 Thanks to all of you to be with us here on day two. So we're really honored to have Stephen Pinker with us. Many of you are familiar with his work. He's the Johnson Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. And he's one of our nation's most prominent and interesting and creative public intellectuals. He's written on many different subjects. He's the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate. And the book that is really what we'll focus on more here is really a fascinating work called The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined. He's, interestingly, the chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. So questions of words and naming means a great deal. And he's been named one of the 100 global thinkers by foreign policy and by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world today. So we're honored to have you with us today. Thank you. And I thought maybe you could begin our conversation with an overview of kind of the general arguments of your book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The thesis of The Better Angels of Our Nature is that despite the impression that one gets from the headlines, quantitative studies of violence show that it has gone down over the course of history, over multiple scales of time and magnitude. This is true of homicide. This is true of treatment of children. This is true of tribal raiding and feuding. But the numbers that I'll mention this morning, given the themes that the conference have to do with war. And this is largely a trend of the last 70 or so years. Since 1945, if you count the wars and if you count the number of people killed in wars. And this is, by the way, very different from getting your impression of the world by looking at the headlines. Because news is by definition about things that happen, not about things that don't happen. We rarely see Wolf Blitzer on the streets of Angola saying, here I am reporting live from a country that's not at war. Given a world of 7 billion people of almost 200 countries, there's very likely to be a war somewhere. It will always make the headlines. If you only concentrate on the headlines, you'll think the world that nothing has changed. It's only when you count up all of the parts of the world that are not at war and the number of people who die peacefully in their sleep that you can really appreciate the trends. And here's what the trends seem to be. One thing, if you look at the most destructive category of war, and that's war between two countries, especially two big, rich, powerful countries. There has been a quite dramatic decline. There's been no war between any two great powers since the end of the Korean War in 1953. And interstate wars, government against government, have been going down. I don't think there has been one with a standard definition of war as one where there's a conflict where there are at least 1,000 deaths in a year. There hasn't been one since 2003. And then just the number has been gradually petering out. Wars between rich countries. There hasn't been a war between the countries, the top 40 countries in terms of GDP since 1945. Wars in Western Europe. We kind of take it for granted that France and Germany are not gonna fight a war anytime soon. But for most of the course of human history, needless to say that was not the case. Western Europe used to have start two new wars a year for a span of 500 years. As of 1945, that went to zero. And of course, there were no wars between the United States and the Soviet Union, contrary to every expert prediction that World War III was just a matter of time. And then the smaller wars, the civil wars and the wars between less developed countries, those persisted after the decline of war between big rich powerful countries. But those too have been going down in number and in the human toll. If you were to count the number of verified war deaths per capita, the numbers would look something like maybe 300 per 100,000 per year during the worst years of World War II. That went down to about 30 per 100,000 per year during the years of the Korean War, down to the teens during the era of the Vietnam War, the single digits in the 70s and 80s, down to about one for most of this century, sorry, one in the 1990s and less than one in the 21st century. Now there's been a small uptick in the number of wars and the rate of deaths in war over the last three years because of the Syrians of a war and the wars in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. But even that has raised the rate from about two tenths of a war death per 100,000 people to about 0.8 tenths of a war, sorry, eight tenths of a war death per 100,000 per year. So it is a quadrupling, but it's quadrupling from a really, really tiny number to a number that's only a little bit worse. It's wiped out about a dozen years of progress, taking us back to about 2002, 2003, but nowhere near the levels of the 60s, 70s and 80s. So that's the empirical datum that among others I try to explain in the better angels of our nature and it's one that is underappreciated if you go by the headlines. I see my book as part of a general trend to try to move people away from basing their assessment of the state of the world on subjective impressions and intuition and more towards data and numbers. We've all seen revolutions in areas like sports with moneyball in political forecasting with 538 as opposed to a seat of the pants punditry and I'd like to see more of that in our analysis of war and peace and in violence more generally. So this gets us to the title of this panel which is why is violent conflict decreasing in the long term? So you've given us compelling data that we've seen these decreases specifically in war, but underlying that has to be some justification, some understanding of the reasons why these numbers have gone down. Yeah, and I'm under no illusions about human nature. I'm not a romantic or utopian and I think Homo sapiens is a nasty piece of work. On the other hand, stranger things have happened over the course of human history. All the great ancient empires used to practice human sacrifice, throwing virgins into volcanoes to placate angry gods, they managed to get rid of that even though human nature presumably