 Now the second torture will start. So I have now reached a stage of conceptual analysis and of historical insight and background information that allows me as my second task here to comment in some detail on the most recent attempt by Stephen Pinker with his book The Better Angels of Our Nature to give new impetus to the wick theory of history that is the myth that human history has been a somewhat rocky but nonetheless steady march upward and into the light and that we live today in the western world if not in the best of all possible worlds but definitely in a world better than anything that came before. The book unsurprisingly has been enthusiastically greeted by the ruling elites and become a great commercial success further boosted undoubtedly by Pinker's status as a charismatic Harvard professor. On 800 pages of small print the book assembles a great mass of interesting and useful pieces of information and analysis but insofar as the case made therein concerning Pinker's central thesis of some steady social progress culminating in the present my verdict is entirely negative. Pinker may be an excellent psychologist but he is out of his depths in the areas of philosophy, methodology, economics and history which all are obviously required to pass some sound judgment on the degree of social perfection of the various stages and long run developments of human history. In particular his historical narratives frequently strike me as cherry picking and either missing the wood for the trees or vice versa and more often the trees for the wood. There is plenty to criticize about the book not least the fact that Pinker is less than careful in unambiguously defining his terms so as to avoid internal inconsistency and equivocation. Here however I shall concentrate my criticism on just two central points. First Pinker's measurement or criterion of social progress that is his explanandum and then the explanation for this so-called measured phenomenon his explanance. Throughout his entire work Pinker shows a remarkable hostility to religion and hence it is hardly surprising that Pinker does not cross his mind to use the biblical commandments which incidentally he completely misrepresents as benchmark for social perfection rather his benchmark is violence and social progress is defined as a reduction of violence. Now at first sight this criterion does not seem too far away from the biblical libertarian goal of peace. In fact however it turns out to be something quite different. His prime example of violence are homicides and war casualties. The book is filled with tables and statistics on such indicators of violence. Incredibly however Pinker does not make a categorical distinction between aggressive and defensive violence. In the biblical commandments with their explicit recognition of the sanctity of private property such a distinction is made. It makes a difference if violence is used to take another man's property or if a man uses violence in defense of his property against an aggressor. Murder is a categorically differencing than the killing of someone in self defense. Not so for Pinker. Property and property rights do not systematically figure in his analysis at all. Instead the terms do not even appear in the book's 30 page subject index. For Pinker violence is violence and the reduction of violence is progress regardless of whether this reduction is a result of a successful suppression and a resignation of a people by and vis-à-vis another successful conqueror. The result of a people's own successful suppression of aggressors and conquerors. In Pinker's world a stable master-slave relationship is the sign of civilization while a slave revolt accompanied by violence is the sign of de-civilization. Likewise a system of compulsory taxation which is another term like that of property that is completely missing from his index and I think not by accident. And regardless of how high the taxation is is an indicator of civilization as long as it is only stable. That is as long as the mere threat of punishment by the tax authorities is sufficient to result in general compliance on the part of the tax. Whereas any tax revolt and resistance is to count as de-civilization. One is peace and progress to Pinker whereas the other is violence and regression. Now Pinker does not follow his own logic to the bitter end but it deserves to be pointed out to reveal the full depravity of his thought. According to him a smoothly run concentration camp for instance guarded by armed men who do not murder the inmates and prevent them from killing each other but who supplies them let's say with happiness drugs to keep them quietly working on for the benefit of the guards until their own natural non-violent deaths is the perfect model of peace and social progress while the violent overthrow of the guards by the concentration camp inmates is violence and de-civilization. Now based on this depraved view of social progress that knows of no property and property rights violations of the property rights violations but only counts the number of unnatural deaths bodily injuries and broken bones it should be expected that Pinker's evaluation of various historical episodes must yield some rather awkward or even grotesque conclusions as in fact they do. In particular it also explains how Pinker could possibly misjudge the present democratic age as the best of all times but is it even on Pinker's own terms that is are we indeed living today in the least violent of times? The answer is ambiguous. On the one hand there are wars which throughout history have always been responsible for the largest number of casualties far outweighing those resulting from regular small scale interpersonal violence. Now in this