..on laundry, that hour and a half is spent washing a lot more clothes than the eleven before. If we had the limited wardrobes of those people, it'd probably be down to twenty minutes.
On the flip side, 11 hours seems high. I've washed clothes by hand before; it doesn't take that long and in fact it's faster than washing by machine (though you can't do something else at the same time).
If you're only washing your clothes maybe but 11 hours a week sounds reasonable if one person is washing clothes for a family + hanging/collecting/folding
If you live in an area with reasonably priced electricity and access to plentiful water. I lived in Honduras for 3 years (2009 - 2012) and laundry consumed far too much of my time because water in the community came twice per week, and electricity was expensive. I had a cistern which was connected to the water main, and I installed a floating shut off valve so that I could leave the valve open to fill with water when it came without notice and invariably I was out working. I couldn't afford a dryer due to high cost of electricity and I was volunteering without any spare income during that period so I had to wash and dry clothes on sunny days. There were people in the community that still washed clothes by hand using a scrub board and I know that they spent many hours weekly on it.
I listened to "Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens" by Eddie Izzard base on the last time Bill Gates book recommendations were on HN and it is superb so this is now an automatic buy for me.
Izzard is someone with quite astounding levels of determination - I had no idea until I read the book that his childhood ambition was to join the SAS, which he may well have been quite suited for.
I've had the same experience whenever I go to his page. It seems odd that a guy that needs no money from his website would have one that doesn't display on everything. There are few sites where my blockers block all of the content. This is one of them.
How do you feel like Homo Deus compares to Sapiens w.r.t. being hand wavy and having a solid grasp on what the potential futures are that we are facing?
Not OP, but as a reader of both Sapiens and Homo Deus, I feel like the latter is a bit of fluff already covered by the end of Sapiens.
Not a bad book, but more baseless theorizing while Sapiens was a really rich examination of history where he author definitely applied a lifetime of study and research.
I'm surprised that you would describe it as baseless, because the theories he presents are built upon the lifetime of study & research of the examination of human history and motivations.
Good point. I don’t mean baseless as worthless, just that it was largely out of the author’s wheelhouse and was more of his projection of ideas without much in the way of evidence. This differed from Sapiens as it was really rich in historical and anthropological sources.
It’s not bad, just not very valuable as an entire book to read. It’s mostly already covered in the final segment of Sapiens.
Homo Deus is certainly based on the author’s general wisdom and draws upon his study of history. It’s always hard to vet “futurists” to see who is worthwhile.
I appreciated Sapiens because while it also examines similar measures for how our lives are "improving," it also stops to ask how we decide what those measures should be. Progress is subjective.
I guess I can only give my opinion from my own limited world, but I feel to an extent that "reason, science, and humanism" are at need of advocacy today, more than usual. This book might be well timed.
Good on Bill Gates to not just choose a feel-good book for sake of "virtue signaling", but a book with real substance in it. (The fact that this book happens to be optimistic is incidental)
I dunno how strong it is, but I have a feeling that the virtue signalling you mention is at least tangentially at odds with the "reason, science, and humanism" he mentions.
I'm also a fan of Pinker's books, but stopping to consider valuable when he writes the preface or recommends a book. I've got 2 terrible flops reading his recommendations. It looks like he'd recommend any friend that ask him.
So torn. I'm generally a Pinker fan, but almost detest Peter Singer's thought to the core. Singer recommending that book makes me really second guess the recommendation. But I respect Bill Gates immensely too.
Maybe the idea that Pinker could write a book so loved by both Gates and Singer is a testament to how good it is?
Something more interesting would be learn how to more quickly improve the world. The world of 2100 could arrive in 2050, for example.
Gates has around $100 billion to improve the world. How to most effectively leverage his money, for example?
Build a better pharmaceutical company and cure some of the diseases on his list? Help to create better economies in Africa?
[UPDATE]
This comment got downvoted fast. I guess I’ll be happy with the improvements and learn to live with the current rate of progress.
Any other feel good comments from the book that I could use at a party?
[UPDATE]
Don’t want to waste fu karma today. So, answer is half the world’s population lives in cities. Perhaps we could increase by making them more liveable. I’m all for reducing the human footprint on the world. Wildlife crossings, fewer roads and cars, less plastic, etc. How about a billion people move one planet over? A lot depends on increasing knowledge and reducing costs. Let’s increase the rate of innovation!
Absolutely - even if everyone read this and suddenly feels complacent about our progress - what's next? Everyone is scared to talk about population growth - I mean at what point do we decide that we don't want to erase all unpopulated land simple because its there and fill it with humans. What about populations of wild animals - don't they get to share the earth with us? I feel like the movies about aliens coming and killing all humans is exactly how we treat animals on this planet. Just because they don't use verbal communication doesn't mean they should be slaughtered for our food. Why does progress always have to be pro-human?
I have yet to meet anyone who gave a good answer to this question. It is obvious that we (as a species) behave like this because we can get away with it. Plain & simple. Whether it is a good long-term strategy is unclear to our brains that refuse to look at far-off effects. Time will tell.
Besides moral relativism helps us to justify much of our destructive behaviour and inability to accept hard changes that might be necessary to make the world better for all living things.
My two cents on population: cars are a cancer on modernity. For a hundred years we have structured cities and societies around the automobile. As a result we as a species are largely bound to an expensive machine and a design of society that cannot function without that expensive machine. Many cities (especially in America, which is an enormous country with lots of space) are so sprawled out and gutted from public transit (thanks GM!) that transportation is impossible without the automobile. It’s even worse when you factor in the fact that a lot of freight is also required to be moved by automobile.
Sprawl increases costs of transportation and infrastructure (roads, water, gas, electric, sewage) by an enormous degree. This in turn raises the cost of everything else to everybody.
Even a perfect Jason Statham self-driving car would serve as a band-aid over a diseased organ.
The very difficult question we must ask if we expect to maintain our standard of living with a growing population and a planet rotting from overconsumption is how do we redesign ALL cities to operate at the lowest possible cost per person. Otherwise we continue to pass along the cost to the planet and the next generations...assuming there will be any...
Love Pinker but thought this was too funny not to share: "Steven Pinker jinxes the world" on how a lot of the trends that he spoke about started to stall and even reverse since the publication of the book.
"War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations."
I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).
Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
I think the jist is that this was still successful because if the UN didn't exist we may have already had 7 additional multination wars (that is if the first 2 didn't kill everyone). Of course we don't know for sure if that would have happened.
Don't forget that the US has had a hand in very many of those wars, and have been responsible for massive amounts of deaths in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
Including by the countries supposed to enforce the rule (UN security council: Russia who annexed Crimea, China building illegal islands in the Pacific, US who started wars based on lies for oil..)
That's a false context setup. Show me Halliburton's chart where it collapsed down to $16 in 2008 after the commodity bubble burst.
All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26.
Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production.
If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.
That graph doesn't show an obvious uptick after the big red "WAR" dot. It's growing fast but seemingly was before just as much. What's it supposed to prove?
You could easily argue that most of the conflict the US is currently involved in - and there are many! with boots on the ground or otherwise[0] - have some motive involving petrodollar or other resources.
Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
You're saying it was about oil primarily. Yet the US didn't take Iraq's oil. The US didn't even secure an outsized share of contracts related to Iraq's oil. The US vaporized a trillion dollars, along with suffering tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, trying to stop the Iraqi civil war in which Iraqis killed hundreds of thousands of each other.
Simultaneously over that decade the US technologically unlocks its massive shale oil resources, making Middle Eastern oil almost entirely moot strategically. So much so, that the US is now merely about 10% of Saudi oil demand.
And the US got what out of all of that Iraq mess when it comes to oil? The US stuck its military where it shouldn't have been, and it did so for geo-political reasons, not economic reasons. The US was a massive loser economically from that effort to try to weaken Russia, it was an economic disaster. The net 'benefit' over two decades will be perhaps close to a negative two trillion dollars all-in.
> Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
> You're saying it was about oil primarily.
Those aren't conflicting explanations; the US is concerned about the friendliness of governments in the region largely because it cares about how they manage oil supplies (both for price and geostrategic reasons like making sure we have access and our enemies do not in a major crisis.)
Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today, and will overwhelmingly be tomorrow. Please explain to me how it was in the US interest to topple Saddam, lose a couple trillion dollars in national treasure, all so China could increase its power and influence by securing critical oil supplies and displace the US influence in the Middle East.
And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
> Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today
No, it's not, because the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy.
If we were in a major war with China now and that was true, it would suggest that the policy had been unsuccessful in achieving a key goal, but even then wouldn't refute that that had been the policy goal.
> And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
Perhaps (though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use) but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
> the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy
Of course it's about who buys (ie who can supply their economy with the energy it needs). The entire political value of oil is that it's critical to most economies. You keep saying that it's about controlling the oil, the point of that control is to use it for self-benefit. If the US were doing what you're claiming, it would be denying oil to China. You say that there is value in being able to deny oil supply to enemies - and then you pretend the US wouldn't have an interest in denying oil supply to China to slow its economic ascension (it obviously would benefit massively if it could partially suffocate China's growth via oil). These are contradictions in your theory, as China swims in Middle Eastern oil supply.
> though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use
Russian and Iranian oil production is drastically beyond their peacetime economic consumption. I can't imagine where you're trying to go with that.
> but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
You're refuting yourself there. Then why didn't the US deny Chinese access to Iraqi oil? China almost immediately began benefiting immensely from Iraq's oil as production ramped up after the worst of the shutdown. Saudi's primary customer is now China and that is going to get a lot more dramatic in the coming decade. Those two points collapse what you're claiming.
If the US wanted to press an advantage, it would destroy Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil supplies (use an ISIS-like mess), which would hammer China's economy by removing 1/4 to 1/3 of their oil supply. The US is now one of the few major nations that can fully support itself on energy. Instead, the US is actively protecting both Saudi and Iraq, while the largest US rival - China - benefits the most from that protection.
I agree that people probably overestimate the role of oil, but you have to keep in mind that the current world paradigm is not the world paradigm at the time of the Iraq war, and that there are very personal issues involving the Bush dynasty and its connections with the intelligence-executive infrastructure at play as well.
The US shale oil issue has also really flipped the script as well; it's something I don't think anyone was predicting at the time. The rapidity of solar and wind's rise is another surprising thing.
I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that. I just mean that, yes, China is dominant now, and there's a certain global socioeconomic-political dynamic. But at the time leading up to the Iraq war, the world was a very different place in terms of global politics and energy economics.
It is probably more fruitful to argue over whether or not the US government anticipated these geopolitical changes well enough. But to point to things that happened later as a rationale for what transpired before seems backward to me.
In some ways, the transition we've witnessed is from a oil-cold-war dynamic involving the US and Russia/USSR to a vacuum, made by renewable energy and Asian and European economic growth. As an American, I feel like we should sidestep issues about Euro-Asian supremacy and American-Russian decline, and take a hard look at what assumptions we often make, and what it increasingly looks like is that many of the old political blocs are starting to seem irrelevant to a prosperous future. I think America has a dominant role it can play, and will, if it just starts being forward-looking instead of backward-looking.
It didn't vaporize any money whatsoever, in fact, Halliburton (and many of the hundreds of military strategy companies in the MIC) did quite well with their new economy.
