 My name is Professor Rod Broadst. I'm a professor of criminology at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and it's my very great pleasure to welcome and introduce Professor Peter Sperenberg, formerly from the Erasmus University in the Netherlands and currently visiting Australia, delivering a series of talks on the very current topic of violence. Maybe Professor Sperenberg, I can start by asking a pretty basic question. Do you think we've become more or less violent than we were in the past? First of all, Professor Broadst, thank you for inviting me to speak here at ANU. Are we becoming less or more violent? Many people would think we're becoming more violent, but the evidence really shows that we have become less violent, perhaps not all countries but at least we know much about European history, for example, about murders and less so in North America. And we know that they have declined very much in terms of rates per 100,000 per year from the Middle Ages up to the present. That decline, I mean, I notice at least in the published research, which there are actually a considerable amount of study now, shows that that decline has gone from as high as 70 to 80 per 100,000 down to 1 to 2 per 100,000. I mean, it's a massive decline. What do you think drove that decline? Why has interpersonal violence, particularly homicide fallen so dramatically? And indeed, it's been fairly stable now for over 100 years in terms of that lower rate, at least in Western Europe. Well, I think it confirms the theory of Norbert Elias, a theory that I have worked with over the decades, which talks about the process of civilization, so not civilization as something static, but a process that, again, is driven by the increasing stability and growth of states, the so-called state formation processes. Yeah, I mean, just to reflect a little bit on the inference of Elias on your work, I mean, one of the significant achievements, I think, of Elias is that he did lay out some of the very basic drivers of what we would see as contributing to the decline of violence, one, as you mentioned, the state formation and monopolization of violence. But he also made a great play about the role of, if you like, commerce of interdependence. The fact that we had what he called longer chains of interdependence was one way of reducing the fear of others. And the other one he mentioned, which you touch on quite a bit in your own work, is this sensitization to violence, this process in which our attitudes or our response to violence becomes much more constrained. And we're much more shameful and we find much more repugnant, the spilling of blood, the suffering of other human beings. So could you tell me a little bit more about, you know, how those Elysian notions of, I like, have influenced your own work? Yes, I think you have already very neatly summarized some of his theories. But I think the key word here is interdependence. So it's not one development in one field, like the economic field, which are driving all other social changes. But it is changes in one field affect the other field, like with processes of state formation and economic development. They reinforce each other if in the early on, in the high middle ages, a powerful prince, a king of France, for example, would be able to be, is able to beat a few rivals. But if there are no lines of communication and there's little trade going on between these areas that he has conquered, then this early monopoly falls down again. So it's, in the end, it's economic development and state formation reinforce each other. And that again has a consequence for people's habit as Elias calls it. So it's not only people's violent inclinations that become tamed as it were, but it's the whole psychology of humans that is changing in the end. That's a wonderful insight of Elias. He really pointed the fact that it's our interior, our psychic, what he would have called our relationship to our psychogenesis and our sociogenesis. This change affected us in the way, in our eternal thoughts. And I think if I'm right, I might be pushing it a little bit. He was really talking about a capacity to empathize and ability to see others as you would see yourself. And I think he was referring to another, had an impact on our inner feelings and so on. Yeah, one of the concomitant processes is an increasing ability of identification that people increasingly, not only that the identification with people that you know very well around you increases, but increasingly also people are able or they tend to identify with others far away as humans. And that, for example, influences people's attitudes towards genocide or massacres. It's a very recent phenomenon that massacres, wherever they occur in the world, they tend to get noticed, noted and revealed. And that's what people are feeling, revulsion against what is happening. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned, because the other side of the coin in lethal violence studies and homicide studies is, we talk about, I know it sounds rather sort of insensitive, we talk about ordinary homicides, that's homicides that policing agencies in our states deal with commonly. But the other side of the coin is that we also, homicide also involves mega murders or massacres or mass murders, genocide you mentioned being perhaps one of the more extreme kinds of crimes or atrocities that take place. What do we know about, I mean we can demonstrate clearly that at least in Western Europe and many other countries, interpersonal violence, homicides decline very, very dramatically. What can we say about the frequency, if you like, or the commonness of mass atrocities, mass murders and so on? What do we know about what those trends are? Well, we have not the kind of precise statistical evidence that we have for homicide, so it's much less of a thing that we can make precise measurements of mass murder or genocide. It used to be believed by many people, also by many scholars that recent periods say the last 150 years are the most violent in history, especially when you examine massacres and genocide, but that was mainly the impression raised in general studies of genocide, where the beginning of the 20th century very often is also the beginning of the story, but if you dig a little deeper, then it's easy to find out that genocide is of all ages, even though we do not really know whether it is more or less common in the mother world. Well, I mean you're making a fairly strong argument to say that of course massacres, genocide has been known to