regard as Nicolas Taleb has shown in response to Pinker's progression thesis no statistically discernable trend can be established. According to Taleb for the 600 year period from about 1500 until today for which we have comparatively reliable data no significant change as to the frequency of war or the number of war casualties always set in relation to the total population at the time can be made out. Indeed if anything there has been a slight uptick in war-related violence with the spread of democracy contrary to the proponents of the so-called democratic peace theory. And as for the 70 year period since the end of World War II until today which Pinker identifies as exceptionally peaceful and warless despite a few hundred million people killed in the Middle East. For this period Taleb points out that wars and especially large scale wars are highly irregular and comparatively rare events and that an observation period of just 70 years then is far too short to serve as a basis for any far-reaching conclusions. As well as John Gray has argued against Pinker even this assessment of modern times is likely too rosy a picture because it tends to systematically underestimate the number of war-related casualties among non-combatants. That is the number of civilians dying from various diseases spread through war or from the long-term side effects of war such as slow deaths caused by economic deprivation and starvation. Incidentally the same danger of underestimation does not exist at least not to the same extent for the wars of the European Middle Ages because they were typically small scale wars and territorially restricted events and they involved a comparatively sharp distinction and separation between and of combatants and non-combatants. On the other hand there exist indeed plenty of empirical evidence to speak of a suprasecular trend toward a reduction in violence not to be confused with a reduction in the infringement on property rights on violence as measured in particular by homicide rates because a homicide is a homicide regardless of who kills whom by and how. In this extra or amoral sense we can indeed speak of a civilizing process as Pinker does and demonstrates in great detail. Pinker adopts this term from the German sociologist Norbert Elias and his book The Civilizing Process which was published in German in 1939 and translated into English 30 years later. In this book Elias describes and aims to explain the changes in everyday etiquette from table manners to sexual morse that occurred during and since the European Middle Ages. Put briefly, this process can be described as the gradual transition from brutish, gross, crude, boorish, bearish, immodest, intemperate and so on and so on behavior to increasingly more refined, controlled, considerate, modest and temperate and so on behavior. Taking his cues from Elias Pinker merely generalizes and expands his thesis about the civilizing process from human etiquette to all of everyday life and behavior and in this in my judgment he is by and large correct. However Pinker's explanation for this extra or amoral form of social progress from brutish to increasingly refined behavior is fundamentally mistaken. What he identifies as the principle cause of this development and I will come to that in a moment has actually if anything retarded and distorted this development. That is absent Pinker's cause there would have been not less but more and significantly different refinement in human conduct. In fact Contra Pinker, the grand long run historical tendency toward increasingly more refined or less brutish behavior can be explained simple enough as a quasi natural byproduct of the widening and deepening of the division of labor in the course of economic and technological development. The development of increasingly more and different productivity enhancing tools and instruments proceeded hand in hand with the development and increasing differentiation of human crafts, skills and talents. Put briefly the importance of muscle power for economic success declined relative to the importance of brain power, physical finesse and mental agility. Moreover as I have tried to explain in my short history of men, especially under Malsusian conditions which prevailed for most of human history as systematic premium for economic success and indeed human survival is placed on the progressive development and growth of human intelligence of low time preference and impulse control and patience which personal characteristics are at least partially hereditary and thus passed on through subsequent generations. Pinker's explanation for this tendency toward a progressive refinement of human conduct is a very different one however. His explanation for this development is the institution of a state that is a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making and he claims that the most decisive and all important step in the progressive refinement of human conduct has been the transition from a stateless social order to a statist society. And in this ironically enough he is not entirely wrong given that his definition of progressive refinement is an extra or a moral one. The institution of states and more specifically of democratic states is indeed the principal cause of many central features and observations regarding the present age except to notice that many or most of them have nothing to do with moral progress and stand in open contradiction to biblical commandments as well violence as defined by Pinker may indeed have gone down except to notice that the exercise of violence has been so refined and redefined under state auspices as to no longer fall under Pinker's narrow definition of the term violence. Witches for instance are no longer