The data shows a downward trend in interstate conflicts, colonial conflicts, and per capita battle deaths since the 40's. Civil conflicts peaked in the early 90's, but nukes aren't a factor in those.
There is other research[0] (also recently posted to HN, though it got a lot less traction than Gates and Pinker), that claims this trend may very likely not be there. It's very hard to prove.
The fact that a law is broken is not a counterexample of the law existing. War was once the default, and lauded. Now it is the exception, and is decried and worked against.
When a war happens we ask ourselves why, and the international community works to try to prevent it the next time. That would be truly alien to a world leader even a couple centuries ago.
How much of this is UN and how much is the new world structure and technology meaning any conflict can diverge into WW2 and nobody wants to end up being Germany again ?
I see this as the basis for cold wars and other international competitions, conflicts are converted into other outlets.
Yeah. It seems to me that it's not so much that "war is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it." Or at least try to. That's probably a good thing, but it seems useful to me to approach it with a more accurate perspective.
"It seems to me that it's not so much that war "is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it.""
In some lines of thought, that's the definition of illegal...
OK, but even by that definition, it's not the UN that has made it illegal. The UN is pretty toothless.
I mean, yes, they have peacekeeping forces. Those forces are not keeping the peace by force. In fact, there have been times when they have stood aside while one side violated the peace, because the UN force's rules of engagement didn't allow them to use force to prevent one side from starting the war back up.
It can be pretty toothless, but the mere fact that it exists as a platform for discussion, expression if views and the firmation if consensus is a huge improvement compared to nothing. I think the experience nations get of working together on issues is also pretty valuable.
AnimalMuppet isn't making a general criticism of the UN, he's arguing that the UN isn't responsible for war being illegal under dfmooreqqq's operational definition.
Yes, but being explicit and acknowledging the concentration of power is better than saying pithily "war is illegal", as if it were shoplifting or loitering.
>Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45.
Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.
the cist of tye war to Russia was also ruinous and maintaining that level of conventional forces would have been a real priblem. Bear in mind they got a lot of material support from the Allies during the war and continuing without that would have been very painful.
One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.
The 1/7 GDP figure is misleading. It is absolutely true that everyone had an incentive back then to overstate the USSR's position: Communists and sympathizers for ego gratification, American liberals to use as an argument for government intervention in the economy and internal reform, and the American Right to ramp up militarism and domestic repression. That said, the revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.
GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter.
For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO.
Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.
>revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think there are two factors at play here:
1. The USSR's power projection was really good because it's really hard to convince people to fight for capitalism. For communism, on the other hand, you always have a million volunteers.
2. The USSR's military credibility when it comes to a land war in Europe was based on the fact that they were preparing for a near-home or home defense scenario. So, instead of investing in expensive fleets, aircraft carriers, and bombers, they invested in tanks, close-support aircraft, and anti-air stuff. The Atlantic would prevent the US from effectively responding to massive columns of tanks, since tanks are very heavy and hard to transport and supply. However, it also means that the USSR wouldn't be going anywhere with its massive war machine. It wouldn't have any ability to threaten anything outside of euroope. So the obvious result of any conventional war would have been the US conventionally bombing every Russian city to dust.
The Soviets lost to the incredibly poor country of Afghanistan. Vietnam's GDP was/is a small fraction of Russia's, yet America still lost and communism spread through the region. If war came to Western Europe again, I find it unlikely that America could've won.
"The Internationalists" makes the case that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact to outlaw war was what started the paradigm shift against war [1]. (Of course the thesis is controversial, as you say.) You might enjoy the book; here's an Op-Ed the authors wrote in summary [2], and a podcast interview with the authors [3].
> From 1816 until the Kellogg-Briand Pact was first signed in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one territorial conquest every 10 months. Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year... The average amount of territory seized between 1816 and 1928 was 114,088 square miles per year...
> Since World War II, conquest has almost come to a full stop. The average number of conquests per year fell drastically — to 0.26 per year, or one every four years. The average size of the territory taken declined to a mere 5,772 square miles per year. And the likelihood that any individual state would suffer a conquest in an average year plummeted — from 1.33 percent to 0.17 percent, or once or twice a millennium.
Neal Conan covered this in an episode of Truth, Politics and Power [1]. Can't say I completely agree with everything discussed but it's definitely a good listen. Both authors are on the episode and, as usual, Neal does a great job of giving them plenty of time to discuss their book and get their points across.
War is perhaps illegal, except in self-defence, but certain people interpret "self-defence" to mean "defence of (national) interests", but also, belt-and-braces, they don't actually declare war any more and claim that what they're doing, killing and maiming people, bombing hospitals, television studios, water purification plants, isn't a "war". Also, Geneva Convention does not apply because the victims are "unlawful combatants" or some such bullshit.
It still applies. It applies to the weapons we use, how we treat prisoners, and how we treat the injured. Bad things happen, but please don't ever think your solider's are willfully bombing hospitals or killing civilians.
Nothing has had as large an impact on the maintenance of relative peace, at least between large/nuclear nations, as the atomic bomb. It's the MAD principle - mutually assured destruction. I think our discovery of nukes is actually pretty cool.
No question about it. Nukes accomplish something that no other deterrent can: they make world leaders personally afraid to go to war with each other.
Those who advocate nuclear disarmament are basically advocating a return to increasingly-bloody world wars every few years.
Of course, it's also true that the leaders who are afraid to confront each other directly are more likely to resort to proxy wars that cause massive pain and suffering in their own right. But that's a different problem that will have to be solved by different means.
This is similar to what you've said, but I'd say the issue is more that it becomes more advantageous to use them if the same people who would normally levy sanctions against you have all disarmed. Currently there's little risk of North Korea actually using nuclear weapons. If they could do so without nuclear retaliation, it becomes a much more likely scenario. Even if banning nuclear weapons makes it much more difficult to obtain them, the consequences of someone obtaining them become much worse.
It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids.
Have you any source for that? It certainly raised questions but the war was winding down and destroying things the allies would need wasn’t in their interest.
Bigger raids happened after Dresden as well and Harris gave his opinion: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” Luckily he alone didn’t make describe I guess.
> It was what stopped the British led allied bombing which had escalated out of the Blitz. Dresden was not a military target and its destruction killed so many civilians that they stopped night time bombing raids.
No. Dresden was bombed on 15 February 1945 [0]. The British continued night raids until the end of the war, peaking in March, and with the last raid on Berlin on the night of 21/22 April (76 Mosquitos) and the final raid on the night of 25/26 April [1]
The Dresden firebombing is very well known outside of Germany. And if you've seen the 'before' and 'after' pictures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden you won't be surprised that people consider them to be on the same scale.
Bombing of Dresden is well known, of course, but it doesn't compare to a single bomb that can level cities when it comes to deterring your enemy. I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden, but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way (like Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo), so I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.
> No, there aren't. That's exactly why Dresden stands out.
I don't think it should be treated as a "most destroyed city" contest, but you should really research the scale of destruction in the cities I've mentioned. [1] looks quite comparable to [2], [3] looks arguably worse.
Those cities are larger. But the reason Dresden is used as an example in these conversations is not because such a huge number of people died (< 50K iirc) but because of the whole town very little was left standing. Those other cities are much larger, and even if in total more was destroyed also much more was left standing. Dresden was pretty much gone.
From [1]: "In total there were 222,000 apartments in the city. The bombing affected more than 80 percent of them with 75,000 of them being totally destroyed, 11,000 severely damaged, 7,000 damaged, and 81,000 slightly damaged."
From [2]: "By January 1945, between 85% and 90% of the buildings had been completely destroyed; this includes up to 10% as a result of the September 1939 campaign and following combat, up to 15% during the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 25% during the Uprising, and 40% due to systematic German demolition of city after the uprising"
It's not me underestimating the scale of destruction of Dresden, but rather you underestimating the scale of destruction in other cities.
Robert McNamara points out that the firebombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 civilians. In "The Fog of War" he also says that if the Allies had lost, he and Curtis "Bombs Away!" LeMay would have been treated as War Criminals, because they were.
I think the fact that liberal democracies don't go to war was the main reason - at least amongst western democracies. And even among non liberal democracies (eg China and Russia) as long as there is enough wealth and quality of lifestyle at risk amongst the ruling elite, there's not going to be much appetite for war.
The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb.
The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinkably destructive, so the superpowers were already deterred plenty from provoking a third world war. Also, since the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so disproportionate to any strategic goal, its threat is for all practical purposes a bluff, which is why so many non-nuclear powers have defied nuclear ones since 1945. Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
In the past, such small-power wars generally began once the (at least failsafe) support of a larger power was obtained. This always had the risk that the conflict might escalating to a first-power war (such as the first Punic War which was sparked by a tiny-power conflict.) Nowadays, the downside of such escalation is obviously even sharper.
The U.S. was never going to chose between Spain and Canada in advance of actual fighting (or Canada and France re similar issues), because the larger nuclear-fueled conflict with Russia made dumping allies overboard foolish; whoever began shooting would have lost. I would argue that the nuclear standoff trickles down.
The bomb is only a real deterrent amongst the superpowers. The cost of maintaining and deploying a modern military force is a bigger influence. Devoting a large portion of GDP to a standing army is only possible for demagogues and those few nations wealthy enough for the waste to not be felt by the populace. And even for the demagogues, their impressive manpower isn't all that well equipped or trained because it costs too much.
> Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
Frankly, this looks to me like Pinker is reasoning from a provably false premise. Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.
The Congo War killed ~4 million people, including 300,000+ via direct killings. The Yugoslav Wars killed 100,000+. The Second Gulf War, 400,000 deaths, 100,000+ from direct killings. The Syrian Civil War is 400k and counting.
The rejoinder, I suppose, is that Canada and Spain is a first-world example and none of my are. I don't buy it. First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict. Second, because Pinker's example is a silly one; both because war over flatfish would have been a money-loser and because Canada and Spain are NATO signatories operating under the nuclear shield of other nations. Shooting war between NATO member states is regularly described as a nightmare scenario that would escalate nuclear tensions worldwide; Pinker is naively or dishonestly equating "owning no nukes" with "lacking nuclear defense".
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
As for nuclear weapons being "disproportionate to any strategic goal" and "for all practical purposes a bluff"... I hope to god he's right, but tactical nuclear weapon use is back on the table in Russia and strategists don't seem to agree with him.
> First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict.
Great powers have interests in every war ever, but when Yugoslavia broke up, the USSR and in 1999 Russia were too weak to be considered equal adversaries.
In the early 90s the country fell apart and a tyrant started three wars ending in ethnic cleansing and genocide. When he started a fourth one in 1999, a short and by modern warfare limited campaign finally stopped him.
Sorry, the conflation of Yugoslavia with "proxy war" was in error, you're totally correct.
The link to great power conflict I had in mind there was the pressure cooker effect of Tito's dictatorship, which suppressed the major conflicts of the region without solving them. But it's a rather different entity than wars with direct meddling, and I can't judge the counterfactual: would a lack of Communist dictatorship have caused an earlier and more peaceful dissolution, or simply hastened what happened anyway?
It's a bad example and I shouldn't have used it; thank you.
