WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp, 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:09.000 have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:14.000 and have given us a new understanding of who we are, 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:17.000 where we've come from and the times we live in. 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:21.000 During the twentieth century, we witnessed the atrocities 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:26.000 of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda and other genocides, 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:30.000 and even though the twenty-first century is only seven years old, 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:34.000 we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in Darfur 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:36.000 and the daily horrors of Iraq. 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:40.000 This has led to a common understanding of our situation, 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:44.000 namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence, and perhaps 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:47.000 that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from, to our peril. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:52.000 Here is an example 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:55.000 from an op-ed on Thanksgiving, in the Boston Globe 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:58.000 a couple of years ago, where the writer wrote, "The Indian life 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:02.000 was a difficult one, but there were no employment problems, 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:04.000 community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown, 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:08.000 crime nearly non-existent, what warfare there was between tribes 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:12.000 was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:16.000 or wholesale slaughter." Now, you're all familiar with this treacle. 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:20.000 We teach it to our children. We hear it on television 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:25.000 and in storybooks. Now, the original title of this session 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:28.000 was, "Everything You Know Is Wrong," and I'm going to present evidence 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:31.000 that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong, 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:35.000 that, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are, 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:38.000 that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:42.000 and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:46.000 Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:50.000 a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:53.000 and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:59.000 that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:02.000 is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:05.000 over centuries, over decades and over years, 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:08.000 although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:12.000 of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:15.000 all over the world, although not homogeneously. 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:18.000 It's especially evident in the West, beginning with England 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:21.000 and Holland around the time of the Enlightenment. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:25.000 Let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 -- 00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:28.000 from the millennium scale to the year scale -- 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:32.000 to try to persuade you of this. Until 10,000 years ago, all humans 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:35.000 lived as hunter-gatherers, without permanent settlements 00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:38.000 or government. And this is the state that's commonly thought 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:43.000 to be one of primordial harmony. But the archaeologist 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:48.000 Lawrence Keeley, looking at casualty rates 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:51.000 among contemporary hunter-gatherers, which is our best source 00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:58.000 of evidence about this way of life, has shown a rather different conclusion. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:00.000 Here is a graph that he put together 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:03.000 showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:07.000 in a number of foraging, or hunting and gathering societies. 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:14.000 The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:17.000 at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away 00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:21.000 of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:24.000 in the New Guinea Highlands and the Amazon Rainforest. 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:28.000 And they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:31.000 at the hands of another man to, in the case of the Gebusi, 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:36.000 only a 15 percent chance. The tiny, little blue bar in the lower 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:39.000 left-hand corner plots the corresponding statistic from United States 00:03:40.000 --> 00:03:44.000 and Europe in the twentieth century, and includes all the deaths 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:49.000 of both World Wars. If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed 00:03:49.000 --> 00:03:55.000 during the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:58.000 Also at the millennium scale, we can look 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:03.000 at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:08.000 in the Bible. And in this supposed source of our moral values, 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:12.000 one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare, 00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:15.000 such as the following from Numbers 31: "And they warred 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:18.000 against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses, 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:21.000 and they slew all the males. And Moses said unto them, 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:25.000 'Have you saved all the women alive? Now, therefore, kill every male 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:28.000 among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:32.000 by lying with him, but all the women children that have not know a man 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:35.000 by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.'" In other words, 00:04:35.000 --> 00:04:40.000 kill the men; kill the children; if you see any virgins, 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:42.000 then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them. 