Tópico: [LIVRO]Mundo nunca foi tão pacífico, diz cientista dos EUA

[4 Ton Mantis]

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ciencia/993687-mundo-nunca-foi-tao-pacifico-diz-cientista-dos-eua.shtml


Faz pelo menos 500 anos que o mundo está se tornando um lugar cada vez mais seguro para se viver, e a raça humana nunca foi tão pouco violenta. Ataques terroristas e guerras civis são meros soluços estatísticos numa paz que nossos ancestrais achariam quase impensável.

 Duro de engolir, certo? Pois os números reunidos por Steven Pinker, 57, psicólogo evolucionista da Universidade Harvard, são difíceis de refutar. Todas as formas de violência estão em declínio, das guerras à crueldade com animais, e em alguns casos a queda já dura séculos, diz ele.



Pinker, pop star científico que aprecia os temas polêmicos (ler abaixo), apresenta um resumo de seus argumentos em artigo de opinião na edição de hoje na revista científica "Nature". São ideias tiradas de seu novo livro, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (ainda sem edição no Brasil).

ANJO BOM

 Conforme o título do livro sugere, Pinker argumenta que os "anjos bons [literalmente, melhores] da nossa natureza" estão vencendo a disputa pela alma humana.

 "As histórias da Antiguidade estão cheias de conquistas gloriosas que hoje seriam classificadas como genocídios. Fulano, o Grande e Sicrano, o Grande seriam processados como criminosos de guerra", brinca o cientista. E não se trata só da Antiguidade.

 O registro arqueológico e os estudos sobre povos indígenas atuais mostram que esse negócio de bom selvagem não existe, diz Pinker.

 Mais precisamente, esses povos cometem centenas de vezes mais homicídios do que os europeus do século 21, e cerca de 20% das pessoas nessas sociedades morrem em guerras, afirma ele.

 O bioantropólogo Walter Neves, especialista da USP que estuda os primeiros habitantes da América, concorda. "A guerra, seja entre caçadores-coletores, seja entre horticultores [agricultores primitivos], é crônica e endêmica", afirma ele. No caso de povos pré-históricos, "é preciso tomar um pouco de cuidado porque a agressão entre eles, como bordoadas, deixa marcas no esqueleto que a nossa muitas vezes não deixa, então é difícil fazer a comparação", diz.

BRAÇO FORTE

 A primeira queda na pancadaria teria vindo com o fortalecimento dos Estados, em especial as monarquias europeias, a partir do século 16.

 Com o rei abarcando o poder absoluto e os nobres (que costumavam guerrear entre si) na coleira, a violência desregrada saiu de cena, já que atrapalhava a centralização de poder e riqueza desejada pelo monarca.

 Segundo motivo de queda da violência, segundo Pinker: a invenção da imprensa, barateando a circulação de ideias, e o Iluminismo resultante desse processo.

 Os pensadores iluministas, com sua ênfase no debate racional e sua redescoberta das ideias democráticas, dominaram o universo intelectual europeu, debatendo todos os temas tabus e defendendo os direitos de plebeus, minorias, mulheres e até animais.

 O debate iluminista acabou levando ao lento porém crescente predomínio da democracia como regime de governo, o que também diminuiu guerras --é muito raro que uma democracia declare guerra contra outra. E o avanço do comércio internacional tornou os países cada vez menos interessados em guerrear por riquezas, diz ele.

NÃO AO SENSO COMUM

 Steven Pinker tem uma predileção pelos debates politicamente incorretos. Seu livro mais polêmico antes da nova obra sobre a história da violência se chama "Tábula Rasa" e tem como meta mostrar que a natureza humana é algo relativamente difícil de mudar, independente dos esforços de pais, professores ou doutrinadores políticos e religiosos.

 A ideia de que existe uma natureza humana vai contra a corrente dominante nas ciências humanas e entre intelectuais de esquerda, para os quais seria possível "melhorar" a humanidade.

Curiosamente, se o novo livro não é uma mea culpa, ao menos mostra certa fé de Pinker no progresso.

"THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE"
AUTOR Steven Pinker
EDITORA Viking
QUANTO US$ 19,99 (como livro eletrônico no site Amazon)
CLASSIFICAÇÃO ótimo

[Feliperj]

EU acho q no geral, so melhoramos....Antigamente, os filhos já eram craidos para guerra. Aliás, a guerra era uma constante na vida de quase todos os povos...Fora que a sua vida não valia literalmente nada, e nem pertencia a vc.

Abs
Felipe

[Donatello]

Já tinha visto o TED dele no ATEUS.NET:
<a href="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf?vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2007/Blank/StevenPinker_2007-320k.mp4" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf?vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2007/Blank/StevenPinker_2007-320k.mp4</a>
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
(no link original tem legenda em PT-BR)

E ele cita meu capítulo predileto da Bíblia Sagrada  .

[_tiago]

Eu estava preguiçosamente traduzindo do edge.com, mas...
../forum/topic=25607.0.html
Já me adiantaram...

[Geotecton]

"O mundo nunca foi tão pacífico"?

Melhor reescrever:

"O mundo está menos violento"!