didn't change and burning heretics and capital punishment for shoplifting and debtor's prisons and all kinds of barbaric customs eventually declined and eventually disappeared. And so I think of the decline of war as something that's not necessarily permanent by any means, but it does seem to be a real development and we ought to try to understand what was behind it. What is it about human nature that allows both aggressive forces like revenge and dominance to do battle with some of our more peaceable inclinations like self-control, like rationality, like empathy and so on. So if you try to see what's gone right in the last 70 years, lots has gone wrong, but something's gone right. We actually heard a number of them from General Ogierno earlier this morning when he made a number of statements about the overall conduct of war that I think would have been quite extraordinary a hundred years ago. Like the purpose of the military is to prevent wars, like our prime objective is to prevent provocation, miscalculation, escalation. There's a general increasing norm that war is not just the continuation of policy by other means, it's not the natural state of affairs. It's an abnormal situation to be avoided and I think that is a historical change. There's more of a valuation of human life and less of a valuation of national honor, glory, status, dominance and so on as a primary aim. There are more tangible changes in norms that I think have helped implement that. There's, since 1945, there's been an understanding that more or less, the world is divided into states. States are immortal, boundaries are sacrosanct. Now, that's not 100% true, but it is surprisingly true. No member state of the United Nations has gone out of existence through conquest since 1945. That's an extraordinary in world history when states were just wiped off the map or swallowed up at the drop of a hat. Very few national boundaries have been moved around by force and the exceptions are instructive like the Falklands, like Kuwait in 1990, like Israel in the Six-Day War where the conquests are contested to this day. Granted, there have been some pushing at the boundaries like Crimea is a disturbing example, but by and large, the lines that were on the map in 1945 are still on the map. There have been states that have fragmented. There have been decolonization, but the colonial borders then got kind of grandfathered international borders and very few of them have been moved around by force quantitatively, if you count. So that's a second set of norms, just what you do or don't do if you are a member of the respectable club of nation states, which the United Nations kind of sanctified. Then there are structural factors that I think each, at least statistically, pushed the world, reduced the likelihood, although they don't reduce it to zero. Economic development, probably the best predictor of civil wars is just rock bottom poverty and once a country rises to a couple of thousand dollars equivalent per capita GDP, the chances of it hosting a civil war plummet. So as the world gets richer, it has fewer wars. Global institutions like the United Nations and other regional coalitions seem statistically to lower the likelihood of war. International trade and investment, when countries find it cheaper to buy things than to steal them, then they're less likely to indulge in conquest. And it's often been said the United States and China, despite the rivalry are probably not gonna go to war because they make all our stuff, we owe them too much money, so it would be economic suicide on both sides. And democracy has at least a statistical effect in reducing the chance of war. All things being equal, two democracies are much less likely to go to war than a democracy and an autocracy or two autocracies. And so the rising tide of democratization has brought with it a slight lowering of the risk of war. So those are the explanations that have been on the table and I think all of them have some degree of validity. So one of the most interesting things about your book is it's not really about war per se, it's about violence. It sort of offers a comprehensive theory in a way of violence and its steady reduction over long periods of time. So do you see, and you speak about domestic violence and crime and other forms of violence, is there any type of violence that you think in the near or long-term future poses a particular threat that might increase in some profound or destabilizing way? Well, there's a lot of, needs to say a lot of unpredictability. There are no cycles, that is I don't think that statistical studies of war's over the course of history, so there's an enormous amount of randomness. There are unknown unknowns, things come out of the blue, but it is not the case that if we'd gone for a long period of time without a big war, then we're due for one. History doesn't work that way. It's random rather than cyclical. I think there's certain categories that could continue to go down. I think the violent crime, homicide and rape and assault have been sputtering downward and the old idea that you'll never get rid of them or even reduce them until you solve major problems like poverty and racism and inequality have turned out not to be true, that when a country decides, let's just try to reduce the crime rate, they generally succeed. And even some of the most violent cities in the world like Bogota and the Favellos of Rio and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union where it looked like violence was going to be permanent, the rates of homicide have come juttering down. The other categories though that are much less predictable. Whereas interstate war, you've only got a couple of hundred members of the club to agree that war is a stupid thing to do. But when it of course comes to civil wars, all you need is a bunch of young men and weapons which are pretty easy to procure and they can call themselves the popular front for the liberation of whatever and you could have a civil war. So it's gonna be much harder for the world to see an end to civil war compared to interstate war. Terrorism is always tempting because it's a way of leveraging a very small amount of violence into a very large amount of attention. The global toll of terrorism