violently burnt but shift off instead seemingly peacefully into psychiatric wards to be drugged and pacified by medical professions and neighbors are no longer robbed of their property violently but much refined and apparently without any physical violence presented with regularly recurring tax bills to be quasi-automatically paid per bank transfer into the accounts of the state. No violence. The central cause identified by Pinker for social progress and increasing social perfection then the institution of a state actually turns out a central force of desivilization retarding and distorting the underlying civilizing process naturally set in motion to reduce the deepening and widening of the division of labor in the course of economic development. The institution of the state may explain the refinement of violence in the course of time but it is itself a constant source of violence however refined and the driving force for expansion and intensification. The subtitle of Pinker's book Why Violence Has Declined would at least lead most potential readers to expect an answer to a moral question or problem because of the negative connotations typically associated with the term violence yet as such the book's title is an ingenious attempt at false and deceptive advertisement because Pinker does nothing of the sort instead he answers a very different question of how to technically or scientifically define violence so as to make the morally most depraved and violent institution of all appear as a peacemaker or to make Satan look like an angel. And how does he do this? Now first in throwing out logic and plain common sense and then fudging the data and historical narratives so as to fit his illogical and plain nonsensical basic premise his basic premise is presented by Pinker in the form of a simple diagram in any two person scenario both parties according to him have a motive for violence either as an aggressor to prey on the other or as a victim to retaliate Consequently, similar to Hobbes Pinker pictures this state of affairs as one of interminable violent conflict as a bellum, omnium, contra-omnus or war of all against all but miraculous there is a cure to this problem namely a third party called bystander by Pinker that acts as judge and assumes the role as a territorial monopolist of violence so as to create lasting peace but question why would this bystander not also be a potential predator and would this predator motive not be even strengthened if he were the monopolist of violence and did not have to fear any retaliation from his victims Pinker does not address this rather obvious question let alone provide a systematic answer to them nor does he provide an answer to the question why anyone would submit himself without resistance to any such by standing monopolistic judge would no one recognize the potential danger for his own property from such an arrangement and put up resistance against its establishment to be sure Pinker cannot escape to later on notice occasionally that empirically states territorial monopolists of violence did not always emerge spontaneously or quasi-organically but mafia-like as some sort of protection rackets yet this observation does not lead him to revise or reject his fundamental assumption of the state being a peacemaker nor does it lead him to the recognition that many if not most of the civilizing achievements that he ascribes to the workings of the state are in fact the result of popular resistance against state power whether active and violent or passive and non-violent indeed as mentioned before Pinker classifies any violent resistance against the state as de-civilization which implies that the prior violence exercised by the state vis-a-vis the resistor must have been a civilizing and pacifying activity not to be counted as violence at all and almost needless to say then that such mental acrobatics cannot but lead to various contradictions from which Pinker can extricate himself only through more or less ingenious but always intellectually painful contortions Pinker's identification of the state as the all important force in the process of civilization coincides of course perfectly well with the assessment of all state rulers everywhere and it is essentially the very same lesson that we all have been taught in school and university to accept as a quasi-axiomatic truce in particular it is the same lesson taught also by all contemporary so-called leading top economists and yet it flatly contradicts one of the most elementary laws of economics production under monopolistic conditions will lead to higher prices and lower quality of whatever is produced as compared to the production of the same product under competitive conditions that is under conditions of free entry most contemporary economists recognize this law of course but they fail to apply it to the peculiar monopoly that is the state most likely because they are employees of the state in fact however this law applies to the state just as it applies to any other producer regardless of how one describes the specific product produced by the state if we describe the state as Pinker does as a territorial monopolist of peacemaking then the piece made by it will be more expensive and of lower quality if we describe it as a monopolist of justice then the justice will be of higher cost and of lower quality if we describe it as a monopolist of violence its violence will be more expensive and of worse quality or if we describe it as I think best as a territorial monopolist of expropriation charged with a task of property protection then we will predictably get much expropriation which benefits a monopolist and little protection which will only be costly to the state in any case the