I agree re. 'Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.' Vietnam, Cambodia, Syrian War (as you stated) IMO have been primarily proxy wars that resulted in a lot of killings while helping the powers avoid killings of their own people. Who can say they would have fought/killed at the same rate anyways if they weren't pushed/armed to do so but it seems to me that the casualty rate would have been lower in Vietnam, for example, if the US and USSR/China had not been involved. EDIT: syntax.
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
This is my main reservation about the Better Angels thesis: we may be replacing regular threats of (relatively)limited scope with existential threats. It seems like we are building a complex ratchet mechanism made up of entangled components. Many of these threats don't actually disappear, but are held in abeyance by continual technological progress, resource substitution, or our own fears of upsetting the ratchet.
I think Pinkerian thought is strong when it argues that we are currently in a much better time than, say, the Plagues of Justinian, where war, disease, and famine affected a huge part of the western hemisphere. But I wonder if our present condition is more fragile than our large population and social/technological advancement would lead us to believe.
We also had the horror of chemical weapons in WWI. It was becoming more and more clear that there were things men could do that men should never do, even in war.
Otherwise you could just crop-dust your downwind neighbors and be moved in before anyone could even report an attack.
I still don't understand why we're allowed to stockpile nerve gas given the past 100 years of warfare and treaties.
Actualy the reason the Germans didnt use nerve gas in WW2 was because they mistakenly assumed Britain and Russia also already had them. Hitler was otherwise pretty keen on them.
That's a popular theory, but not supported by the testimony of those involved at the time. For example Hitler ordered that tabun production be continued as the highest priority even though the precursor chemicals were in high demand and very short supply.
The US and Russia avoided conflict with each other before and after the atom bomb, and also before and after the UN made it illegal. I'm not sure either were essential or even effective deterrents.
In fairness, the US did come into conflict with Russia in a sense, by supporting the White Army in the civil war.
But setting that aside, when would they have come into conflict? Prior to WWI, the US did its best to stay out of international affairs, and Russia wasn't trying to export a political philosophy. In the gap between the wars, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with internal concerns.
It's very hard to compare the potential for conflict post-1945 between the two powers with any period of time before that. Russia and the US simply weren't all that relevant to each other (Alaska aside).
On top of that, I would argue that war was able to be made illegal because the major world powers found war among themselves to be incredibly ineffective. Many years, massive amounts of money, and hundreds of millions of working/reproducing aged citizens died for almost no gain by most countries. It makes a lot more sense to work things out through international policies and economics than by bombs and guns. All that being said, Russia still invades Crimea and Georgia, maybe because it's just easier and faster with absolute overwhelming force.
If you consider war as (among other things) "a contest" (albeit a very grim one), do any of you think there'd ever be any traction in settling disputes via something more sportsmanlike and without such fatality and waste of human life on both sides? I am reminded of the pistol duels of ages ago (although those were often fatal). Something that could test the "will and skill" of opponents who agree to settle it in such a fashion...
I'm also reminded of the flavor of the Olympic Games during the Cold War as almost a "proxy war" between the Soviets and the U.S.
No, because a symbolic contest is not final in the way that the physical imposition of force is: a country who loses a symbolic contest has limited incentive to abide by the symbolic outcome if they believe they can nevertheless impose their will on the other country by force. Wars end when contestants lose the will or the ability to resist the will of the opponent.
There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.
Perhaps when it comes to sovereign states, but with individuals you have things like tort law, instead of simply killing the person you have a dispute with. Why couldn't there be something like that on the international level?
What incentivises individuals to obey the decisions of courts? In the end, again, it's force, as monopolized by the state. If you don't abide by the court's decision, the state will take measures against you: it will impose fines, garnish wages, take away various privileges, and ultimately imprison you. If there were no such unpleasant and inevitable consequences, many people would simply ignore a tort judgment against them.
There are examples of this principle[1], where each side would send a representative or representatives to fight on their behalf. Perhaps the most well known example of this is (at least in my cultural context) is David and Goliath in the Old Testament
""War is illegal. This idea seems obvious."
Well, was has always been a privilege for countries. It is absurd that some German generals were executed after WW2 for "fighting an aggressive" war (not talking about war crimes).
Obviously the WW3 will make look WW2 like a piece of cake.
"Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation." 1983
Another factor making war less likely is the mass media. Remember how the Vietnam War was "the first television war"? Actually seeing what happens in war turns peoples' stomachs, and the propaganda of war's "glories" is revealed for what it is.
Which is why the Afghan and Iraq wars never made it to TV in the same way. Journalism was strangled in scope to conform to commanders' wants; else, no access.
STOP THE PRESSES!! Erase all prior analyses and all following as misguided. There HAS been a change: you nailed the reason spot-on:
Nuclear weapons mean that those that declare war cannot insure they will not be killed by it.
This does not apply to (1) pathologically narcistic insecure megalomaniacs, (2) multi-national organizations/companies that profit from war, (3) competing, well-siloed, immortal military AI strategic advisors, unfortinately!
> Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no?
Never thought about that. It's hard to tell, Everyone was in some sort of cold war with Germany before the two world wars. Nobody wanted to fight and this is what led Germany to conquer very quickly a number of countries.
And any direct war that happened after 1945, had one belligerent that did not possess nuclear weapons, who turned out to be loser. That's the reason victor decided to wage war against him, citing some puny reason for the aggression.
Do you really think the Americans "won" Iraq or Afghanistan? 15+ years of war, many trillions of dollars spent, nearly a million civilian casualties in Iraq, and what is there to show for it?
I wish the "War is illegal" thing would have more effect on stuff like Turkey's recent attacks on Arfin. Not much seems to happen on the legal front there.
I would argue that it’s just USA centric view of impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the damages where on par with “traditional” fire bombing.
So their role in ending the war is hugely overestimated for propaganda reasons.
> War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations.
While this may have kept the 'superpowers' from engaging in direct warfare with each other, it has done nothing to deter them from engaging in proxy wars with eachother. And in the process, devestating the proxy countries. It seems Bill Gates, through all of his philanthropist work, would have realized this first hand.
My point is that war is not "illegal", and the current "deterrent" has done nothing to deter proxy wars in places like (as recent examples) Syria and Yemen. It has also done nothing to deter Russia's invasion of Crimea, the US's boondoggle in Iraq and Afghanistan (nor the extremely vague 'war on terror' that enables the US to arbitrarily attack anyone it perceives as a 'terrorist').
The number of folks experiencing war may be shrinking [citation needed], but it's far from being 'illegal.'
The UN and it's declaration have had nothing to do with the peace we have seen since 1945 - it has been becasue of Pax Americana...and with that on the way out we will see another major war in short order.
meh, seems to me like the richest are biased into seeing a 'better' world because that reflects well on their influence.
But is the world really better relative to the progress we've made? I don't think you can use the sort of facts mentioned in the blurb as a case for the increase in Humanism.
Pew research did a survey where it asked 42,000 people in 38 different nations how their day was. Respondents could answer 'particularly good', 'typical', or 'particulary bad'. Nigerians are having the best time, with 73% of respondents saying they were having a particularly good day. In Japan on 11% were having a particularly good day. The outcomes of this pew study correlate inversely with studies that objectively measure quality of life.
Interesting! Amartya Sen's theory of justice had a similar passage about quality of live of Indian women: Originally they self-assessed as healthy and without problems (while objectively being in very poor condition and having very low life expectancy), then, years later, as both education (esp. health-related) and access to healthcare improved, self-assessed as unhealthier than before! Turns out they didn't know/ couldn't imagine their health problems as something optimizable. Life just was how it was, alternatives not imaginable.
Another factor is that there exists a massive advertising industry in developed nations whose goal is to convince everyone they can't be happy unless they are X or have Y.
If a typical Nigerian faces a calamity every 14 days and a Japanese citizen every 140 days, you will get a much more relieved and appreciative average answer for daily life from the Nigerians to this question. Especially if those who faced a calamity in the last couple of days are less likely to participate in the survey.
The British philosopher John Gray is a good counterpart to Pinker's idea of progress. He focuses on the myths of progress, civilisation and freedom.
This is his response to Pinker: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev... "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"
One example: Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world. Something that was once thought to have been made illegal everywhere was made legal (waterboarding) but not in a backward dictatorship, but in the vanguard of progress and liberty - the USA. Now, Obama made it illegal again (mostly), so that shows that you have to fight to keep your progressions. Progress does not occur automatically, and once achieved, it doesn't stay, Gray argues. I think Gray also argues that wars are mostly many and small proxy wars that occur all the time instead of larger grander affairs.
I think his current ideas on Freedom area also similar. We assume that western democracies are the best ever and getting more freer, but there are examples of a decline in freedoms, in a decline in enlightenment values etc. In a previous book, Gray even highlights that the Enlightenment itself was flawed (with leading figures being overtly racist to say the least) and that we shouldn't put a halo around it by default - rather that there is nuance, and that it's a fragile thing. He also points that whilst the Enlightenment and Freedom is an old idea, ISIS and Islamic terrorism is actually a modern thing. Modern != Progress.
He encourages us to assume that progress is fragile, is not automatically improving and that we need to be active in defending our freedoms, our progress and the things we take for granted.
I watched the video of Pinker & Gates, and I confess my prejudice was 'two comfortably rich elitists pushing a centralized globalization agenda'. I'll read the book but with a large pinch of salt...
What is "centralized globalization?" The top google result for this term is a paper talking about the Vatican; results quickly seem to become less relevant (for example, talking about "globalization, centralization, ...").
"He encourages us to assume that progress is fragile, is not automatically improving and that we need to be active in defending our freedoms, our progress and the things we take for granted."
But would Pinker or Bill Gates disagree with that statement? I don't think so. Bill Gates is devoting his fortune to doing so, and is doing so very effectively.
And even if Pinker is wrong, I believe his message is much more likely to get people to defend freedoms and advance progress than Gray's would be: it's much easier to act if you believe that your actions will be effective.
Yes, I don't think that view was expressed in Gray's article about Pinker. But I imagine that there could be an implication that "if the data shows the world is improving, it always will do, progress happens one way and is always going up" which Gray takes issue to. Why act if everything is getting better anyhow?
It is getting better for some people by some measures, and worse for others by other measures. What Pinker and Gates are attempting to impose is a tyranny of faux rationality--"an 800 pg book with sources up the wazoo say that the world is getting better, all these whiny poor folk must just be delusional".
> What Pinker and Gates are attempting to impose is a tyranny of faux rationality--"an 800 pg book with sources up the wazoo say that the world is getting better, all these whiny poor folk must just be delusional".
That is a pretty extreme reading of what Pinker and Gates are saying. I don't think they are saying that at all.
Would faux rationality that the world is getting better constantly not keep us in silent optimism, as opposed to - urm - violently keep fighting for it being made much worse?
What cruel bastard would even do such a thing, anyway?
Only very strong motivated reasoning would lead someone like Gates -- who would presumably consider himself 'rational' -- to take seriously a book written by an amateur historian in full-scale emeritus mode. Outside of his own field, Pinker's just a crank. He doesn't understand his sources, and isn't taken seriously by anyone that I've read so far who has the slightest interest in or understanding of historiography.
The source of Gates' wonky motivation can only be known to him (if he possesses enough self-awareness). We might guess that justification of the changes his corrupt dealings have been a part of (and made him in the process a leading megaconsumer) might have something to do with it.
It's getting better for some measures of 'better', and it's getting worse for others. It's also getting 'better' for some people, and less so for others. For example I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years, and is fabulously better for the super-rich.
