By Andrea Rizzi
One of the boldest claims that a scholarly work has made in the last few decades is the one made by Steven Pinker in his The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). In an ambitious though captivating attempt to trace back violence as far as to 10,000 BCE, the Canadian-American author argues that a massive yet little-recognised worldwide decline in all forms of violence has taken place, and that we are therefore living the safest time ever.
The book has met both praise and criticism from many angles and it is not this post’s aim to scrutinise the individual claims, explanations and pieces of evidence put forward by Pinker. However, in the light of the wave of revolutions and ensuing conflicts that have shaken the Middle East as well as of more recent events, most notably the flare-up in the Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, we are faced with the question whether these claims can still be withheld today. While the US (at least under the Trump administration) vowed to reduce their international military presence and Europe rests on the soothing laurels of the so-called Long Peace (Gaddis, 1989), one wonders whether the West can keep pretending that the Yugoslav wars, the Syrian civil war, the Donbass ‘hybrid war’ and the Caucasian wars (just to mention the most vicious conflicts that have ‘knocked’ on Fortress Europe’s gate in the last three decades), not to mention the several hotbeds of organised violence that emerged since the end of the Cold War, can still be viewed as mere bumps along the road to generalised peace or should rather be interpreted as early symptoms of a trend change.
One case in point, or rather an example of the multiple possible readings of contemporary violence outburst, is represented precisely by the latest military confrontation in Nagorno-Karabakh. Looking at how the international community tried to mediate for peace (not only the UN, but also the US, France and more incisively Russia brokered a ceasefire) in a relatively remote land, with no considerable energy or economic resources at stake, one cannot but acknowledge that Pinker has a point – war is considered morally unacceptable and, although peacekeeping interventions are anything but devoid of political interests, governments feel somewhat invested with the responsibility to end people’s suffering. Rationality, sensitivity towards human life and the other ‘better angels’ of our nature are empirically prevailing.
As Pinker himself maintains, however, progress is not a natural force and only functioning institutions and norms can constrict the irrational and destructive traits of human psyche. The latter observation is key to analysing the present reality: by focusing on full-blown wars and fairly circumscribable phenomena such as the drug traffic-related feuds in Latin America, we might fail to grasp the complexity and subtle nature of contemporary violence. Where conflict has ended, for example, post-conflict instability is still very much a troublesome reality, and often ends up exacerbating conflict persistence (Rangelov, 2012). Post-war and post-revolution countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, offer some of the most conspicuous examples of a continuum of violence: local populations, often faced with the daunting watershed between accepting an authoritarian rule or opening the Pandora’s box of regime overthrow, are subject to a continuum of violence both over time (repressive regime, violent revolt, post-revolt insecurity) and over social contexts within an impoverished, embittered, militarised society.
Furthermore, although the amount of deaths by direct violence is definitely a valuable indicator, assuming that life is better because less people die is a rather simplistic syllogism: social exclusion, lack of purpose, depression and other forms of violence and pain are among the most distinctive social features of modernity. And their causal relation with death is not to be underestimated: in highlighting a sudden sharp rise in mortality in Russia and several former Soviet states between 1990 and 1995, Bob Sutcliffe (2006) points out that it is widely attributed to “the collapse of the Soviet form of government, leading to the break-up of the USSR, the pursuit of market reforms and widespread social disruption and financial and political instability”. Violence does not necessarily require an ill-intentioned agent nor a specific target, but it can still come about and claim victims that are not accounted for in conflict death tolls. Contemporary scholarship is showing how the top-down imposition of inherently violent systems like capitalism, globalisation and neoliberal development enforced by Western actors can have dire consequences on political stability, social cohesion, equality, and security.
To conclude, while one cannot but agree that – to a certain extent – the world is an safer place compared to any previous historical period, at least three ‘buts’ lurk around the corner of each triumphant praise of our better angels: first, violence can be used to (although it rarely succeeds in) changing an undesirable status quo, one characterised by injustice and oppression. Therefore, not all violent enterprises should be condemned as such, as some can herald positive long-term transformations. As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical”. Second, the absence of war is not necessarily peace, nor a guarantee of a longer, more decent and fulfilling life for all. In fact, fighting a war – especially one deemed to be a just one – can give a sense of purpose to some individuals. Hence, although this is too thorny an issue for the scope of this article, it can be argued that the pervasiveness of physical violence is perhaps just one of the elements that make life in a certain time in history more or less worth living. Last but not least, the belief that we are winning the battle over the ‘evils’ of our nature has the power to make those in power complacent and could ultimately be wielded as a powerful excuse for inaction or indifference. It could, in other words, threaten the forces for progress, the very better angels that got us this far.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gaddis, J.L., 1989. The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. Oxford University Press.
Pinker, S., 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York, Viking.
Rangelov, I. and Kaldor, M., 2012. Persistent conflict. Conflict, Security & Development, [Online] 12(3), pp. 193-199. Available through: doi:10.1080/14678802.2012.703531.
Sutcliffe, B., 2006. Death and Development. Human Development in the Era of Globalization, [online]. Available through: doi:10.4337/9781845429867.
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