result is always the same and Pinker's central thesis concerning the civilizing effect of the institution of a state then must be rejected on logical grounds alone now what about Pinker's empirical case then no logic cannot be refuted by empirical data but if one throws out logic one is bound to misinterpret empirical data Pinker offers a huge number of data tables, graphs of great interest I have no quarrels with them my criticism concerns solely the interpretation of these data in fact as mentioned before I can largely go along with a generalized Elias's thesis about a civilizing process from brutish to refined human conduct based on logic however I would interpret it differently whatever civilizing process there is it did not occur because of the state but despite or in resistance against the state and whatever de-cevilizing process there is it did not occur because of the absence of the state but in spite of its absence or as a late onlingering effect of a prior now dissolved state and its prior de-cevilizing tendency post hoc does not imply proctor hoc now I will restrict my criticism to two central exhibits that Pinker offers in empirical support of his thesis one concerning global affairs and another regionally more specific one that is most directly related to my earlier observations on Europe and Western history the empirical support for the global progression thesis is summarized in two tables the first is supposed to show the decline of war deaths as percentage of the population from human prehistory to the present for this Pinker distinguishes four historical stages prehistory hunter-gatherer societies hunter-corticultural societies and finally state societies and then he provides data to show that there was at best only a minimal improvement from the prehistoric to the hunter-gatherer stage that violence even increased somewhat with the introduction of horticulture and agriculture which is not entirely surprising as there is then more to steal and that it finally dropped off sharply to a level never seen before in human history with the introduction of state societies as well to further bolster his thesis the second table compares the rate of deaths in warfare for modern non-state societies of the 19th and 20th century with equally modern state societies demonstrating supposedly once more the civilizing effect of states as said before I shall not quibble about the numbers and estimates presented in these tables except to note that any estimate concerning human prehistory and the far distant hunter-gatherer horticultural stages of human history must be viewed with a good dose of skepticism archaeological findings of broken skulls for instance can provide the basis for some reasonable estimate of violence at particular places and times and you may then also scale up such estimates to the estimated total world population at the time to calculate the violent death rate for any given time period but what you cannot do and what is for rather obvious technical or practical reasons at least until today near impossible to do is to show that your sample of violence data is a representative sample from which alone it would be legitimate to generalize one specific findings to the population total the central reason however why Pinker's data failed to demonstrate what he wants to demonstrate is a different one in his attempt to compare non-state societies with state societies he is comparing what cannot be compared his examples of non-state societies whether ancient or modern refer almost exclusively to some obscure tribes outside of Europe or in a few years or in a few cases some rare cases that apply to Europe two cases that have thousands of years took place thousands of years before the Christian era and all of these examples that he gave have either literally died out or else left no lasting trace in history and it is near impossible today to trace any contemporary society genealogically back to these primitive societies as their historical predecessor in distinct contrast all examples of state societies are taken from Europe and the western world where such genealogical backtracing is easily possible for periods of hundreds or even thousands of years obviously such a comparison can yield an unbiased conclusion only under the assumption that the only relevant factor distinguishing European or western people from Pinker's various tribesmen is the presence versus the absence of a state and that otherwise both people are the same made up of the same physical and mental pick up and endowment now Pinker never explicitly states this for his own case of course crucial assumption probably because this would cast some immediate doubt on the validity of his conclusion and indeed as a matter of fact there are countless empirical studies in the meantime in many disciplines that demonstrate the utter falsehood of this assumption substantial differences exist in the physical and mental make up and endowment of different people European or more generally westerners are decidedly not the same sort of people that Pinker's tribesmen are and with that his first empirical proof of his progression ceases collapses his proof is a non-starter and proves nothing in addition Pinker misses the trees of humans for the global wood of mankind also in another regard for according to his own data there are also some non-state societies even if only a few that equal or even surpass the level of peacefulness achieved in state societies now as a brief aside Pinker might not even be aware of the fact that some sort of false human equality assumption is necessary to make his point but he assumes it anywhere again and again if only implicitly or surreptitiously deep down Pinker is an egalitarian