history for a long, long time, at least I guess since the Greerian kingdoms and so on, but I gather you're also been playing with some interesting data or ideas about what kind of societies were, how violent societies were in the Paleolithic in the pre-literate period, because it's again a kind of a controversial area where we don't have a lot of data, and so judgments and opinions about that period are quite interesting from the origins of our violent nature, if I can put it that way, indeed whether we really are violent. Well, this is an area that I've become recently interested in, which is research that I'm still developing, but I can say a few things. First of all, I depend here on scholars who know a lot about genetics, and nowadays with the study of DNA, by studying DNA of present-day living populations, we know a lot about movements of population in the past, tens of 50,000 years ago, but we also can speculate a bit about possible violence, and it is my hypothesis that the so-called races, which used to be distinguished on the earth, that in the formation of these races, these have been formed also through processes of exclusion, expulsion and violence. The white-skinned colour, for example, is something relatively recent that perhaps arose some 10,000 years ago, independently in Western Eurasia and China. Well, anyway, this is a hypothesis that I'm still working on. Look, it sounds, you know, terrifically interesting, and of course, given our great concerns and apprehension, particularly now in the modern world and the current world, when we seem to face crisis after crisis, small wars, if you like, atrocities, I'm thinking particularly of in Syria and Iraq. I mean, how would your theoretical ideas or your ideas about violence, what sort of take would you give on what's happening in these sorts of places where we see just terrible examples of massacres and mass atrocities taking place almost on a daily basis? One thing, of course, that we have to think of is that of the role of the mass media nowadays, so everything that happens anywhere in the world just is on TV and on the Internet, so it's, for one thing, it looks as if there are more conflicts around, but another answer is that, yeah, this process of gradually decreasing violence does not mean that it goes on and on just everywhere in the world and just neatly goes in the right direction. Not a simple linear sort of relationship. No, if that would be the case, there would no need for scholars to study it. Everyone could just see it. But if you speak, for example, of Syria and Iraq, it is also important to realize that these, until 50 years ago or something, well, somewhat longer ago, but throughout the 19th century and the early 20th century, these areas and many others were colonies of European powers, and there was also then a lot of colonial violence going on, but then mostly hidden from the public in the home country. Yeah, look, I think you're really pointing to what I think, anyway, is a very important sort of area of research. We know that Elias's ideas and your work in particular has extended what we know about violence using that model, if you like, or that theoretical grasp in Western Europe and Europe more generally, or at least in the Western hemisphere. But we have so little work, as you point out, coming from Oriental or non-Western sort of jurisdictions or places, I mean my own work in Cambodia with my colleagues, Terry Buhuz, and Bridget shows that, at least in the Cambodian example, that the same kind of cascading form of violence takes place. But it may still, I guess, be too early to argue convincingly, at least to everybody, that we might have, if you like, a series of ideas or thoughts about, or if you like, theories, I'm just a reminder of Cain's famous diction about, there's nothing more pratical than a good theory. Do you think, in that sense, that it would be worth trying to extend that work into a broader comparative area? I mean, I think it's something that you've been trying to do. Oh, sure, I've been trying to do that, and well, I'm glad that you are doing that as well, so we surely need more research, and I'm looking forward to read your book on Cambodia. Thank you, Professor Sveremberg. Look, we probably should finish now. I'd love to ask more questions. The one that's still bubbling up in my mind is the classic, and maybe we can finish with this, that kind of classic criticism of the whole sort of Elysian idea of, in his book about manners, how manners, how etiquette, the way we behave, how that's changed over time. I'm just thinking one of the kind of criticism that's come up quite a bit is that we often look at our forefathers, our ancient, our middle ages, forebears, and conceive of them as rather childlike, as rather emotional creatures, prone to extremes of violence and calm. You know, societies that can generate, you know, the wonderful baroque music that we hear, but at the same time, we're keen on dueling and splitting noses and some of the other sort of, you know, violent things that we've talked, that you particularly talk about in your books. Do you think that that's true that we do kind of over-characterize or we pretend that our earlier sort of, you know, our forefathers were somehow crude and less sophisticated, less civilized? Is that a, how would you respond to that kind of criticism? Well, you might call them less civilized, but then in a very neutral and technical sense, but they were surely human beings. They lived in a different society and they behaved accordingly. They behaved to what was useful for them in that society. They often had to rely on themselves for their protection, but there's no need for ourselves to be pride in our civilized habitus. That's just the result of us having been born in 1948, as in my case. I guess just to sort of finish, I mean, it's clear that the process of civilization is something that's ongoing or continuing. You're optimistic about, you know, the future of humanity. Do you think, you know, the violence will, the level of violence that we experience even today will continue to diminish? What might, you know, what's your, what's your sort of take on that, Professor Spencer? I would always say it's possible, but it's not something that's automatically guaranteed. Well, thank you, Professor Sperenberg, for joining us in today's conversation. It's been a real delight and it's been a pleasure having you. Visit us at ANU and we look forward to having more engagement with you in the future. Thank you so much. You're welcome.