"I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years"
Really? 40 years ago we didn't have the internet, didn't have videogames, had far far far fewer TV shows/movies/entertainment options. Worse health outcomes, though to a less significant degree I think. Far more access to education and educational content (you can effectively get the equivalent of a degree in almost anything, online, for free). More access to healthier foods.
Middle class families in the US have access to all of the above. Would most of them really go back to a time when they didn't?
Though I can't find a reference right now, I am pretty sure Pinker repeatedly and emphatically disavows any claim that progress will inevitably continue. There is no doubt we have to work for it.
Pinker's work is a rebuttal to people who want to paint the world as hopelessly bad right now.
The world gets better because people have been demonstrably trying to make it better. If the efforts of everyone trying to improve the world had come to naught then that would be an argument for lazy cynicism.
Pinker explicitly addresses this argument, both in Better Angels and in the free chapter of the new book linked from OP. Quote:
So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take
care of itself.
Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it
does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed
the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the
social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions
persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they
don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are,
so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure
that the decline of violence continues.
As Pinker said in the video, progress is not a popular concept among academics anymore. This is the concept that underpins his book, which is glossed over in attempts to characterize it as "everything is good now" instead of "everything is getting better thanks to perpetual human progress".
Which leads to the obvious question of how can we maintain or advance this progress?
Dismissing the progress that was made also dismisses how the progress was made. And I fear many academics are not comfortable crediting the longer term ROI from industry and technology, and would rather obsess over pet political or social issues of the day and their own ideologies.
Thank you. I couldn't help but feel like Pinker is peddling feel-good nonsense to sell books, and give people hope to cling to.
Progress or betterment is entirely subjective, and when considering the human condition, relies on too many variables to even count. Of course, the variables the Pinker focuses on have gotten better overall.
The way I see it is a chaotic scatterplot that is trending slightly upwards towards "better." There are many local minima and maxima however, and I presume those ebbs and flows of prosperity and poverty can last 60 years at a time.
It's telling that one of the richest, most well off men on Earth is helping to peddle this narrative. It behooves those in positions of power and wealth to hoodwink the masses into being satisfied with their given stations. Research and statistics say the world is a better place than ever, put down your protest signs.
Could you please not post unsubstantive rants to HN? Even if you're right, it's a quality-lowering comment genre. There's no point worth making here that can't be made thoughtfully, as indeed other users have been doing in this thread.
Pinker is much more nefarious (and you can know that by going to his talks, as I have, where he's more loose-tongued than in his books). He places such emphasis on the fact that the world is getting better as a rebuttal to "complainers" and political activists. The problem is not with his premise but with his conclusion. The world has been getting better (to the extent that it has) because people complain and are dissatisfied, and because they take political action to make the world better. The world has not been getting better on its own; people have made it better through political struggle.
There is a certain rather loud, rather fashionable kind of "activist" who are if not directly claiming that everything is awful, then strongly evoking symbolism and imagery to that effect. To fix this, they want to take broad, radical action, basically to affect revolution. This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipulating their followers for personal power. If they get their way, things will get worse, quickly. These are the people Pinker is rebutting.
There is also a kind of activist that work towards fixing specific problems, including Gates, but certainly also a great many people of lesser means and public profile, and does indeed improve the world in the way you describe. I have no doubt that Pinker respects these.
Sure. From the plebeians of ancient Rome, through the French revolutionaries and American abolitionists and feminists of the 19th century, to the feminist suffragists[1] of the early 20th century.
[1]: One of the things I always find hilarious is the constant refrain among conservatives is "well, the old generation was right but this one has gone too far!" despite the constant decline in the fervor of feminist activism for over a century now. :)
Yep, for centuries (millennia, actually) the pattern is the same. A social change movement is invariably viewed as having "gone too far", but in order to be perceived as reasonable, the critics invariably say that the previous generation was right. Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as having gone too far (the American revolution and the abolitionist movement included).
In general, conservatives (like Pinker) pretty much always get the history wrong (the facts, the interpretation, and usually both), while liberals are usually wrong about the future (and I say this as a radical leftist). That's why it's easy to poke fun at conservatives who write history (certainly those who, like Pinker, are not professional historians), while liberals are always surprised of the turn of events (for good or bad; when liberals -- including myself -- are optimistic I'm worried, and when they're pessimistic I know I can relax).
[1]: Feminists not so much; there's been a constant decline in the fervor feminist activism over the past century, but certainly, say, the French revolutionaries. Feminism has always been special for many understandable reasons. It is almost always the most timid form of social activism, yet almost always perceived as the most radical.
> Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as having gone too far (the American revolution and the abolitionist movement included).
Sure, by some. It's also true that in about 100% of cases where people have argued for legitimately bad social change (eugenics, communism, prohibition, etc.), those people (and their allies) cast their opponents as immoral and regressive.
It's like Carl Sagan said: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Today on Twitter I saw a conservative arguing that people who deny the personhood of a fetus are like slaveowners who denied the personhood of slaves. As a radical leftist, I doubt you'd agree with that. But this person is just as convinced as you that they are the progressive on this issue.
So we need a better heuristic than "people arguing social change are probably right." Some are right, others are not.
Right, but the point that Pinker is missing that we are what we are because people fought to get us here -- the very same kind of people he dismisses.
Just a nitpick: communism has certainly not been "legitimately bad" everywhere. In my country (Israel), we have practiced communism (on a local scale, in the Kibbutzim) for much longer than the USSR (over 100 years now), and it's a more extreme form of communism (makes the USSR seem like a capitalist country by comparison), and while it has certainly not been an unqualified success (especially the communal raising of children), and it is certainly crumbling now (due to powerful external and internal pressures), it has been the complete opposite of failure. It has been entirely democratic for 100 years (with problems, but not unlike in any democratic system), and one of Israel's proudest achievements. So communism was an overall great success in Israel for a century.
When it come to history I find most political movements to be wrong on both facts and interpretation. Take women's suffrage in the US for example and the relation to shortage in conscription at the end of world war 1. Following liberal writing there exist no relation. According to those writing the right to vote came through demonstrating and women empowering themselves. True or false? Should we interpret it as a victory for self empowerment or as a result of lack of soldiers during the last year of the biggest war the world had seen (also called the war to end all wars)?
An other example: witch hunts. According to liberal writing those where all campaigns targeting the weak, poor and vulnerable in society. Historians points towards campaigns that transfered land and money from the accused families into the pocket of the church. True or false? Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?
Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history. Facts don't fit the nice narrative that is needed to gain mass adaption. Usually the truth is a bit from column A and column B and involve multiple events which together create an environment where famous historical facts happened. It is in the realization of those events and the interpretation that we can grasp what actually happened in the past and why.
> Should we interpret it as a victory for self empowerment or as a result of lack of soldiers during the last year of the biggest war the world had seen?
Clearly as the first. Women would not have gotten the vote without the suffrage movement, just as they didn't get it after the Civil War. However, the war had an effect on the timing, as is often the case with social change movements. They can go on for decades, and finally succeed when an external event forces the dominating powers' hands. No one would say that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the cause of WWI. The alliance system was rigged to blow at the first spark, and that spark happened to be the assassination.
> Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?
As medieval and early modern history was my focus in grad school, I must say that I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically by any professional historian that I've read, and they were relatively uncommon. Like most things in history, they were a result of a complex interaction of factors, but as is often the case, the powerful are rarely the victims of events of that sort, regardless of their complex causes.
> Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history.
I wasn't talking about political writing but about scholarly or pseudo-scholarly works, and all writers have political leanings. Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.
One could as easily interpret that the abolishment movements relation with the civil war has about as much validity as the relation between the first world war and the suffrage movement. I am not saying you are wrong, but that political writers tend to disregard facts and make interpretations that fits their views regardless if they are left or right, usually to the detriment of the truth.
> I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically
Out of all writing I have read, only two books that I recall described the witch hunts as complex causes rather than a simplistic prosecution of defenseless women. I see it so often in political texts I usually tick of a mental box when i see it.
When it comes to plundering, history don't seem to often show that its the most powerful in society that becomes victims. They can employ armies to defend themselves or buy enough influence to not become a target. Usually those that are targeted is those with resources to defend but that relies on social constructs for defense.
But to go back to the claim about liberal writers, I can recommend a book called Debt: The First 5000 Years. The author was involved with the occupy movement so not sure if that defines him as a liberal writer or not. What I found interesting in that book (outside of the overall focus on debt) is the description of bridge gifts, slavery and veils, each having a very different interpretation to common liberal views. Since the author is a professor of anthropology he also supports those interpretations with facts that usually missing when those subjects are being discussed in a historical perspective.
> Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.
It is very possible that liberal writers lie less and tend to be less intentional dishonest than conservative ones. Its a very different claim that liberal writers are usually right and conservative writers usually wrong.
> but that political writers tend to disregard facts and make interpretations that fits their views regardless if they are left or right, usually to the detriment of the truth.
All writers are political (I would hope all people) and there are many brilliant historians, some writing analyses that would appear contradictory to their stated views (my best professor was like that).
> simplistic prosecution of defenseless women
I find that hard to believe, as women were abused on a much larger scale before, during and after the witch trials. Defenseless women make easy targets, but I find it hard to believe that any historian would consider that an explanation. Women are so marginalized from all positions of power and are completely at the mercy of their fathers, brothers or husbands, but let's try just a few for being witches to drive the point home!?
> This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipulating their followers for personal power.
Except that, as any student of history knows, the current state of the world is what it is thanks almost entirely to people just like that (although historians generally view them in a better light than you do because of what they've achieved, despite always being presented by conservative forces in the same light as you view them).
My technophile bias is showing, but I'm not convinced that any, all, and every past and present student of history thinks that progress is due to violent/radical revolutionaries, and that they are/were the good guys (gals) - even if revolutions were necessary for change.
However, it's seems very evident that to extract even some minuscule progress from a conservative power structure a very strong anti-conservative force is usually a must, and that is usually not a moderate progressive force, but a very blunt radical one.
Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.
But, it can be argued that a moderate force simply bounces back without much effect, but even the recent events of the last decade make that argument very unconvincing. (As big changes are easily usurped by blind populism, leaving no room to critical evaluation of possible policy proposals.)
> and that they are/were the good guys (gals) - even if revolutions were necessary for change.
While my training as a professional historian was cut short, I know enough to say that historians are very much trained not to judge or categorize people into good or bad. That has nothing to do with the fact that most social change has been achieved through political struggle.
> Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.
I try not to prescribe a course of action based on the past. I note that Pinker's assessment is judgmental, i.e., he considers the main trend to be positive, yet at the same time he's judgmental against activists. My point is that you can't hold both views at once.
I don't think Pinker is against activists making the world better. But activists need to convince people that their ideas actually will improve things. Lots of activists have made the world better, but some have made it worse, despite having good intentions (see: eugenics, communism).
If you're trying to sell people on the idea that status quo institutions like capitalism are bad, you have to compare it to the alternatives. You can't just say "bad things happen under capitalism, therefore we need to do away with it." That's comparing capitalism vs. utopia, but utopia doesn't exist, for all kinds of practical reasons.
Pinker makes the case for what the world as we know it has achieved. An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.
> An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.