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:47.000 You can find four or five passages in the Bible of this ilk. 00:04:47.000 --> 00:04:50.000 Also in the Bible, one sees that the death penalty 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:55.000 was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality, 00:04:55.000 --> 00:04:59.000 adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, talking back to your parents -- 00:04:59.000 --> 00:05:03.000 (Laughter) -- and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:06.000 Well, let's click the zoom lens 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:09.000 down one order of magnitude, and look at the century scale. 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:13.000 Although we don't have statistics for warfare throughout 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:15.000 the Middle Ages to modern times, 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:18.000 we know just from conventional history -- the evidence 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:22.000 was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:25.000 in socially sanctioned forms of violence. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:25.000 --> 00:05:29.000 For example, any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:32.000 were routine forms of criminal punishment. The kind of infraction 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:36.000 today that would give you a fine, in those days would result in 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:40.000 your tongue being cut out, your ears being cut off, you being blinded, 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:42.000 a hand being chopped off and so on. 00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:46.000 There were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment: 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:49.000 burning at the stake, disemboweling, breaking on the wheel, 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:52.000 being pulled apart by horses and so on. 00:05:53.000 --> 00:05:57.000 The death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non-violent crimes: 00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:01.000 criticizing the king, stealing a loaf of bread. Slavery, of course, 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:05.000 was the preferred labor-saving device, and cruelty was 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:09.000 a popular form of entertainment. Perhaps the most vivid example 00:06:09.000 --> 00:06:12.000 was the practice of cat burning, in which a cat was hoisted 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:15.000 on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire, 00:06:15.000 --> 00:06:20.000 and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat, howling in pain, 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:23.000 was burned to death. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:26.000 What about one-on-one murder? Well, there, there are good statistics, 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:32.000 because many municipalities recorded the cause of death. 00:06:32.000 --> 00:06:36.000 The criminologist Manuel Eisner 00:06:37.000 --> 00:06:39.000 scoured all of the historical records across Europe 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:44.000 for homicide rates in any village, hamlet, town, county 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:46.000 that he could find, and he supplemented them 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:49.000 with national data, when nations started keeping statistics. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:57.000 He plotted on a logarithmic scale, going from 100 deaths 00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:03.000 per 100,000 people per year, which was approximately the rate 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:08.000 of homicide in the Middle Ages. And the figure plummets down 00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:12.000 to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year 00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:17.000 in seven or eight European countries. Then, there is a slight uptick 00:07:17.000 --> 00:07:21.000 in the 1960s. The people who said that rock 'n' roll would lead 00:07:21.000 --> 00:07:24.000 to the decline of moral values actually had a grain of truth to that. 00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:28.000 But there was a decline from at least two orders of magnitude 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:31.000 in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present, 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.000 and the elbow occurred in the early sixteenth century. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:39.000 Let's click down now to the decade scale. 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:41.000 According to non-governmental organizations 00:07:42.000 --> 00:07:46.000 that keep such statistics, since 1945, in Europe and the Americas, 00:07:46.000 --> 00:07:49.000 there has been a steep decline in interstate wars, 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:54.000 in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms, and in military coups, 00:07:54.000 --> 00:07:58.000 even in South America. Worldwide, there's been a steep decline 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:03.000 in deaths in interstate wars. The yellow bars here show the number 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:08.000 of deaths per war per year from 1950 to the present. 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:13.000 And, as you can see, the death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:17.000 per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:21.000 per conflict per year in this decade, as horrific as it is. 00:08:21.000 --> 00:08:24.000 Even in the year scale, one can see a decline of violence. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:28.000 Since the end of the Cold War, there have been fewer civil wars, 00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:34.000 fewer genocides -- indeed, a 90 percent reduction since post-World War II highs -- 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:40.000 and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime. 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:44.000 This is from the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics. You can see 00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:47.000 that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the '50s and the '60s, 00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:52.000 then it soared upward for several decades, and began 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:56.000 a precipitous decline, starting in the 1990s, so that it went back 00:08:56.000 --> 00:09:00.000 to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:02.000 President Clinton, if you're here, thank you. 00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:04.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:07.000 So the question is, why are so many people so wrong 00:09:07.000 --> 00:09:11.000 about something so important? I think there are a number of reasons. 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:14.000 One of them is we have better reporting. The Associated Press 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:18.000 is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the Earth 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:22.000 than sixteenth-century monks were. 00:09:22.000 --> 00:09:27.000 There's a cognitive illusion. We cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:30.000 to recall specific instances of something, 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:33.000 the higher the probability that you assign to it. 