On Violence in History

Philip Dwyer, Mark S. Micale, Philip Dwyer, Mark S. Micale

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789204650, 9781789204643
• eBook ISBN: 9781789204667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Is global violence on the decline? Scholars argue that Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's proposal that violence has declined dramatically over time is flawed.

This highly-publicized argument that human violence across the world has been dramatically abating continues to influence discourse among academics and the general public alike. In this provocative volume, a cast of eminent historians interrogate Pinker's thesis by exposing the realities of violence throughout human history. In doing so, they reveal the history of human violence to be richer, more thought-provoking, and considerably more complicated than Pinker claims.

From the introduction:
Not all of the scholars included in this volume agree on everything, but the overall verdict is that Pinker's thesis, for all the stimulus it may have given to discussions around violence, is seriously, if not fatally, flawed.The problems that come up time and again are the failure to genuinely engage with historical methodologies; the unquestioning use of dubious sources; the tendency to exaggerate the violence of the past in order to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the modern era; the creation of a number of straw men, which Pinker then goes on to debunk; and its extraordinarily Western-centric, not to say Whiggish, view of the world. Complex historical questions, as the essays in this volume clearly demonstrate, cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, and certainly not in a simplistic way. Our goal here is not to offer a final, definitive verdict on Pinker's work; it is, rather, to initiate an ongoing process of assessment that in the future will incorporate as much of the history profession as possible.

Chapter 1

The Past as a Foreign Country

Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Pinker’s “Prehistoric Anarchy”

Linda Fibiger

Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature is not the first publication to have put bioarchaeological evidence for high levels of violence in prehistory into the spotlight.¹ Like Pinker, Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization gave prominence to both skeletal and ethnographic studies when re-creating the prehistoric narrative on violence, rejecting the image of a pacified past.² Pinker has, in fact, simply reused many of the studies featured in Keeley’s work. This has come under considerable criticism on the basis of its statistical inferences, which use percentage deaths in war of up to 60 percent in some archaeological as well as ethnographic studies, and is more eloquently and knowledgably discussed by Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Taleb and by Dean Falk and Charles Hildebolt.³ Most recently, Rahul Oka and colleagues have demonstrated that Keeley’s and Pinker’s approach of simply considering the number of those engaged in violent conflict and the proportion of those killed by violent acts may not be a sufficiently robust indicator for comparisons across time. Instead, they postulate that units with larger population sizes—such as those identified as “states”—produce more casualties “per combatant than in ethnographically observed small-scale societies or in historical states.” In short, this means that modern states are not any less violent than their archaeological predecessors.⁴ While numbers are at the heart of much of the criticism leveled at Pinker, it is terminology that will be considered first here, followed by a critical exploration of bioarchaeological data generation, analysis, and interpretation, which provide the foundation on which much of Pinker’s argument for prehistoric violence rests.

Talking about the Violent Past

Both archaeology and bioarchaeology (that is, the scientific analysis of human skeletal remains) are, as disciplines, reliant on clear, unequivocal terminology when trying to identify, classify, analyze, and interpret what is in many cases a fragmented, incomplete record to re-create past human activity. This terminology may not be universal and can include, for example, particular regional chronologies and systems of periodization, underpinned by more widely accepted conventions, ethical and professional frameworks, and operational procedures (for example, the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains).⁵ This is, of course, common to many disciplines, and a failure to fully understand, apply, or cross-reference important key terms that emerge from other disciplines will ultimately obscure, confuse, or weaken a potential argument, as will the assumption of universality of meaning.

Defining Prehistory

The first term that needs to be considered critically is that of prehistory itself, which throughout Pinker’s book is presented as a unifying expression mainly used to refer to nonstate societies and the “anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations with cities and governments, beginning around five thousand years ago.”⁶ In archaeological terms, prehistory encompasses a vast period of tens of thousands of years. Its traditional periodization highlights apparent changes in aspects of materials culture (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age), and is also punctuated by shifts in subsistence (such as the introduction of agriculture), settlement patterns (permanent rather than seasonal settlements), and societal organization and administration (such as urbanization).⁷ The overall characterization of prehistory immediately becomes much less defined and consistent when homing in on different regions at different times within Pinker’s main chronological focus of hunter-gatherer/horticultural societies and beyond. The transition to agriculture, for example, certainly did not equal the universal emergence of cities and governments Pinker is implying.

The Danish cemetery site of Vedbæk, featured in Pinker’s table documenting deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies, is a good case in point and highlights some of the complexities behind each of the 22 sites listed by Pinker as representative of warfare deaths at prehistoric archaeological sites that, overall, make up a less than coherent sample.⁸ At Vedbæk, two of the 21 burials (a small assemblage, which is not apparent when presented as percentage figures only) showed potential signs of violence. The cemetery dates to the fifth millennium BCE and is attributed to the Mesolithic (that is, hunter-gatherer dominated) Ertebølle horizon (named after its type site in Jutland), representing complex hunter-gatherer-fisher groups whose settlement sites (some of which were probably occupied year-round) and cemeteries indicate social complexity and a relatively high degree of economic stability—something conventionally associated with the Neolithic period and an agricultural subsistence economy.⁹

A single site from Denmark cannot be considered representative of Pinker’s assumed nonstate prehistoric horizon in a northern European context, and it is certainly highly problematic to compare or even group it with the geographically and temporally removed sites from India, Africa, and North America that join Vedbæk in Pinker’s table, selected purely, one would guess, for their already collated and published English-language availability. Even much closer to Vedbæk, across the North Sea in Britain, a completely different picture for the Mesolithic emerges. No Mesolithic cemeteries have been excavated here to date, human remains are usually found disarticulated and in a variety of mostly nonfunerary contexts, and the complete skeletal rec­ord for the whole period consists of fewer skeletal remains than the single site of Vedbæk. Skeletal remains provide the most direct evidence for violence in prehistory, especially in times and places where specialized weapons may not exist or fortified architecture is absent.¹⁰ Of course, we can analyze them only where we find them, but it would be difficult to make a broad statement about cross-regional or continental trends of violent interaction in prehistory from the remains of 21 individuals found in a small cemetery.

