I'm criticizing Pinker's concept of violence as only against personal security. Violence can also be done against a system or environment.
Certainly, violence as against personal security is more readily measurable and so easier to grasp because lives and individual acts are countable, than is violence vis-a-vis the stability of a system, where there is only one thing easily enumerable, the success or failure of said system.
So while understandable, Pinker only provides half the picture of the decline of violence, the other half of which I would argue has increased in violence in the modern era.
When I read the book, I thought his argument largely right since the observation of the decline of force in interpersonal behavior is a fact. But apart from my slight disagreements on the cause, I found myself unable to agree with him on the whole because he fails to appreciate the life of the human world, the life of a civilization as having value beyond the mere lives of individuals.
And of course, I don't know of which systems you refer. When I think of Pinker, I want to use an example that includes more than one country. I will use the example of driving a car from Canada through multiple countries to Panama. 20 years ago, this was dangerous, unthinkable. While you encounter many systems along the way, and I'm thinking systems of infrastructure, policing, border security, ... they are all working well enough now for you to make the trip and they are still improving overall.
I'm criticizing Pinker's concept of violence as only against personal security. Violence can also be done against a system or environment.
Certainly, violence as against personal security is more readily measurable and so easier to grasp because lives and individual acts are countable, than is violence vis-a-vis the stability of a system, where there is only one thing easily enumerable, the success or failure of said system.
So while understandable, Pinker only provides half the picture of the decline of violence, the other half of which I would argue has increased in violence in the modern era.
When I read the book, I thought his argument largely right since the observation of the decline of force in interpersonal behavior is a fact. But apart from my slight disagreements on the cause, I found myself unable to agree with him on the whole because he fails to appreciate the life of the human world, the life of a civilization as having value beyond the mere lives of individuals.
And of course, I don't know of which systems you refer. When I think of Pinker, I want to use an example that includes more than one country. I will use the example of driving a car from Canada through multiple countries to Panama. 20 years ago, this was dangerous, unthinkable. While you encounter many systems along the way, and I'm thinking systems of infrastructure, policing, border security, ... they are all working well enough now for you to make the trip and they are still improving overall.