less than half of the actual population – were registered. Considerably more than half of the population was thus unregistered and paying no taxes (p297 Cambridge History of China). This shows that in times of difficulty the highly centralised taxation system could break down – resulting in half the population or more being omitted from the census. | |
| After the An Lushan revolt the situation reached crisis proportions and a new period of warlordism and regional autonomy emerged. The Tang had survived only by carrying out a general decentralisation of administrative power and dispersing power through a new tier of provincial governments. Despite the restoration of peace the empire remained in a state of chaos. China broke into many regions who collected their own taxes and remitted only a small portion to the central government. The Tang could no longer update it’s registers and chart landowning; local tax records were destroyed, scattered and rendered obselete. As Graff writes: | |
| After the An Lushan rebellion, the Tang court lost the ability to enroll, enumerate, and impose taxes directly upon the majority of China’s peasant households. This development is dramatically illustrated by the decline of the registered population from approximately nine million households in 755 to less than two million in 760. (P240 – Medieval Chinese Warfare) | |
| The post rebellion census figures cannot then be relied upon when estimating the impact on the empires population in the 8th century and there are no signs of a catastrophic two thirds population loss. Instead the indications are that China continued to have a large population base into the 9th century with which the dynasty was able to raise professional and conscripted armies to compete with the nomadic powers in dominating inner Asia. | |
| The estimates given by the great Harvard sinologist John King Fairbank in 'the New History of China' (2006) are that ‘the empire’s population may have totalled 60 million in AD 80, 80 million in 875, 110 million in 1190’ (p106). These are of course estimates but they show that the general impression from historians of the period is not one of catastrophic population decline followed by recovery – but of a slow and steady late medieval population boom coupled with a shift in population from north to south. Mark Edward Lewis remarks that that: | |
| ‘Between 742 and 1080 (two years for which comprehensive census records have survived), the population in the north increased by only 26 percent, while that in the south increased by 328 percent’ | |
| C A Peterson in the Cambridge history of China notes that in the wake of the rebellion: | |
| Large scale shifts of population took place. Many of the war affected areas in Ho-pei and Ho-nan were partially depopulated, and many people migrated to the Huai and Yangtze valleys and to the south (P496) | |
| There are therefore plenty of reasons to be sceptical of Pinker’s claim that An Lushan’s revolt ranks as the most destructive war of all time. In fact he doesn’t appear to have done even the most basic research of research into the credibility of his figures; which is a shame because ‘The Better Angels of our Natures’ is a very good read and presents some interesting questions. | |