as shows up in particular in his outspoken sympathy for the progress brought about by the so-called civil rights movement in the United States and the noble Dr. Martin Luther King as well as one of history's greatest statesmen Nelson Mandela not withstanding both men's well-known communist connections Pinker is not an extremely silly egalitarian of course he makes distinctions between sexes, ages, races, classes and he is well aware of the unequal distribution of various human traits and talents within society of intelligence, diligence impulse control, sociability and so on but as a politically correct progressive he cannot bring himself to the recognition that the unequal distribution of these human traits and talents within society may be a different one in different societies with Pinker's first global empirical proof rejected what about his second, his regional one here all data come from Europe and in so far the danger of comparing incompatibles is avoided Pinker devotes some 10 pages to this case and the central information is condensed in a single graph depicting the rate of deaths in conflict in greater Europe from 1400 to 2000 if anything however this graph demonstrates the opposite of Pinker's progress thesis what it shows is that the longest period of relative peacefulness and low levels of violent wars was a period almost 200 years from 1400 until the end of the 16th century yet this period falls precisely within the longer period of the European middle ages and marks its end and the middle ages as I have argued before are the prime example of a stateless society interestingly Pinker concurs with his assessment of medieval Europe as a stateless society but then he fails to see that this assessment implies according to his own data an empirical refutation of his thesis and it gets even worse for Pinker's case according to the same graph the following historical period that is from the late 16th century on to the present is characterized by three huge spikes in the level of violence the first spike from the late 16th century until the Westphalian peace in 1648 is largely associated with the 30 years war the second from the late 18th century until 1815 somewhat less steep than the first is associated with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and the third and greatest spike from 1914 to 1945 is associated with the 20th century's two world wars as well for all intermediate periods the level of violence and his own data remained well above that of the medieval times and this level was only reached again three centuries later during the period from 1815 to 1914 and again during the post world war II era all in all then the record for post medieval Europe in terms of violence appears to be rather depressive and yet the entire period from the late 16th century until today is the area of states which Pinker considers the driving force of civilizing progress Pinker associates the first drastic spike in violence with religion and the wars of religion in fact however they were wars to make states feudal kings and princes aspiring to the rank of absolute ruler made war to bring increasingly larger contiguous territories under their supreme control and in this they took advantage of the recent split within Latin Christendom of Catholics and Protestants and it was they who actually invented the term wars of religion if only so as to hide and deceive about their real purpose of state making which had little if anything to do with religion the second spike marks the turning point from monarchic to democratic states and is the result of Napoleonic France using war in the attempt of establishing hegemony over all of continental Europe and the third and most drastic spike upward to the level of the level of violence marks the beginning of the area era of full-fledged democracy and is the result of Britain and the United States going to war to establish world hegemony in his interpretation of these data Pinker tries to make the best out of for him rather desperately looking situation for one he points out with the help of a second graph that throughout the entire period the number of violent conflicts declined as a number of states fell due to territorial consolidation and centralization a greater number of small scale wars with few casualties were replaced with a smaller number of large scale wars with many casualties now this does not appear much like progress especially if it is kept in mind that the rate of deaths in conflicts actually increased during the entire period even if the number of violent conflicts declined to still rescue his progress ceases then Pinker advances to auxiliary arguments first he claims that the more lethal character of these less frequent modern wars has nothing to do with states per se or the territorial expansion and consolidation of states but is instead a quasi accidental results of advances in military technology which is a ceases that he elsewhere rejects where he states that the development of technology is essentially neutral to the level of violence just think of the Hutus and the Tutsis what they did and secondly to add more weight to his ceases about the decline in the frequency of war but not to emphasize again the decline of war related death rate he points out that the progress of political centralization that is the increasingly smaller number of states with increasingly larger state territories was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in civil war intra state war and hence represents a real civilizing gain and not just an accounting trick essentially according to Pinker with each political centralization and ultimately the establishment of a one world state the likelihood of war declines and