Not necessarily according to Pinker's cherry picked statistics. Plantation owners were not going to achieve more by freeing their slaves, at least according to their own accounting.
Sure, if someone else thinks other statistics are relevant, they can cite those. I agree that a plantation owner would probably have cited statistics that didn't capture the harms of the fact that they are enslaving people.
"The world" hasn't achieved anything on its own. People of precisely the kind Pinker dislikes and dismisses are those who have achieved those things for our world. They achieved it not by convincing others through theory, but through their strong beliefs. You're right, sometimes they failed miserably, but even those who've brought us to where we are today were ridiculed just as those who've failed.
I think you're not being charitable to Pinker here - he's not in my view "nefarious," and he's arguing his points in good faith.
That said, I agree with you. I read Better Angels in its entirety and thought parts of it were very convincing. Others were deeply, provably wrong to anyone who is a professional historian (for instance, he let a bunch of Harvard RA's loose on some non-peer reviewed books purporting to statistically describe fatalities in wars that are very poorly documented, then used this faulty data to draw huge, misguided conclusions, like WW1/WW2 being less damaging in aggregate than the An Lushan rebellion).
I actually really enjoy Pinker's writing style and he is clearly brilliant (as I learned when I tried to spar with him a bit in a Q&A and he casually parried what I thought was a devastating counter-example!)
But IMO his intelligence is actually his downfall when it comes to this particular argument. He's convinced himself that everything is getting better, and he is indeed very convincing on certain aspects of this point. The problem, as you say, is with the scale of his conclusions. Certain things like the use of the death penalty and rates of infant mortality really are going down, demonstrably. Other things, like the risk of massive destruction due to a stolen nuclear weapon or EMP or a Nick Bostrom-style evil AI, or even just a generalized societal decline due to economic inequality and environmental degradation, are almost certainly getting worse. Pinker is so self-assured as a writer and thinker that he runs the risk of giving us all a false sense of complacency and a license to ignore these very real problems.
Maybe he's arguing in good faith, but his conservative views are so deeply entrenched that even he fails to see how conservative he is. Such an extreme ideology that you yourself cannot distinguish from what you perceive to be neutral reasoning is the primary sign of a weak critical mind. I find Pinker to be one of the weakest public minds of our times for that reason, and for that I find him terribly boring. A writer who is so far behind the reader in understanding his own text makes the reading boring rather than interesting.
> Could you expand on what do you mean conservative here?
Someone who believes or acts towards (either consciously or not) the preservation of the current distribution of power in society and against changing it. Often extreme conservatives (though not Pinker) even desire to return the social order to some (almost always imagined) past.
> Also, could you recommend some public minds whom you consider strong?
Max Weber, Marc Bloch, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman. Strong does not necessarily mean "right". It means either having truly profound and interesting insight and/or the ability to apply critical thinking to yourself.
What problem do people in this conversation have distinguishing current state from current rate?
Complain that things are bad and fight to improve them? Sure. Complain that things are getting worse over time? It's false in a global sense, and in most specific senses too.
> Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world.
Isn't this cherry-picking data? I don't see how the extent of torture could be said to be a valid measure of progress unless happening on a massive scale. Besides, on a global scale, I would not be too wrong in saying that torture has declined. During the investigation of 1993 Bombay blasts, the police didn't balk at interrogating and torturing even the suspect's relatives[1] who didn't have any role in the act. The probability of this happening again has certainly declined.
Picking a narrow trend doesn't refute the global one that the world is getting better in every aspect.
> One example: Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world.
True, but a) highly controversially b) condemned by much of the rest of the world c) only allowed outside US territory and d) claimed to be legal only due to the allegations that it was carried out on people falling outside the protections of the Geneva Convention.
Compare to much of history, where torture was widespread, uncontroversial, and legally sanctioned.
I don't think Pinker's thesis that overall violence is decreasing dramatically can be disproved by counter-examples, any more than climate change can be doubted due to occasional colder days. For a solid rebuttal to Pinker I'd want to see disagreement with his extensive statistics, and I don't see much of that in Gray's article.
It'd be one thing if the use of torture was increasing over time across our society, or all societies.
But using "torture was recently brought back" as a data point to rebut an overall statistical decline makes no sense. It's like saying "Apple's stock price fell today, therefore people are wrong to say the economy is improving".
Ya this resonates with me more. We are seeing the rolling back under the current US presidential administration of so many things we thought were done deals. Things like Bears Ears National Monument getting turned over to private corporations for uranium mining. And a thousand more issues just like that, of weighing the value of the priceless against the profitable. Or misdirection in the cause of various forms of human suffering away from the very people and institutions that caused it.
I think what a lot of people (especially modern day conservatives) don't realize is that this stuff requires never-ending vigilance. The natural tendency of human progress is towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the eventual complete exploitation of people and resources.
Where some people today see a spoiled youth glued to their smartphones and spending all of their money on flatscreen TVs, I see a generation disenfranchised with literally no say in any aspect of their regulatory system. No say over how much money they make, no recourse when multinational corporate monopolies charge them excessively for education, health, even things as basic as untainted food. Earning a fraction of the income their parents had when adjusted for inflation.
So no, this is nothing even remotely close to the future we're capable of. We're just comfortable enough to miss the injustices being carried out against us and the planet, often in our own names.
I think it's easy for the likes of HN readers, most probably sitting in their comfortable western strongholds to feel like we are bringing progress in the world with our fancy tech. I believe the reality feels very different to a lot of people in a lot of other places - where things as basic as even food or clean water might still be hard to come by - and it's kind of insulting for fussy old rich men living in comparative luxury to be telling these people otherwise.
None of the examples I got to read in this article are in any logical contradiction with the original enlightenment. It is shown that Locke didn't originally fully understand his own new school of thought - maybe because it's naive to think you fully understand a new idea when you're having it? It was attempted that 20th century atrocities happened as a direct result of enlightenment thinking.
I honestly grew tired of reading this very quickly. The sum of all words these philosophers said is not enlightenment. Reason means you don't frigging trust every frigging word of what people say, even if they said "don't trust every word of what people say". How is that not obvious?
What is John Gray's message here? I get he is trying to challenge Pinker's seemingly optimistic views, but I don't get what is the pattern he tries to convey by throwing all that sand into the gears of Pinker's progression thing?
Are we seriously giving up on seeing patterns here and insist in our mental image of the world as a white noise tv screen?
People talked optimistically about the end of war in the early 20th century when it looked like war had gone the way of the dodo. The last major international conflict was a century earlier when the Powers deposed the second rise of Napoleon. There were a number of internal civil wars in the meantime mainly dealing with the transition from monoarchy to republics and the consolidation of related city states intomcountries. The early 20th century had much progress in industrialisation, invention and global trade.
Then WWI happened, following soon by WWII, partly based on a poor resolution of WWI. Then a 45 year Cold War with several close nuclear wars.
Thats why I am skeptical the concept of world war is really over.
"The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade. Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter."
However, it's important to note that there is no consensus on why this effect is being observed. There are multiple theories and us having to interpret symbols on smartphones is just one of the proposed ones.
I haven't read the book but I wonder.. as a billionaire he clearly stands to gain a lot from spreading a message of optimism and collective progress over the last century presumably to maintain status quo when an equally factual but completely opposite perspective on the world (unprecedented levels of inequality, our global lack of response to climate change, etc.) is also there for us to see.
I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.
A lot depends on your viewpoint. What you call "unprecedented levels of inequality" is, at the same time, unprecedented rise in quality of life for pretty much everyone - yes, for some people the improvement was greater than for others, but it's still a big improvement for everyone.
(I don't want to dismiss this issue, but reading about it, sometimes it sounds to me like a case of pretty much the most pathetic human behaviour - getting $10 for free and, instead of being grateful, getting angry that someone else got $1000.)
Hell, WRT climate change, we need some optimism, and we need to devote less time to usual social bickering, and more time to fixing what's important.
> I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.
Everything he's doing nowadays fits perfectly the theory that his motives are pure, and about the well-being of humanity. Is there anything in particular you're aware of that is evidence to the contrary?
> A lot depends on your viewpoint. What you call "unprecedented levels of inequality" is, at the same time, unprecedented rise in quality of life for pretty much everyone
That kind of assumes “quality of life” is a simple function of absolute material wealth and not strongly influenced by relative position. While certainly many people have moral beliefs that that should be the case, there is plenty of reason in all of human history to believe that it is not in fact the case.
Why is inequality a problem? It seems like what people should care about is how well off they are absolutely, not how well off they are relative to other people.
Let me put it this way: if everyone in the human race was so rich that they owned an entire planet full of machines that cater to their every whim, then there might still be people who are "rich" and own thousands of planets. Does that wealth inequality matter? No, it doesn't, because you're still so rich you own a goddamn planet! People who own planets have no reason to be indignant.
The same is true in our world. The only thing that should really matter to people is how well off they are absolutely. Anything more than that is simply coveting other people's wealth. In America, it turns out that even people who are considered "poor" by the government are well off by material possessions:
> As scholar James Q. Wilson has stated, “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.” In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.
> The home of the typical poor family was not overcrowded and was in good repair. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. The typical poor American family was also able to obtain medical care when needed. By its own report, the typical family was not hungry and had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.
The problem is that greater relative wealth turns into greater absolute power, a power which preferentially hoards limited resources whether you need them to survive or not.
If everyone was rich enough to own a planet.. but the richest owned all the planets with food on them, then you are screwed the next time a famine happens and they are not.
Besides: the majority of people would be much better off absolutely if there were less inequality given a fixed amount of wealth. So at no point will people not have a reason to consider inequality a problem unless they are wealthier than average.
"Better Angels"—and presumably this book—cuts against the grain of popular discourse, since claiming the world is in decline and a state of moral depredation has always been an effective way to agitate for change. Which is understandable on one level, because so much in the world is still obviously suboptimal. The reaction tends to be: "How can you claim the world is getting better when [insert bad current event stuff here]?!?"
The problem is that so much of this lessening of horribleness came about via imperfect systems. We become focused in our opposition to the system's flaws, and (in some circles) that opposition morphs into opposition to the system as a whole, which is a dangerous kind of thinking if it becomes mainstream.
Not sure I agree. It seems to me that "claiming the world is in decline and a state of moral depredation" has always been primarily a cheap way of bringing attention to yourself, your cause, and gaining popular support. Which is why, for example, journalists love writing doom&gloom articles.
Also, if anything, everyone preaching doomsday makes people depressed, disinterested and detached. If the world is falling apart, what could possibly an individual do? IMO we need the exact opposite now - an optimistic tone that tells people that while there are problems, things are looking up, we're winning, and yes, you can help too.
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] thread* The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade.
* Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I haven't read the book, but I strongly suspect that it doesn't suggest that we are finish, or that we rest on our laurels.
Feeling good about progress made thus far is an excellent way to provide the motivation necessary to push forward even harder.
The laundry one is also good, because I hadn't already heard of it :)
TL;dr - Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
What also seems a little strange is that his blog has a members only section with special "deals" like book excerpts for which you need to sign up.
Never saw that on a personal blog, I might be mistaken, but on first glance it seems like its more of a business than just a personal blog.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Sapiens-A-Brief-History-of-...
Not a bad book, but more baseless theorizing while Sapiens was a really rich examination of history where he author definitely applied a lifetime of study and research.
