The Unspeakable 20th Century
The Best of Times, Part III
From Claire—Today at the Cosmopolitan Globalist we have the third and final part of my father’s essay, The Best of Times, which treats Steven Pinker’s claim that violence has been steadily declining for 800 years and indeed that we live in the most peaceful time in history. If you haven't started it already, you can now read it from start to finish:
PART I
PART II
PART III
Of course I’m not impartial, but I think it’s an extraordinary essay that well warrants your time and care, one of the best my father has written.
What’s remarkable to me is that Pinker managed so successfully to interject into public discourse an idea that’s absurd on its face. His book received glowing encomiums, lavish praise for the breadth of its scholarship. Did anyone check his sources? Did anyone ask whether the claims even made sense?
As my father writes,
Homicide is murder, and genocide, mass murder. When the statistics pertaining to mass murder in the twentieth century are acknowledged, they bleed through every calculation, forming a ghastly but ineradicable spike in the otherwise humdrum human record of murders undertaken in some sordid hotel room or in the alleyway behind the Bannhof or in a field of winter wheat.
… If mass murders are not included in the homicide rate for the twentieth century, then the homicide rate is no very good measure of violence; and if they are included, then the homicide rate does not indicate a long-term declining trend in violence.
The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that no one thought about this point carefully. One after another critic marvelled at Pinker’s “counterintuitive” thesis but failed ask, “If it’s counterintuitive, perhaps that’s because it’s wrong?”
To declare that humanity is only getting more and more peaceful in the wake of the terrible twentieth century requires putting that whole century firmly out of mind or failing to grasp its enormity.
As my father writes,
In the face of its crimes, what can one say about the twentieth century beyond what Elias Canetti said: “It is a mark of fundamental human decency to feel ashamed of living in the twentieth century.” What one is not prepared to say, and still less to encounter, largely because it is, at once, absurd and obscene, is the view that the great crimes of the twentieth century were, all things considered, not so bad. This is the view that Pinker defends.
And thanks, Pop, for letting the Cosmopolitan Globalist publish it. We’re very pleased to have done so.