Defining War

While the subtitle of Pinker’s book refers to the history of violence, it is the term warfare that features large in his narrative and is applied universally to a variety of contexts and data sets, ranging from violence-related skeletal trauma data in prehistoric grave sites to death statistics from world wars. This raises the important question of the definition of the term and concept of war, what actually constitutes true evidence for its presence, and how this may vary depending on the context and period. This is an underdeveloped but important aspect in Pinker’s argument.

Available definitions of war arise from anthropological, archaeological, historical, and military studies and place different emphases on social, tactical, and physical aspects, varying degrees of specificity and complexity, and different scales of conflict. Physical force and domination are recurring features in existing characterizations of war, as are its link to groups or defined units.¹¹ Additional identifying features frequently examined are lethality, territoriality, and duration.¹² At other times, war is defined exclusively as a state activity.¹³ All of these attributes are valid and important considerations, but they are varied and not universally present in Pinker’s data sample.

The scale of feuding and raiding, common expressions of conflict in pre-industrialized, preliterate, small-scale societies like those of the earlier prehistoric periods to which Pinker is referring, may well be characterized by “organized fighting” involving planning, direction, and an expected set of lasting results.¹⁴ It may also see the application of the “use of organized force between independent groups” and therefore be defined as warfare according to some of the current anthropological definitions of war.¹⁵ This does not mean it is always possible to distinguish its presence and results, at least archaeologically, from one-off violent events and other forms of interpersonal violence such as one-to-one fights, punishment, torture, and domestic violence. The scale and intensity of a conflict may not necessarily be accurately reflected in the archaeological record, and warfare as a scaled, organized, long-term group conflict will need critical levels of human casualties or material destruction to be visible archaeologically and/or osteologically.¹⁶

In the face of such different ideas about underlying concepts as well as the actual practice of war, the main function of applying the term universally across time and space appears to be its superficial simplicity, its familiarity, and its popular accessibility in a work that is situated across the popular/academic divide. Warfare also suggests a sense of scale that—when considering the discussions on Vedbæk and on the statistical validity of some of the data in Pinker’s work—may be misleading. It does also, even unintentionally, dramatize, perhaps even sensationalize the topic in a way that the term violence may not to the same degree.¹⁷

Tribes and Tribal People

The term tribe or tribal people, as used by Pinker, is not without problems. Past criticisms have resulted from its potential colonial associations, involving assumed uniformity and linear concepts of societal development (that is, from the more “primitive” to the more “advanced/civilized”).¹⁸ The key issue arises from the quasi-evolutionary classification it may suggest in a study that contrasts the concept of tribal with apparently more developed/advanced, and therefore more peaceful, state societies. This situation is further complicated by grouping recent ethnographic data with prehistoric archaeological data, which assumes or at the very least suggests uniformity or comparability between the two, blurring the lines between a projected or theorized past (the recent ethnographic record as a good approximation of the distant past), and the actual contemporaneous record of that past (the physical and bioarchaeological evidence).

If we use the term tribe simply as a descriptive term, what does it mean? It could, for example, suggest the presence of small- or medium-sized, local, prestate groups, connected by language, culture, and subsistence practices.¹⁹ These groups might have been interacting, and lineages or families are likely to have provided their organizational basis. This has been confirmed for later agricultural groups through DNA analysis, such as at Eulau in Germany.²⁰ Nor can potential for some degree of social ranking, prestige, or leadership be disregarded.²¹ Again, we cannot really rely on this concept to be accurate for all the groups, past and present, summarized under nonstate societies in Pinker’s work. The term’s value as a descriptive shorthand, even if properly defined, may be outweighed by the potential historically derived connotations of inferior societal development, and the use of the term small-scale societies may be more appropriate in many cases.

Body Counts and Boneyards

Every scholar, every scientist, every researcher publishing their work is under public scrutiny. Even highly technical, specialized, or apparently inaccessible research results can find their way into the public sphere, and many, like The Better Angels of Our Nature, are created for this very purpose: as semipopular works accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike. In this case, the book’s scope beyond the author’s own discipline means that the choice of terminology and language used is pivotal, not just while trying to engage diverse audiences when presenting within the author’s own specialism, but also while stepping outside it. While a certain degree of compromise and loss of detail may be unavoidable in “bigger picture” studies, this should not compromise sensitivity to wider issues within and outside the discipline.

Data resulting from the excavation, analysis, and continued curation of human skeletal remains is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: History, Violence, and Steven Pinker
• Chapter 1 The Past as a Foreign Country: Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Pinker’s “Prehistoric Anarchy”
• Chapter 2 Were There Better Angels of a Classical Greek Nature? Violence in Classical Athens
• Chapter 3 Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker: Violence and Medieval England
• Chapter 4 The Complexity of History: Russia and Steven Pinker’s Thesis
• Chapter 5 Whitewashing History: Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
• Chapter 6 Assessing Violence in the Modern World
• Chapter 7 The “Moral Effect” of Legalized Lawlessness: Violence in Britain’s Twentieth-Century Empire
• Chapter 8 Does Better Angels of Our Nature Hold Up as History?
• Chapter 9 The Rise and Rise of Sexual Violence
• Chapter 10 The Inner Demons of The Better Angels of Our Nature
• Chapter 11 What Pinker Leaves Out
• Index