It’s not bad, just not very valuable as an entire book to read. It’s mostly already covered in the final segment of Sapiens.
Homo Deus is certainly based on the author’s general wisdom and draws upon his study of history. It’s always hard to vet “futurists” to see who is worthwhile.
This book, his latest one, is now an automatic buy for me.
Maybe the idea that Pinker could write a book so loved by both Gates and Singer is a testament to how good it is?
Something more interesting would be learn how to more quickly improve the world. The world of 2100 could arrive in 2050, for example.
Gates has around $100 billion to improve the world. How to most effectively leverage his money, for example?
Build a better pharmaceutical company and cure some of the diseases on his list? Help to create better economies in Africa?
[UPDATE]
This comment got downvoted fast. I guess I’ll be happy with the improvements and learn to live with the current rate of progress.
Any other feel good comments from the book that I could use at a party?
[UPDATE]
Don’t want to waste fu karma today. So, answer is half the world’s population lives in cities. Perhaps we could increase by making them more liveable. I’m all for reducing the human footprint on the world. Wildlife crossings, fewer roads and cars, less plastic, etc. How about a billion people move one planet over? A lot depends on increasing knowledge and reducing costs. Let’s increase the rate of innovation!
Besides moral relativism helps us to justify much of our destructive behaviour and inability to accept hard changes that might be necessary to make the world better for all living things.
My two cents on population: cars are a cancer on modernity. For a hundred years we have structured cities and societies around the automobile. As a result we as a species are largely bound to an expensive machine and a design of society that cannot function without that expensive machine. Many cities (especially in America, which is an enormous country with lots of space) are so sprawled out and gutted from public transit (thanks GM!) that transportation is impossible without the automobile. It’s even worse when you factor in the fact that a lot of freight is also required to be moved by automobile.
Sprawl increases costs of transportation and infrastructure (roads, water, gas, electric, sewage) by an enormous degree. This in turn raises the cost of everything else to everybody.
Even a perfect Jason Statham self-driving car would serve as a band-aid over a diseased organ.
The very difficult question we must ask if we expect to maintain our standard of living with a growing population and a planet rotting from overconsumption is how do we redesign ALL cities to operate at the lowest possible cost per person. Otherwise we continue to pass along the cost to the planet and the next generations...assuming there will be any...
https://amp.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6ggwap/stev...
I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigger deterrent of war - at least among the developed countries of the world: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the world saw the atom bomb's capability for destruction, the motivation to avoid war increased significantly (to put it lightly).
Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."
Yet that one rule is broken multiple times a year by multiple nations in multiple regions on earth.
Overwhelmingly what we've seen in the way of war deaths since WW2, is in civil war and genocides by Socialist, Communist and Fascist regimes.
Halliburton share prices from 2003-2005: https://i.imgur.com/UgPNCBg.gif
NY Times article about the division of Iraq oilfields: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/energy-environmen...
All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26.
Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production.
If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.
[0] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-16/us-now-involved-134-w...
Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.
You're saying it was about oil primarily. Yet the US didn't take Iraq's oil. The US didn't even secure an outsized share of contracts related to Iraq's oil. The US vaporized a trillion dollars, along with suffering tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, trying to stop the Iraqi civil war in which Iraqis killed hundreds of thousands of each other.
Simultaneously over that decade the US technologically unlocks its massive shale oil resources, making Middle Eastern oil almost entirely moot strategically. So much so, that the US is now merely about 10% of Saudi oil demand.
And the US got what out of all of that Iraq mess when it comes to oil? The US stuck its military where it shouldn't have been, and it did so for geo-political reasons, not economic reasons. The US was a massive loser economically from that effort to try to weaken Russia, it was an economic disaster. The net 'benefit' over two decades will be perhaps close to a negative two trillion dollars all-in.
> You're saying it was about oil primarily.
Those aren't conflicting explanations; the US is concerned about the friendliness of governments in the region largely because it cares about how they manage oil supplies (both for price and geostrategic reasons like making sure we have access and our enemies do not in a major crisis.)
And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
No, it's not, because the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy.
If we were in a major war with China now and that was true, it would suggest that the policy had been unsuccessful in achieving a key goal, but even then wouldn't refute that that had been the policy goal.
> And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.
Perhaps (though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use) but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
Of course it's about who buys (ie who can supply their economy with the energy it needs). The entire political value of oil is that it's critical to most economies. You keep saying that it's about controlling the oil, the point of that control is to use it for self-benefit. If the US were doing what you're claiming, it would be denying oil to China. You say that there is value in being able to deny oil supply to enemies - and then you pretend the US wouldn't have an interest in denying oil supply to China to slow its economic ascension (it obviously would benefit massively if it could partially suffocate China's growth via oil). These are contradictions in your theory, as China swims in Middle Eastern oil supply.
> though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use
Russian and Iranian oil production is drastically beyond their peacetime economic consumption. I can't imagine where you're trying to go with that.
> but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.
You're refuting yourself there. Then why didn't the US deny Chinese access to Iraqi oil? China almost immediately began benefiting immensely from Iraq's oil as production ramped up after the worst of the shutdown. Saudi's primary customer is now China and that is going to get a lot more dramatic in the coming decade. Those two points collapse what you're claiming.
If the US wanted to press an advantage, it would destroy Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil supplies (use an ISIS-like mess), which would hammer China's economy by removing 1/4 to 1/3 of their oil supply. The US is now one of the few major nations that can fully support itself on energy. Instead, the US is actively protecting both Saudi and Iraq, while the largest US rival - China - benefits the most from that protection.
The US shale oil issue has also really flipped the script as well; it's something I don't think anyone was predicting at the time. The rapidity of solar and wind's rise is another surprising thing.
I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that. I just mean that, yes, China is dominant now, and there's a certain global socioeconomic-political dynamic. But at the time leading up to the Iraq war, the world was a very different place in terms of global politics and energy economics.
It is probably more fruitful to argue over whether or not the US government anticipated these geopolitical changes well enough. But to point to things that happened later as a rationale for what transpired before seems backward to me.
In some ways, the transition we've witnessed is from a oil-cold-war dynamic involving the US and Russia/USSR to a vacuum, made by renewable energy and Asian and European economic growth. As an American, I feel like we should sidestep issues about Euro-Asian supremacy and American-Russian decline, and take a hard look at what assumptions we often make, and what it increasingly looks like is that many of the old political blocs are starting to seem irrelevant to a prosperous future. I think America has a dominant role it can play, and will, if it just starts being forward-looking instead of backward-looking.
It didn't vaporize any money whatsoever, in fact, Halliburton (and many of the hundreds of military strategy companies in the MIC) did quite well with their new economy.
Source: https://files.prio.org/publication_files/prio/Gates,%20Nyg%C...
[0] http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...
When a war happens we ask ourselves why, and the international community works to try to prevent it the next time. That would be truly alien to a world leader even a couple centuries ago.
I see this as the basis for cold wars and other international competitions, conflicts are converted into other outlets.
In some lines of thought, that's the definition of illegal...
I mean, yes, they have peacekeeping forces. Those forces are not keeping the peace by force. In fact, there have been times when they have stood aside while one side violated the peace, because the UN force's rules of engagement didn't allow them to use force to prevent one side from starting the war back up.
That term isn't right, since there are a few other countries involved, but it brings to mind the right associations.
No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45.
Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.
One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.
GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter.
For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO.
Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think there are two factors at play here:
1. The USSR's power projection was really good because it's really hard to convince people to fight for capitalism. For communism, on the other hand, you always have a million volunteers.
2. The USSR's military credibility when it comes to a land war in Europe was based on the fact that they were preparing for a near-home or home defense scenario. So, instead of investing in expensive fleets, aircraft carriers, and bombers, they invested in tanks, close-support aircraft, and anti-air stuff. The Atlantic would prevent the US from effectively responding to massive columns of tanks, since tanks are very heavy and hard to transport and supply. However, it also means that the USSR wouldn't be going anywhere with its massive war machine. It wouldn't have any ability to threaten anything outside of euroope. So the obvious result of any conventional war would have been the US conventionally bombing every Russian city to dust.
The Soviets lost to the incredibly poor country of Afghanistan. Vietnam's GDP was/is a small fraction of Russia's, yet America still lost and communism spread through the region. If war came to Western Europe again, I find it unlikely that America could've won.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30753784-the-internation...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/opinion/sunday/outlawing-...
[3] https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-oona-hathaway-an...
> From 1816 until the Kellogg-Briand Pact was first signed in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one territorial conquest every 10 months. Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year... The average amount of territory seized between 1816 and 1928 was 114,088 square miles per year...
> Since World War II, conquest has almost come to a full stop. The average number of conquests per year fell drastically — to 0.26 per year, or one every four years. The average size of the territory taken declined to a mere 5,772 square miles per year. And the likelihood that any individual state would suffer a conquest in an average year plummeted — from 1.33 percent to 0.17 percent, or once or twice a millennium.
[1] https://truthpoliticsandpower.org/897-2-2-2-2-3-2-2/
They've also been caught on film laughing and bragging about killing civilians.
My first thought was that they ought to have a monument to the Rosenbergs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg), if that is the approach they're taking.
Those who advocate nuclear disarmament are basically advocating a return to increasingly-bloody world wars every few years.
Of course, it's also true that the leaders who are afraid to confront each other directly are more likely to resort to proxy wars that cause massive pain and suffering in their own right. But that's a different problem that will have to be solved by different means.
It only takes one bad actor to light the fuse that ends the world.
Bigger raids happened after Dresden as well and Harris gave his opinion: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” Luckily he alone didn’t make describe I guess.
No. Dresden was bombed on 15 February 1945 [0]. The British continued night raids until the end of the war, peaking in March, and with the last raid on Berlin on the night of 21/22 April (76 Mosquitos) and the final raid on the night of 25/26 April [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden#Second_World_War
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command#Strategic_b...
It does actually. The only difference is how long it took and arguably Dresden was in worse shape than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
> I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden
Well, forgive me.
> but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way
No, there aren't. That's exactly why Dresden stands out.
> I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.
You really should go and have a look at those before and after pictures then. They are nothing short of incredible.
Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo (and Rotterdam, for that matter) do not compare even though the destruction there was widespread.
I don't think it should be treated as a "most destroyed city" contest, but you should really research the scale of destruction in the cities I've mentioned. [1] looks quite comparable to [2], [3] looks arguably worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_destruction_of_Warsaw#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
[3] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2d/10/af/2d10af195da2779dbd4c31ddf...
From [2]: "By January 1945, between 85% and 90% of the buildings had been completely destroyed; this includes up to 10% as a result of the September 1939 campaign and following combat, up to 15% during the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 25% during the Uprising, and 40% due to systematic German demolition of city after the uprising"
It's not me underestimating the scale of destruction of Dresden, but rather you underestimating the scale of destruction in other cities.
[1] http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Bombing_of_Dresden...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_destruction_of_Warsaw
If you compare overall damage then Dresden had less than 50% of its building destroyed, while Warsaw had been destroyed in 80%-90%.
It really must have required special kind of ignorance to write this sentence.
https://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-ab...
The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb. The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinkably destructive, so the superpowers were already deterred plenty from provoking a third world war. Also, since the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so disproportionate to any strategic goal, its threat is for all practical purposes a bluff, which is why so many non-nuclear powers have defied nuclear ones since 1945. Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war.
