COOK: What would you say is the biggest misconception people have about violence?
PINKER: That we are living in a violent age. The statistics suggest that this may be the most peaceable time in our species’s existence.
COOK: Can you give a sense for how violent life was 500 or 1000 years ago?
PINKER: Statistics aside, accounts of daily life in medieval and early modern Europe reveal a society soaked in blood and gore. Medieval knights—whom today we would call warlords—fought their numerous private wars with a single strategy: kill as many of the opposing knight’s peasants as possible. Religious instruction included prurient descriptions of how the saints of both sexes were tortured and mutilated in ingenious ways. Corpses broken on the wheel, hanging from gibbets, or rotting in iron cages where the sinner had been left to die of exposure and starvation were a common part of the landscape. For entertainment, one could nail a cat to a post and try to head-butt it to death, or watch a political prisoner get drawn and quartered, which is to say partly strangled, disemboweled, and castrated before being decapitated. So many people had their noses cut off in private disputes that medical textbooks had procedures that were alleged to grow them back.
COOK: What made you interested in violence as a scientific question?
PINKER: I’ve long argued that the human mind is not a blank slate but has been fitted by evolution with a complex set of emotions, drives, and systems for reasoning, learning, and communicating. Advocates of the blank slate fear that the very idea of human nature dooms us to perpetual conflict—that if we are killer apes with a territorial imperative, a thirst for blood, a death instinct, and genes for aggression, then it’s pointless to try to make the world a better place.
These fears, I’ve argued, are illogical. Human nature may embrace motives that lead to aggression, but it also embraces motives like empathy, self-control, and reason, which, under the right circumstances, can outweigh the aggressive impulses. And empirically, we can observe many ways in which violence has decreased over time, including a relief from cycles of deadly raiding and feuding when tribes came under the control of states, the 35-fold decline of homicide in medieval Europe, the abolition of slavery, cruel punishments, and frivolous executions, and the recent replacement of totalitarian regimes with democracies.
COOK: Having worked through this material, I wonder, do you see current events differently now?
PINKER: Absolutely. The present looks less sinister, the past less innocent. The mind always focuses on current threats, and takes for granted the violent events that don’t happen but could easily have happened a few decades ago. A sniper in Norway kills dozens of innocent people—and the population does not riot or lynch the perpetrator and his extended family, but holds candlelight vigils. The Egyptian government falls—but the new one does not vow to push the Israelis into the sea. North Korea sinks a South Korean ship, killing 45 sailors—but instead of escalating to war, the Koreans go back to life as usual. Every day I notice the dogs that don’t bark.
. That would like appealing to the principles of logic to prove the color of red
. This place is free entertainment. Why wouldn't I come here?
