We live in violent times. Or do we?

Despite the seemingly constant flow of human engineered destruction on our fellow humans, other species and our precious environment some thoughtful analysis — beyond the headlines of cable news — shows that all may not be lost to our violent nature. An insightful interview with psychologist Steven Pinker, author of “How the Mind Works” shows us that contemporary humans are not as bad as we may have thought. His latest book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” analyzes the basis and history of human violence. Perhaps surprisingly Pinker suggests that we live in remarkably peaceful times, comparatively speaking. Characteristically he backs up his claims with clear historical evidence.

[div class=attrib]From Gareth Cook for Mind Matters:[end-div]

COOK: What would you say is the biggest misconception people have about violence?
PINKER: That we are living in a violent age. The statistics suggest that this may be the most peaceable time in our species’s existence.

COOK: Can you give a sense for how violent life was 500 or 1000 years ago?
PINKER: Statistics aside, accounts of daily life in medieval and early modern Europe reveal a society soaked in blood and gore. Medieval knights—whom today we would call warlords—fought their numerous private wars with a single strategy: kill as many of the opposing knight’s peasants as possible. Religious instruction included prurient descriptions of how the saints of both sexes were tortured and mutilated in ingenious ways. Corpses broken on the wheel, hanging from gibbets, or rotting in iron cages where the sinner had been left to die of exposure and starvation were a common part of the landscape. For entertainment, one could nail a cat to a post and try to head-butt it to death, or watch a political prisoner get drawn and quartered, which is to say partly strangled, disemboweled, and castrated before being decapitated. So many people had their noses cut off in private disputes that medical textbooks had procedures that were alleged to grow them back.

COOK: How has neuroscience contributed to our understanding of violence and its origins?
PINKER: Neuroscientists have long known that aggression in animals is not a unitary phenomenon driven by a single hormone or center. When they stimulate one part of the brain of a cat, it will lunge for the experimenter in a hissing, fangs-out rage; when they stimulate another, it will silently stalk a hallucinatory mouse. Still another circuit primes a male cat for a hostile confrontation with another male. Similar systems for rage, predatory seeking, and male-male aggression may be found in Homo sapiens, together with uniquely human, cognitively-driven  systems of aggression such as political and religious ideologies and moralistic punishment. Today, even the uniquely human systems can be investigated using functional neuroimaging. So neuroscience has given us the crucial starting point in understanding violence, namely that it is not a single thing. And it has helped us to discover biologically realistic taxonomies of the major motives for violence.

COOK: Is the general trend toward less violence going to continue in the future?
PINKER: It depends. In the arena of custom and institutional practices, it’s a good bet. I suspect that violence against women, the criminalization of homosexuality, the use of capital punishment, the callous treatment of animals on farms, corporal punishment of children, and other violent social practices will continue to decline, based on the fact that worldwide moralistic shaming movements in the past (such as those against slavery, whaling, piracy, and punitive torture) have been effective over long stretches of time. I also don’t expect war between developed countries to make a comeback any time soon. But civil wars, terrorist acts, government repression, and genocides in backward parts of the world are simply too capricious to allow predictions. With six billion people in the world, there’s no predicting what some cunning fanatic or narcissistic despot might do.

[div class=attrib]Read more of the interview here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Scientific American.[end-div]