The U.S. was never going to chose between Spain and Canada in advance of actual fighting (or Canada and France re similar issues), because the larger nuclear-fueled conflict with Russia made dumping allies overboard foolish; whoever began shooting would have lost. I would argue that the nuclear standoff trickles down.
Frankly, this looks to me like Pinker is reasoning from a provably false premise. Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.
The Congo War killed ~4 million people, including 300,000+ via direct killings. The Yugoslav Wars killed 100,000+. The Second Gulf War, 400,000 deaths, 100,000+ from direct killings. The Syrian Civil War is 400k and counting.
The rejoinder, I suppose, is that Canada and Spain is a first-world example and none of my are. I don't buy it. First, because the use of proxy wars is a defining feature of 20th century combat; war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria is directly linked to great-power conflict. Second, because Pinker's example is a silly one; both because war over flatfish would have been a money-loser and because Canada and Spain are NATO signatories operating under the nuclear shield of other nations. Shooting war between NATO member states is regularly described as a nightmare scenario that would escalate nuclear tensions worldwide; Pinker is naively or dishonestly equating "owning no nukes" with "lacking nuclear defense".
Pinker has been repeatedly criticized for his focus on combat deaths, and with good reason. The technological advances of war have shifted the balance of casualties from combatants to civilians, and increased the fat-tail risk of escalating conflicts. This is another iteration of the same.
As for nuclear weapons being "disproportionate to any strategic goal" and "for all practical purposes a bluff"... I hope to god he's right, but tactical nuclear weapon use is back on the table in Russia and strategists don't seem to agree with him.
Great powers have interests in every war ever, but when Yugoslavia broke up, the USSR and in 1999 Russia were too weak to be considered equal adversaries.
In the early 90s the country fell apart and a tyrant started three wars ending in ethnic cleansing and genocide. When he started a fourth one in 1999, a short and by modern warfare limited campaign finally stopped him.
The link to great power conflict I had in mind there was the pressure cooker effect of Tito's dictatorship, which suppressed the major conflicts of the region without solving them. But it's a rather different entity than wars with direct meddling, and I can't judge the counterfactual: would a lack of Communist dictatorship have caused an earlier and more peaceful dissolution, or simply hastened what happened anyway?
It's a bad example and I shouldn't have used it; thank you.
This is my main reservation about the Better Angels thesis: we may be replacing regular threats of (relatively)limited scope with existential threats. It seems like we are building a complex ratchet mechanism made up of entangled components. Many of these threats don't actually disappear, but are held in abeyance by continual technological progress, resource substitution, or our own fears of upsetting the ratchet.
I think Pinkerian thought is strong when it argues that we are currently in a much better time than, say, the Plagues of Justinian, where war, disease, and famine affected a huge part of the western hemisphere. But I wonder if our present condition is more fragile than our large population and social/technological advancement would lead us to believe.
Sorry, but that sounds like a load of folk psychology. Leaded gasoline on the other hand, well, see here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
(see especially this section: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis#Evidence..., and the one on alternative explanations immediately below.)
And see also, the absurd boatload of articles Kevin Drum written on about it for MotherJones:
https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&dcr=1&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Cc...
(this google query has the results sorted by date, this: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-crime-co... is their oldest article on the matter, and this [note that this one takes a bit until it gets to the point, but it gets there]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/11/crime-and-the... is their newest on it.)
Otherwise you could just crop-dust your downwind neighbors and be moved in before anyone could even report an attack.
I still don't understand why we're allowed to stockpile nerve gas given the past 100 years of warfare and treaties.
https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Hitler-use-his-extensive-sto...
But setting that aside, when would they have come into conflict? Prior to WWI, the US did its best to stay out of international affairs, and Russia wasn't trying to export a political philosophy. In the gap between the wars, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with internal concerns.
It's very hard to compare the potential for conflict post-1945 between the two powers with any period of time before that. Russia and the US simply weren't all that relevant to each other (Alaska aside).
I'm also reminded of the flavor of the Olympic Games during the Cold War as almost a "proxy war" between the Soviets and the U.S.
There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.
Perhaps when it comes to sovereign states, but with individuals you have things like tort law, instead of simply killing the person you have a dispute with. Why couldn't there be something like that on the international level?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_combat
Obviously the WW3 will make look WW2 like a piece of cake.
"Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation." 1983
Tom Lehrer - So Long Mom (A Song for WW III)
Nuclear weapons mean that those that declare war cannot insure they will not be killed by it.
This does not apply to (1) pathologically narcistic insecure megalomaniacs, (2) multi-national organizations/companies that profit from war, (3) competing, well-siloed, immortal military AI strategic advisors, unfortinately!
Never thought about that. It's hard to tell, Everyone was in some sort of cold war with Germany before the two world wars. Nobody wanted to fight and this is what led Germany to conquer very quickly a number of countries.
The Vietnam War would seem to belie your claim
While this may have kept the 'superpowers' from engaging in direct warfare with each other, it has done nothing to deter them from engaging in proxy wars with eachother. And in the process, devestating the proxy countries. It seems Bill Gates, through all of his philanthropist work, would have realized this first hand.
Is this false? The last time I looked, the percentage of the human population afflicted by war has been shrinking.
The number of folks experiencing war may be shrinking [citation needed], but it's far from being 'illegal.'
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OD8Z4JW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
One of the best books I have ever read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s2qyYQIRQE&feature=youtu.be
But is the world really better relative to the progress we've made? I don't think you can use the sort of facts mentioned in the blurb as a case for the increase in Humanism.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/02/particularly...
A ship is safe in harbour, but that's not what ships are for.
Are games the answer?
This is his response to Pinker: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev... "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"
One example: Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world. Something that was once thought to have been made illegal everywhere was made legal (waterboarding) but not in a backward dictatorship, but in the vanguard of progress and liberty - the USA. Now, Obama made it illegal again (mostly), so that shows that you have to fight to keep your progressions. Progress does not occur automatically, and once achieved, it doesn't stay, Gray argues. I think Gray also argues that wars are mostly many and small proxy wars that occur all the time instead of larger grander affairs.
I think his current ideas on Freedom area also similar. We assume that western democracies are the best ever and getting more freer, but there are examples of a decline in freedoms, in a decline in enlightenment values etc. In a previous book, Gray even highlights that the Enlightenment itself was flawed (with leading figures being overtly racist to say the least) and that we shouldn't put a halo around it by default - rather that there is nuance, and that it's a fragile thing. He also points that whilst the Enlightenment and Freedom is an old idea, ISIS and Islamic terrorism is actually a modern thing. Modern != Progress.
He encourages us to assume that progress is fragile, is not automatically improving and that we need to be active in defending our freedoms, our progress and the things we take for granted.
But would Pinker or Bill Gates disagree with that statement? I don't think so. Bill Gates is devoting his fortune to doing so, and is doing so very effectively.
And even if Pinker is wrong, I believe his message is much more likely to get people to defend freedoms and advance progress than Gray's would be: it's much easier to act if you believe that your actions will be effective.
That is a pretty extreme reading of what Pinker and Gates are saying. I don't think they are saying that at all.
Would faux rationality that the world is getting better constantly not keep us in silent optimism, as opposed to - urm - violently keep fighting for it being made much worse?
What cruel bastard would even do such a thing, anyway?
The source of Gates' wonky motivation can only be known to him (if he possesses enough self-awareness). We might guess that justification of the changes his corrupt dealings have been a part of (and made him in the process a leading megaconsumer) might have something to do with it.
Really? 40 years ago we didn't have the internet, didn't have videogames, had far far far fewer TV shows/movies/entertainment options. Worse health outcomes, though to a less significant degree I think. Far more access to education and educational content (you can effectively get the equivalent of a degree in almost anything, online, for free). More access to healthier foods.
Middle class families in the US have access to all of the above. Would most of them really go back to a time when they didn't?
Pinker's work is a rebuttal to people who want to paint the world as hopelessly bad right now.
So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself.
Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure that the decline of violence continues.
Which leads to the obvious question of how can we maintain or advance this progress?
Dismissing the progress that was made also dismisses how the progress was made. And I fear many academics are not comfortable crediting the longer term ROI from industry and technology, and would rather obsess over pet political or social issues of the day and their own ideologies.
Progress or betterment is entirely subjective, and when considering the human condition, relies on too many variables to even count. Of course, the variables the Pinker focuses on have gotten better overall.
The way I see it is a chaotic scatterplot that is trending slightly upwards towards "better." There are many local minima and maxima however, and I presume those ebbs and flows of prosperity and poverty can last 60 years at a time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is also a kind of activist that work towards fixing specific problems, including Gates, but certainly also a great many people of lesser means and public profile, and does indeed improve the world in the way you describe. I have no doubt that Pinker respects these.
[1]: One of the things I always find hilarious is the constant refrain among conservatives is "well, the old generation was right but this one has gone too far!" despite the constant decline in the fervor of feminist activism for over a century now. :)
https://areomagazine.com/2016/12/29/why-i-no-longer-identify...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/...
In general, conservatives (like Pinker) pretty much always get the history wrong (the facts, the interpretation, and usually both), while liberals are usually wrong about the future (and I say this as a radical leftist). That's why it's easy to poke fun at conservatives who write history (certainly those who, like Pinker, are not professional historians), while liberals are always surprised of the turn of events (for good or bad; when liberals -- including myself -- are optimistic I'm worried, and when they're pessimistic I know I can relax).
[1]: Feminists not so much; there's been a constant decline in the fervor feminist activism over the past century, but certainly, say, the French revolutionaries. Feminism has always been special for many understandable reasons. It is almost always the most timid form of social activism, yet almost always perceived as the most radical.
Sure, by some. It's also true that in about 100% of cases where people have argued for legitimately bad social change (eugenics, communism, prohibition, etc.), those people (and their allies) cast their opponents as immoral and regressive.
It's like Carl Sagan said: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Today on Twitter I saw a conservative arguing that people who deny the personhood of a fetus are like slaveowners who denied the personhood of slaves. As a radical leftist, I doubt you'd agree with that. But this person is just as convinced as you that they are the progressive on this issue.
So we need a better heuristic than "people arguing social change are probably right." Some are right, others are not.
Just a nitpick: communism has certainly not been "legitimately bad" everywhere. In my country (Israel), we have practiced communism (on a local scale, in the Kibbutzim) for much longer than the USSR (over 100 years now), and it's a more extreme form of communism (makes the USSR seem like a capitalist country by comparison), and while it has certainly not been an unqualified success (especially the communal raising of children), and it is certainly crumbling now (due to powerful external and internal pressures), it has been the complete opposite of failure. It has been entirely democratic for 100 years (with problems, but not unlike in any democratic system), and one of Israel's proudest achievements. So communism was an overall great success in Israel for a century.
An other example: witch hunts. According to liberal writing those where all campaigns targeting the weak, poor and vulnerable in society. Historians points towards campaigns that transfered land and money from the accused families into the pocket of the church. True or false? Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?
Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history. Facts don't fit the nice narrative that is needed to gain mass adaption. Usually the truth is a bit from column A and column B and involve multiple events which together create an environment where famous historical facts happened. It is in the realization of those events and the interpretation that we can grasp what actually happened in the past and why.