is outside of war zones. It's actually quite trivial for, but it is almost by definition a media magnet. And so anyone with a grievance can use a little bit of terrorism to inject themselves on the world stage. So I don't think we're gonna see an end to that any time soon. And then there are other question marks. We don't know what climate change is going to do to violence. I don't think it is a given that as the world gets drier, hotter, perhaps even hungrier that it's necessarily gonna lead to an increase in war. It's a widespread assumption, although the statistical studies don't back it up. So I think overall, absent big, ugly, nasty surprises which can always happen, but the systematic trends I think are toward a more peaceful war together with bad surprises. So let me ask you a question about how you came to this topic. And if you could recount maybe some particular moment or some realization that drew you to the significance of this declining engagement with violence, maybe the visit to the Torture Museum and one of the other episodes that you either speak about in your book or maybe have not spoken about publicly. Yeah, I came to it from a general interest in human nature. I believe there is such a thing. I don't believe that we're particularly nice species. But on the other hand, in encountering fears that a study of human nature leads to fatalism or pessimism or reactionary politics, like why try to make the world a better place if people are just rotten to the core if we've got violent genes or a violent brain and people will just louse it up no matter what you do. And I pointed out that human nature, for many years, human nature is complex that even though we do have motives that can result in violence, like revenge and dominance, human nature also accommodates other motives that can push back against violence. Abraham Lincoln called them the better angels of our nature and that was a lovely poetic term that I co-opted for the book title. But it refers to the fact that the brain also has systems like empathy, like self-control, like reason, like social norms, that depending on the circumstances can repress the parts of human nature that militate toward violence and war. And it's a question of which of those components of human nature get engaged at a particular time and place. So the train of events that led to this book were was pointing out actually on a blog posting. My literary agent has a intellectual website called EDGE and every year he asks a question and a hundred or so scientists and other writers sort of speculate on the question. One of the questions, what are you optimistic about? And I pointed at a number of facts that I was aware of such as that a lot of barbaric practices got abolished over the course of history like chattel slavery, like public torture executions, like debtor's prisons, and that the rate of homicide whenever it's been quantified by historians over a continuous time series shows a downward trend. Then after it was posted I got correspondence from scholars in fields that I barely knew existed saying that there's much more evidence for historical declines in violence than I had even mentioned in this post. In particularly the war nerds, the people who try to quantify how many wars have taken place and how many people get killed in them year by year, sent me their data saying this is the way the curves look. There's a lot of randomness, there are ups and downs but there's an unmistakable downward trend. And when other people sent me data like child abuse is down, spanking is down, domestic violence is down, rape is down, I thought, gee, there's a story here. There's both a trend that few people are aware of because people get their oppression of the world from headlines rather than data. And this is a big fat, juicy, psychological problem. Namely, how could this be possible given that human nature could not possibly have changed that quickly? What is it in the various components of the brain that both allow us to be highly violent but when things go right we can repress those violent instincts? So this is the perfect place to open up the floor for questions from the audience. Right there in the center please. Hi, thanks, Simone Garrow with Control Risks. I first became acquainted with your work in a previous life when I was working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who, and Bill Gates is a huge fan of yours and would always push his team to read your work all the time. So thank you for that. But to bring it back, this is very optimistic and great to hear, but to bring it back perhaps on a more pessimistic note, is there anything that's going on in the world right now or trends that you see that worry you will keep you up at night? Oh yes, well certainly what's happening in Eastern Ukraine represents a real probing of the norm against conquest, against territory changing hands by force. Granted, it's highly limited. There Putin has sent in little green men rather than tank battalions. So it's not like Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. But still, this is pushing against a norm that has probably done a lot to keep the peace, that just you don't, if you're a country you've got some members of your own ethnic group in another country, you don't put on the table the possibility of annexing that chunk of territory. So it's worrisome that that norm is being challenged. Certainly the possibility of the worst case scenarios like nuclear terrorism and again the low probability high impact scenarios of possible nuclear war, even if it's regional. Even though I don't think it's particularly likely, I think the damage would be so catastrophic that we've got to think about those cases. And of course the influence of jihadism, of violent political Islam. Of the ongoing wars now, as of 2014, there were 11 wars in the world, which is a pretty low number historically. A couple of decades ago it was in the 30s. Of the 11, seven of them involve violent Islamist forces. So clearly the jihadism, Salafism, is continuing to be a big problem. Hi, Peter Singer from New America. Your work was recently referenced in a meeting that Ian Wallace and myself had with a senior government official related to cyber security. And they talked