Fisticuffs have broken out in The Guardian, a British newspaper, between two intellectual big shots, philosopher John Gray and psychologist Steven Pinker. The fight, which features lots of rhetorical flourishes and high dudgeon, addresses a serious issue: Is humanity achieving moral progress? Or, as Gray would put it, “progress”? More specifically, are we becoming less violent? In this column I’ll try to score the dispute.
First, a bit of background on Gray. He is almost comically gloomy about humanity’s prospects. In his best-known books, Straw Dogs (2003) and Black Mass (2007), he mocks humanity’s aspirations to create a better world, arguing that our efforts to improve social conditions usually make them worse.
Hence Gray is offended by Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues that humanity, especially since the European Enlightenment, is becoming more “civilized” and less violent. In the Guardian, Gray asserts that the statistics with which Pinker makes his case “are murky, leaving a vast range of casualties of violence unaccounted for.” Gray accuses Pinker of discounting a host of modern horrors, from Nazi genocide to “the proxy war between the U.S. and Russia that is being waged in Ukraine.”
Gray insists that “peace and freedom alternate with war and tyranny, eras of increasing wealth with periods of economic collapse. Instead of becoming ever stronger and more widely spread, civilization remains inherently fragile and regularly succumbs to barbarism.”
In his retort, Pinker calls Gray “howlingly, flat-earth, couldn’t-be-more-wrong wrong” not only about the decline of violence but also about other positive trends. Pinker is right: Gray’s denial of human progress is absurd. Over the last century humanity has become much wealthier, healthier and more free, and war-related casualties have plummeted since the end of World War Two.
But Gray scores legitimate points against Pinker. Gray is right that a single nuclear detonation could shatter what Pinker and others call the “Long Peace”—the relatively low levels of international warfare since World War II. Gray is also right that Pinker tends to blame conflict on “backward” peoples and to downplay the violence of modern western powers, especially the U.S.
Far from eliminating violent Muslim extremism since 9/11, U.S. military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere have arguably exacerbated it. The U.S. spends almost as much on “defense” as all other nations combined, and it is “the dominant innovator, manufacturer and exporter of arms in the world.”
My main complaint with both scholars is that their views of the future are far too deterministic. Pinker implies that all we have to do is sit back and conflict will continue to decline. Gray, who holds that free will is an illusion, thinks violence and mayhem will persist no matter what we do.
My view is that we can end war, soon, and forever, but only if we actively seek to end it. And by “war” I mean also militarism, the culture of war, the armies, arms, industries, policies, plans, propaganda, prejudices, rationalizations that make lethal group conflict not only possible but also likely. In my book The End of War, I offer ideas on how to achieve that goal–and so have many others, including members of the international coalition “World Beyond War.”
If we all join together in pursuing peace, we will surely succeed, not in some hazy, distant future but soon. Wouldn’t it be grand if instead of bickering over whether war will end, Gray and Pinker—and all leading intellectuals—started swapping ideas on how war can end?
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
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