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:36.000 Things that we read about in the paper with gory footage 00:09:37.000 --> 00:09:41.000 burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:46.000 in their beds of old age. There are dynamics in the opinion 00:09:47.000 --> 00:09:52.000 and advocacy markets: no one ever attracted observers, advocates 00:09:52.000 --> 00:09:53.000 and donors by saying 00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:56.000 things just seem to be getting better and better. 00:09:56.000 --> 00:09:57.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:57.000 --> 00:09:59.000 There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:03.000 in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:05.000 there could be anything good about Western culture. 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:10.000 And of course, our change in standards can outpace the change 00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:13.000 in behavior. One of the reasons violence went down 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:17.000 is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time. 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:20.000 That's a process that seems to be continuing, 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:24.000 but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day, 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:27.000 things always look more barbaric than they would have been 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:31.000 by historic standards. So today, we get exercised -- and rightly so -- 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:37.000 if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection 00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:41.000 in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We don't consider 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:45.000 that a couple of hundred years ago, they may have been burned 00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:48.000 at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:51.000 that lasted 10 minutes, and indeed, that that would have been repeated 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:55.000 over and over again. Today, we look at capital punishment 00:10:56.000 --> 00:10:59.000 as evidence of how low our behavior can sink, 00:10:59.000 --> 00:11:01.000 rather than how high our standards have risen. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:06.000 Well, why has violence declined? No one really knows, 00:11:06.000 --> 00:11:10.000 but I have read four explanations, all of which, I think, 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:14.000 have some grain of plausibility. The first is, maybe 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:17.000 Thomas Hobbes got it right. He was the one who said 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:22.000 that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:26.000 and short." Not because, he argued, 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:29.000 humans have some primordial thirst for blood 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:32.000 or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative, 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:36.000 but because of the logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:40.000 there's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively, 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:43.000 before they invade you. More recently, Thomas Schelling 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:45.000 gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling 00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:48.000 in the basement. Being a good American, he has a pistol 00:11:48.000 --> 00:11:51.000 in the nightstand, pulls out his gun, and walks down the stairs. 00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:54.000 And what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand. 00:11:55.000 --> 00:11:56.000 Now, each one of them is thinking, 00:11:56.000 --> 00:12:00.000 "I don't really want to kill that guy, but he's about to kill me. 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:04.000 Maybe I had better shoot him, before he shoots me, 00:12:04.000 --> 00:12:06.000 especially since, even if he doesn't want to kill me, 00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:09.000 he's probably worrying right now that I might kill him 00:12:09.000 --> 00:12:11.000 before he kills me." And so on. 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:16.000 Hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought, 00:12:17.000 --> 00:12:20.000 and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:25.000 Now, one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence. 00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:30.000 You don't strike first, but you have a publicly announced policy 00:12:30.000 --> 00:12:33.000 that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded. 00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:35.000 The only thing is that it's 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:39.000 liable to having its bluff called, and therefore can only work 00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:44.000 if it's credible. To make it credible, you must avenge all insults 00:12:45.000 --> 00:12:49.000 and settle all scores, which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta. 00:12:49.000 --> 00:12:54.000 Life becomes an episode of "The Sopranos." Hobbes' solution, 00:12:54.000 --> 00:12:58.000 the "Leviathan," was that if authority for the legitimate use 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:03.000 of violence was vested in a single democratic agency -- a leviathan -- 00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:07.000 then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack, 00:13:07.000 --> 00:13:10.000 because any kind of aggression will be punished, 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:15.000 leaving its profitability as zero. That would remove the temptation 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:19.000 to invade preemptively, out of fear of them attacking you first. 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:23.000 It removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation 00:13:23.000 --> 00:13:26.000 to make your deterrent threat credible. And therefore, it would lead 00:13:26.000 --> 00:13:32.000 to a state of peace. Eisner -- the man who plotted the homicide rates 00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:34.000 that you failed to see in the earlier slide -- 00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:38.000 argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in Europe 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:43.000 coincided with the rise of centralized states. 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:46.000 So that's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory. 00:13:46.000 --> 00:13:50.000 Also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence 00:13:50.000 --> 00:13:54.000 in zones of anarchy, in failed states, collapsed empires, 00:13:54.000 --> 00:13:58.000 frontier regions, mafias, street gangs and so on. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:00.000 --> 00:14:03.000 The second explanation is that in many times and places, 00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:06.000 there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap. 00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:11.000 In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common 00:14:11.000 --> 00:14:15.000 in one's own life, one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:19.000 on others. And as technology and economic efficiency make life 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:23.000 longer and more pleasant, one puts a higher value on life in general. 