about how you had pointed out how there's all these trends going in a positive direction except in the space of cyber. And he was asking us of how do we make it like that? How do we make cyber threats look the same way as what's played out in, we would say, personal crime violence and also overall violence? And then a second part of this, one that's almost like a policy recommendation question, but related is that perhaps also an explainer for at least some of the things that we're seeing that is it is far more effective for me to non-violently steal the money from hundreds of people, or thousands or millions, rather than bash you across the head and take the money out of your wallet. I'd rather have a hundred million credit cards or the like. How do you both explain cyber security within this phenomena, but then second, what would be your recommendation to make cyber security follow the same patterns and trends? Well, I think there are problems and then there are really, really, really big problems. And so that's, so for example, garbage and solid waste is a problem. Climate change is a really, really, really big problem. So I think of cyber security as a problem. I think if our nerds are smarter than their nerds and if we make it a priority to make systems more resilient and more secure, it'll be more of a nuisance than a global threat. Whereas nuclear terrorism is something keeps me up much more at night. If credit card records get stolen, that's a bad thing, but it's not in the same magnitude as say a nuclear terrorism or a big war between two countries, say a escalation in Ukraine. I don't think it's very likely, but I think it's a much more serious thing to worry about. And I, for, yeah, I'll do it at that. Can we get a mic over here to Tom? Great. Hi, Tom Ricks. I wanna ask you about the medical argument that the reason fewer people are dying in war is most people used to dying in war because of disease. And it's the elimination of disease rather than a decline in violence that has led to declining numbers of dead in warfare. Yeah, it's true that in many wars in the past, there was the number of people dying from disease was greater than the number of people blown up. But that can't account for the trends that we've seen because for one thing, effectiveness of medical treatment works on percentages and the wars vary along orders of magnitude, number of zeros, as opposed to percentage points. And so there's no comparison between say, World War II on the one hand, Vietnam and Iraq, all of which involve different number of zeros compared to the medical care available in World War II Vietnam and Iraq. If you back project the most sophisticated medical care of the current wars and say, well, what if we had them during World War II? World War II would still be off the charts. For one reason, because so many people were incinerated, nuked, starved, so that medical care was kind of beside the point when you have that sheer number of people vaporized or incinerated. And even in the best of circumstances, medical care can only operate at the margins. The percentage of people who would have lived even without medical care, you take away the people who would have died even with the best medical care. It's only the percentage in the middle that can be pushed around by medical care. If you've got 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 as many people affected in a war zone to begin with, that drives the numbers much more than the percentage in that intermediate zone that can be saved now, but couldn't have been saved in the past. Hi there, Anna Mulvarn with the Christian Science Monitor. The US military has a big deal moment on its horizon in January of 2015. It's gonna lift its combat exclusion policy for women. And so that could in turn lead to more women on the front lines of combat as they've been already. And it's traditionally also been a passport to leadership within the Pentagon. So we can imagine a day where more women are gonna be in those leadership positions. So I'm just curious about your reflections on how women might impact the future of violent conflict and warfare as they become more involved. It's a good question. And in general, the empowerment of women pushes against violence. Not that women can't or don't lead countries in wars or commit acts of violence themselves, but of the different categories of violence, I don't think violence is a single thing, and in Better Angels I distinguish a number of categories of violence. But there's some categories that are definitely a guy thing. We have the expression a pissing contest, and it's not a coincidence that one of the two genders is better equipped to compete by reasons of anatomy. I think it's a good metaphor that when it comes to stupid conflicts over honor, prestige, dominance, revenge, a lot of data suggest that that's more of a guy thing than a woman thing. Now again, when it comes to more practical uses of violence, that is, you're attacked, you have no choice, but to fight back, you're playing a chess game, and violence, and at least the threat of violence is to your advantage. I don't think there's a big, or if any, difference between the sexes. But when it comes to the more stupid kinds of war, I think greater voice toward women will mean we get fewer of those stupid categories of violence. And in general, public opinion polling tends to show that even though there's a lot of variance between countries in terms of sympathy for hawkish policies between men and women, so in one country you might have more hawkish women than you have hawkish men in another country. Within a given country there's almost always a gender gap and where men are more hawkish than women by a certain number of percentage points. Big enough so that the, for example, the both elections of George W. Bush would have been reversed if only women had had the vote. And women in American elections are favored, the more dovish candidate in election after election. Again, it's not an all or none difference, but it's enough of a statistical difference that as women have a bigger voice, I think that nibbles away at the probability of war. So we're out of time. Thank you so much. Let's all join together and thank Professor Pickerford. Thank you.