ultimately disappears along with a parallel decline and disappearance of civil war in short states civilize and a one world state civilizes best or in reverse each secession de-civilizes and complete freedom of secession de-civilizes most now economic logic dictates a very different interpretation of all of this however states are not spontaneous voluntary associations they are the result of war and the existence of states increases the likelihood of further wars because under status conditions the cost of war making must no longer be born privately but can at least partially be externalized onto innocent third parties other people pay for their war that the number of wars then declines as a number of states falls and that there can be no interstate wars once the number of states has been reduced to a single one is not much more than a definitional truth even if less frequent however the further advance the process of political centralization and territorial consolidation is the closer to the ultimate status goal of a one world state the more lethal such wars are to become nor can the institution of a one world state deliver what Pinker promises true there then can be no interstate wars by definition for the sake of argument we may even concede that the frequency and the casualty rate of internal civil wars may decline as well although the empirical evidence for this appears to be increasingly doubtful in any case however what can be safely predicted about the consequences of a one world state is this with a removal of all interstate competition that is with a replacement of a multitude of different territorial jurisdictions with different laws, customs, tax and regulation structures by a single worldwide uniform jurisdiction any possibility of voting with one's feet against the state and its laws is removed as well hence a fundamentally important constraint on the growth and expansion of state power is gone and the cost of the production of justice or whatever it is that the state claims to produce will accordingly rise to unprecedented heights while the quality will reach a new low there may or may not be less of broken bone type broken bones type violence a la Pinker but in any case there will be more refined violence that is property rights violations that do not count as violence for Pinker then ever before and the one world state society then will look more like the stable concentration camp scenario mentioned earlier than anything resembling a free convivial social order stripped down to its bare bones Pinker's central arguments amounts to a string of logical absurdities according to him tribal societies somehow merge to form small states and small states successively coalesce into increasingly larger states now if this merging and coalescing were as a terms insinuate a spontaneous and voluntary matter however the result by definition would not be a state but an anarchic social order composed of and governed by free membership associations if on the other hand this merging and coalescing results instead in a state it cannot be a spontaneous and voluntary matter but must of logical necessity involve violence and war in that any territorial monopolization of whatever it is that is monopolized necessitates the violently enforced prohibition of free entry but how then can anyone such as Pinker who wants to reduce violence and war to a minimum and possibly eliminate it entirely why how can he then prefer a social system any social system that necessitates the exercise of violence and war to a system that does not necessitate it answer only in throwing out all of logic and claiming that the relationship between state and violence and war is not a logically necessary but a merely contingent empirical relationship instead that just as it is in fact an entirely empirical matter whether or not I or you commit violence and go to war that is an empirical matter so it is also a purely empirical matter whether or not a state commits violence and goes to war thus according to Pinker World War II with all its atrocities for instance had essentially nothing to do with the institution of states but was a historical fluke owing to the evil doings of a single deranged and individual Adolf Hitler indeed unbelievably and seemingly without blushing although it is difficult to find people blushing or not blushing with a written text Pinker approvingly quotes historian John Keegan saying that only one European really wanted war Adolf Hitler the question that arises but how much evil can a single deranged individual do without the institution of a centralized state how much evil could Hitler have done within the framework of a stateless society such as the Middle Ages would he have become a great lord a king, a bishop or a pope indeed how much evil could he have done even within the framework of thousands of mini states such as Lichtenstein, Monaco or Singapore the answer not much and certainly nothing comparable to the evils associated with World War II it is not then no Hitler, no Churchill, no Roosevelt or no Stalin and then no war as Pinker would have it but rather no highly centralized state and then no Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin remove the state and they may have become Jack the Ripper a Charles Ponzi or even harmless people but not the mass murdering monsters we know them to be institute the state on the other hand and you create, attract and breed monsters in some then Pinker's attempt to rescue the Wig theory of history and demonstrate that we live in the best of all worlds turns out to be an utter failure indeed one may even say that the book and its great commercial success is itself empirical proof of the contrary of his seizes thank you very much