00:14:23.000 --> 00:14:26.000 This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:31.000 A third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game, 00:14:31.000 --> 00:14:35.000 and was worked out in the book "Nonzero" by the journalist 00:14:35.000 --> 00:14:38.000 Robert Wright. Wright points out that in certain circumstances, 00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:42.000 cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties 00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:48.000 in an interaction, such as gains in trade when two parties trade 00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:52.000 their surpluses and both come out ahead, or when two parties 00:14:52.000 --> 00:14:55.000 lay down their arms and split the so-called peace dividend 00:14:55.000 --> 00:14:58.000 that results in them not having to fight the whole time. 00:14:59.000 --> 00:15:01.000 Wright argues that technology has increased the number 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:05.000 of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in, 00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:09.000 by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas 00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:12.000 over longer distances and among larger groups of people. 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:16.000 The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead, 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:21.000 and violence declines for selfish reasons. As Wright put it, 00:15:22.000 --> 00:15:24.000 "Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb 00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:27.000 the Japanese is that they built my mini-van." 00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:29.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:33.000 The fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book 00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:36.000 called "The Expanding Circle," by the philosopher Peter Singer, 00:15:37.000 --> 00:15:40.000 who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense 00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:45.000 of empathy, an ability to treat other peoples' interests 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:49.000 as comparable to one's own. Unfortunately, by default 00:15:49.000 --> 00:15:53.000 we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. 00:15:53.000 --> 00:15:56.000 People outside that circle are treated as sub-human, 00:15:56.000 --> 00:16:00.000 and can be exploited with impunity. But, over history, 00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:04.000 the circle has expanded. One can see, in historical record, 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:07.000 it expanding from the village, to the clan, to the tribe, 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:11.000 to the nation, to other races, to both sexes, 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:13.000 and, in Singer's own arguments, something that we should extend 00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:18.000 to other sentient species. The question is, 00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:21.000 if this has happened, what has powered that expansion? NOTE Paragraph 00:16:21.000 --> 00:16:24.000 And there are a number of possibilities, such as increasing circles 00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:28.000 of reciprocity in the sense that Robert Wright argues for. 00:16:29.000 --> 00:16:33.000 The logic of the golden rule -- the more you think about and interact 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:37.000 with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:41.000 to privilege your interests over theirs, 00:16:41.000 --> 00:16:44.000 at least not if you want them to listen to you. You can't say 00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:47.000 that my interests are special compared to yours, 00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:49.000 anymore than you can say that the particular spot 00:16:50.000 --> 00:16:52.000 that I'm standing on is a unique part of the universe 00:16:53.000 --> 00:16:55.000 because I happen to be standing on it that very minute. 00:16:56.000 --> 00:17:00.000 It may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, by histories, 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:04.000 and journalism, and memoirs, and realistic fiction, and travel, 00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:08.000 and literacy, which allows you to project yourself into the lives 00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:12.000 of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human, 00:17:12.000 --> 00:17:16.000 and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:19.000 in life, the sense that "there but for fortune go I." NOTE Paragraph 00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:24.000 Whatever its causes, the decline of violence, I think, 00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:28.000 has profound implications. It should force us to ask not just, why 00:17:28.000 --> 00:17:32.000 is there war? But also, why is there peace? Not just, 00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:36.000 what are we doing wrong? But also, what have we been doing right? 00:17:37.000 --> 00:17:38.000 Because we have been doing something right, 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:41.000 and it sure would be good to find out what it is. 00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:42.000 Thank you very much. 00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:53.000 (Applause). NOTE Paragraph 00:17:53.000 --> 00:17:57.000 Chris Anderson: I loved that talk. I think a lot of people here in the room would say 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:00.000 that that expansion of -- that you were talking about, 00:18:00.000 --> 00:18:03.000 that Peter Singer talks about, is also driven by, just by technology, 00:18:03.000 --> 00:18:07.000 by greater visibility of the other, and the sense that the world 00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:10.000 is therefore getting smaller. I mean, is that also a grain of truth? NOTE Paragraph 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:14.000 Steven Pinker: Very much. It would fit both in Wright's theory, 00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:18.000 that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation 00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:22.000 over larger and larger circles. But also, I think it helps us 00:18:24.000 --> 00:18:27.000 imagine what it's like to be someone else. I think when you read 00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:30.000 these horrific tortures that were common in the Middle Ages, you think, 00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:32.000 how could they possibly have done it, 00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:34.000 how could they have not have empathized with the person 00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:37.000 that they're disemboweling? But clearly, 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:41.000 as far as they're concerned, this is just an alien being 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:44.000 that does not have feelings akin to their own. Anything, I think, 00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:46.000 that makes it easier to imagine trading places 00:18:47.000 --> 00:18:50.000 with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration 00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:51.000 to that other person. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:51.000 --> 00:18:55.000 CA: Well, Steve, I would love every news media owner to hear that talk 00:18:55.000 --> 00:18:57.000 at some point in the next year. I think it's really important. Thank you so much. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:57.000 --> 00:18:58.000 SP: My pleasure.