Clearly as the first. Women would not have gotten the vote without the suffrage movement, just as they didn't get it after the Civil War. However, the war had an effect on the timing, as is often the case with social change movements. They can go on for decades, and finally succeed when an external event forces the dominating powers' hands. No one would say that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the cause of WWI. The alliance system was rigged to blow at the first spark, and that spark happened to be the assassination.
> Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?
As medieval and early modern history was my focus in grad school, I must say that I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically by any professional historian that I've read, and they were relatively uncommon. Like most things in history, they were a result of a complex interaction of factors, but as is often the case, the powerful are rarely the victims of events of that sort, regardless of their complex causes.
> Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history.
I wasn't talking about political writing but about scholarly or pseudo-scholarly works, and all writers have political leanings. Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.
> I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically
Out of all writing I have read, only two books that I recall described the witch hunts as complex causes rather than a simplistic prosecution of defenseless women. I see it so often in political texts I usually tick of a mental box when i see it.
When it comes to plundering, history don't seem to often show that its the most powerful in society that becomes victims. They can employ armies to defend themselves or buy enough influence to not become a target. Usually those that are targeted is those with resources to defend but that relies on social constructs for defense.
But to go back to the claim about liberal writers, I can recommend a book called Debt: The First 5000 Years. The author was involved with the occupy movement so not sure if that defines him as a liberal writer or not. What I found interesting in that book (outside of the overall focus on debt) is the description of bridge gifts, slavery and veils, each having a very different interpretation to common liberal views. Since the author is a professor of anthropology he also supports those interpretations with facts that usually missing when those subjects are being discussed in a historical perspective.
> Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.
It is very possible that liberal writers lie less and tend to be less intentional dishonest than conservative ones. Its a very different claim that liberal writers are usually right and conservative writers usually wrong.
All writers are political (I would hope all people) and there are many brilliant historians, some writing analyses that would appear contradictory to their stated views (my best professor was like that).
> simplistic prosecution of defenseless women
I find that hard to believe, as women were abused on a much larger scale before, during and after the witch trials. Defenseless women make easy targets, but I find it hard to believe that any historian would consider that an explanation. Women are so marginalized from all positions of power and are completely at the mercy of their fathers, brothers or husbands, but let's try just a few for being witches to drive the point home!?
Except that, as any student of history knows, the current state of the world is what it is thanks almost entirely to people just like that (although historians generally view them in a better light than you do because of what they've achieved, despite always being presented by conservative forces in the same light as you view them).
However, it's seems very evident that to extract even some minuscule progress from a conservative power structure a very strong anti-conservative force is usually a must, and that is usually not a moderate progressive force, but a very blunt radical one.
Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.
But, it can be argued that a moderate force simply bounces back without much effect, but even the recent events of the last decade make that argument very unconvincing. (As big changes are easily usurped by blind populism, leaving no room to critical evaluation of possible policy proposals.)
While my training as a professional historian was cut short, I know enough to say that historians are very much trained not to judge or categorize people into good or bad. That has nothing to do with the fact that most social change has been achieved through political struggle.
> Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.
I try not to prescribe a course of action based on the past. I note that Pinker's assessment is judgmental, i.e., he considers the main trend to be positive, yet at the same time he's judgmental against activists. My point is that you can't hold both views at once.
If you're trying to sell people on the idea that status quo institutions like capitalism are bad, you have to compare it to the alternatives. You can't just say "bad things happen under capitalism, therefore we need to do away with it." That's comparing capitalism vs. utopia, but utopia doesn't exist, for all kinds of practical reasons.
Pinker makes the case for what the world as we know it has achieved. An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.
Not necessarily according to Pinker's cherry picked statistics. Plantation owners were not going to achieve more by freeing their slaves, at least according to their own accounting.
That said, I agree with you. I read Better Angels in its entirety and thought parts of it were very convincing. Others were deeply, provably wrong to anyone who is a professional historian (for instance, he let a bunch of Harvard RA's loose on some non-peer reviewed books purporting to statistically describe fatalities in wars that are very poorly documented, then used this faulty data to draw huge, misguided conclusions, like WW1/WW2 being less damaging in aggregate than the An Lushan rebellion).
I actually really enjoy Pinker's writing style and he is clearly brilliant (as I learned when I tried to spar with him a bit in a Q&A and he casually parried what I thought was a devastating counter-example!)
But IMO his intelligence is actually his downfall when it comes to this particular argument. He's convinced himself that everything is getting better, and he is indeed very convincing on certain aspects of this point. The problem, as you say, is with the scale of his conclusions. Certain things like the use of the death penalty and rates of infant mortality really are going down, demonstrably. Other things, like the risk of massive destruction due to a stolen nuclear weapon or EMP or a Nick Bostrom-style evil AI, or even just a generalized societal decline due to economic inequality and environmental degradation, are almost certainly getting worse. Pinker is so self-assured as a writer and thinker that he runs the risk of giving us all a false sense of complacency and a license to ignore these very real problems.
Also, could you recommend some public minds whom you consider strong?
Someone who believes or acts towards (either consciously or not) the preservation of the current distribution of power in society and against changing it. Often extreme conservatives (though not Pinker) even desire to return the social order to some (almost always imagined) past.
> Also, could you recommend some public minds whom you consider strong?
Max Weber, Marc Bloch, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman. Strong does not necessarily mean "right". It means either having truly profound and interesting insight and/or the ability to apply critical thinking to yourself.
Complain that things are bad and fight to improve them? Sure. Complain that things are getting worse over time? It's false in a global sense, and in most specific senses too.
Isn't this cherry-picking data? I don't see how the extent of torture could be said to be a valid measure of progress unless happening on a massive scale. Besides, on a global scale, I would not be too wrong in saying that torture has declined. During the investigation of 1993 Bombay blasts, the police didn't balk at interrogating and torturing even the suspect's relatives[1] who didn't have any role in the act. The probability of this happening again has certainly declined.
Picking a narrow trend doesn't refute the global one that the world is getting better in every aspect.
[1]: http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-convict-s-journal-alle...
True, but a) highly controversially b) condemned by much of the rest of the world c) only allowed outside US territory and d) claimed to be legal only due to the allegations that it was carried out on people falling outside the protections of the Geneva Convention.
Compare to much of history, where torture was widespread, uncontroversial, and legally sanctioned.
I don't think Pinker's thesis that overall violence is decreasing dramatically can be disproved by counter-examples, any more than climate change can be doubted due to occasional colder days. For a solid rebuttal to Pinker I'd want to see disagreement with his extensive statistics, and I don't see much of that in Gray's article.
But using "torture was recently brought back" as a data point to rebut an overall statistical decline makes no sense. It's like saying "Apple's stock price fell today, therefore people are wrong to say the economy is improving".
I think what a lot of people (especially modern day conservatives) don't realize is that this stuff requires never-ending vigilance. The natural tendency of human progress is towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the eventual complete exploitation of people and resources.
Where some people today see a spoiled youth glued to their smartphones and spending all of their money on flatscreen TVs, I see a generation disenfranchised with literally no say in any aspect of their regulatory system. No say over how much money they make, no recourse when multinational corporate monopolies charge them excessively for education, health, even things as basic as untainted food. Earning a fraction of the income their parents had when adjusted for inflation.
So no, this is nothing even remotely close to the future we're capable of. We're just comfortable enough to miss the injustices being carried out against us and the planet, often in our own names.
http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...
I think it's easy for the likes of HN readers, most probably sitting in their comfortable western strongholds to feel like we are bringing progress in the world with our fancy tech. I believe the reality feels very different to a lot of people in a lot of other places - where things as basic as even food or clean water might still be hard to come by - and it's kind of insulting for fussy old rich men living in comparative luxury to be telling these people otherwise.
I honestly grew tired of reading this very quickly. The sum of all words these philosophers said is not enlightenment. Reason means you don't frigging trust every frigging word of what people say, even if they said "don't trust every word of what people say". How is that not obvious?
What is John Gray's message here? I get he is trying to challenge Pinker's seemingly optimistic views, but I don't get what is the pattern he tries to convey by throwing all that sand into the gears of Pinker's progression thing?
Are we seriously giving up on seeing patterns here and insist in our mental image of the world as a white noise tv screen?
Then WWI happened, following soon by WWII, partly based on a poor resolution of WWI. Then a 45 year Cold War with several close nuclear wars.
Thats why I am skeptical the concept of world war is really over.
"The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade. Kids’ brains are developing more fully thanks to improved nutrition and a cleaner environment. Pinker also credits more analytical thinking in and out of the classroom. Think about how many symbols you interpret every time you check your phone’s home screen or look at a subway map. Our world today encourages abstract thought from a young age, and it’s making us smarter."
This is called the Flynn effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
However, it's important to note that there is no consensus on why this effect is being observed. There are multiple theories and us having to interpret symbols on smartphones is just one of the proposed ones.
Comparing Trump to nuclear bombs and plagues does not seem a good idea to start a conversation about reason, science, humanism, and progress.
[0]https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/kirkus_review_of...
I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.
(I don't want to dismiss this issue, but reading about it, sometimes it sounds to me like a case of pretty much the most pathetic human behaviour - getting $10 for free and, instead of being grateful, getting angry that someone else got $1000.)
Hell, WRT climate change, we need some optimism, and we need to devote less time to usual social bickering, and more time to fixing what's important.
> I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.
Everything he's doing nowadays fits perfectly the theory that his motives are pure, and about the well-being of humanity. Is there anything in particular you're aware of that is evidence to the contrary?
That kind of assumes “quality of life” is a simple function of absolute material wealth and not strongly influenced by relative position. While certainly many people have moral beliefs that that should be the case, there is plenty of reason in all of human history to believe that it is not in fact the case.
Let me put it this way: if everyone in the human race was so rich that they owned an entire planet full of machines that cater to their every whim, then there might still be people who are "rich" and own thousands of planets. Does that wealth inequality matter? No, it doesn't, because you're still so rich you own a goddamn planet! People who own planets have no reason to be indignant.
The same is true in our world. The only thing that should really matter to people is how well off they are absolutely. Anything more than that is simply coveting other people's wealth. In America, it turns out that even people who are considered "poor" by the government are well off by material possessions:
https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/air-c...
> As scholar James Q. Wilson has stated, “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.” In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.
> The home of the typical poor family was not overcrowded and was in good repair. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. The typical poor American family was also able to obtain medical care when needed. By its own report, the typical family was not hungry and had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.
If everyone was rich enough to own a planet.. but the richest owned all the planets with food on them, then you are screwed the next time a famine happens and they are not.
Besides: the majority of people would be much better off absolutely if there were less inequality given a fixed amount of wealth. So at no point will people not have a reason to consider inequality a problem unless they are wealthier than average.
The problem is that so much of this lessening of horribleness came about via imperfect systems. We become focused in our opposition to the system's flaws, and (in some circles) that opposition morphs into opposition to the system as a whole, which is a dangerous kind of thinking if it becomes mainstream.
Also, if anything, everyone preaching doomsday makes people depressed, disinterested and detached. If the world is falling apart, what could possibly an individual do? IMO we need the exact opposite now - an optimistic tone that tells people that while there are problems, things are looking up, we're winning, and yes, you can help too.
This doesn’t mean that eliminating evil is trivial or isn’t worthwhile.
One day we will all be focused on the war on hangnails.