[Barata Tenno]

Copo meio cheio, copo meio vazio

[uiliníli]

Gosto muito do Pinker, é um livro que provavelmente vou comprar. Mas para mim essa conclusão é até bem óbvia, apesar do que diz a turma do "hoje em dia as pessoas não têm mais valores..."

[André Luiz]

A guerra moderna é mais rapida e letal, um Estado pode ser derrotado em questao de semanas

A nao ser que seja briga de cachorro grande , tipo China x EUA

[uiliníli]

Desde que inventaram a bomba H, cachorros grandes não brigam mais.

[pablito]

O Estado Moderno tornou a guerra os conflitos menos difusos.

E a inexistência de organizações ... estatais ... com o formato dos Impérios Antigos também contribuíu para alterar o tipo de guerra que se faz - nos últimos 200/300 anos não se faz mais guerra de extermínio nem para escravizar populações inteiras (como os imperios antigos faziam).

[Geotecton]

[...]
A nao ser que seja briga de cachorro grande , tipo China x EUA

E que, no caso de uma guerra total, duraria pouco mais do que alguns dias.

[_Juca_]

Copo meio cheio, copo meio vazio

Pois é, mas tem também a amplitude da informação hoje. Acontece um assassinato no Rio, e tamanha a repercussão midiática, parece que foi no quintal da sua casa em uma cidadezinha do Rio Grande do Sul a 3000 km dali...

[Dr. Manhattan]

E tem um detalhe que não tem sido muito enfatizado: as pessoas hoje em dia parecem ter menos tolerância à violência (no sentido de tolerância a uma droga). Lendo os livros de história nos dá a impressão (que imagino seja errônea) de que a maioria das pessoas até uns 200 anos atrás era um tanto sádica.

[Geotecton]

E tem um detalhe que não tem sido muito enfatizado: as pessoas hoje em dia parecem ter menos tolerância à violência (no sentido de tolerância a uma droga). Lendo os livros de história nos dá a impressão (que imagino seja errônea) de que a maioria das pessoas até uns 200 anos atrás era um tanto sádica.

Sádica para os padrões atuais de moralidade e de ética.

Talvez os humanos de 2250 AD digam a mesma coisa de nós. Se ainda existir a humanidade, é claro.

[uiliníli]

Se forem vegetarianas, certamente vão nos achar sádicos.

[Fabrício]

E tem um detalhe que não tem sido muito enfatizado: as pessoas hoje em dia parecem ter menos tolerância à violência (no sentido de tolerância a uma droga). Lendo os livros de história nos dá a impressão (que imagino seja errônea) de que a maioria das pessoas até uns 200 anos atrás era um tanto sádica.

Sádica para os padrões atuais de moralidade e de ética.

Talvez os humanos de 2250 AD digam a mesma coisa de nós. Se ainda existir a humanidade, é claro.

Tomara que digam, será um sinal que as coisas continuaram melhorando.

[_tiago]

Da palestra dele sobre o assunto,

Uma história da violência
http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

Palestra interessante no edge.com onde o autor, Steven Pinker, afirma que esta nossa época é das menos violentas na história da humanidade. Especula 5 momentos de declínio, ao que parece, não relacionados:
1. Processo de pacificação, 5000 anos atrás, Humanos em total anarquia, sem governo central. Causa direta do declínio: início da organização dos estados. 
2. Processo de civilização, idade média. Causa provável: a transição da idade média pra moderna consolidou a centralização dos estados. Justiça criminal foi nacionalizada em detrimento da justiça dos senhores da guerra e feudais. Outra causa provavelmente relacionada: crescimento da infra-estrutura do comércio (dinheiro, finanças, tecnologias de manutenção e transporte). Ao invés do saque, comércio.
3. Revolução humanitária, 1800 - hoje: diminuição ou abolição da tortura judicial, abolição da escravatura, diminuição da perseguição religiosa, de duelos, dos esportes sangrentos, prisão dos devedores. Provável causa: a riqueza; com a vida se tornando mais agradável, mais valor dá-se a ela. Há um “However” que não entendi aqui.
4. A longa paz, os últimos 65 anos. O fato relevante: as grandes potências não digladiaram entre si. Em menor proporção, a diminuição de guerras entre países. Outros fatores nos quais insiste: democracia, livre comércio e a comunidade internacional.
5. A revolução dos direitos civis. Diminuição do preconceito e violência contra minorias: negros, homossexuais...

PS:
Tradução minha. Ainda estou lendo; o que eu achar interessante posto aqui ou complemento o que já postei.

[uiliníli]

E os ensinamentos de jijuis? Onde entram os ensinamentos de jijuis?

[_tiago]

Não entra nem nos motivos pessoas para a diminuição da violência,

Now let's turn to the brighter side, our so-called better angels.

They include the faculty of self-control: the ability to anticipate the consequences of behavior, and inhibit violent impulses. There’s the faculty of empathy (more technically, sympathy), the ability to feel others' pain. There’s the moral sense, which comprise a variety of intuitions including tribalism, authority, purity, and fairness. The moral sense actually goes in both directions: it can push people to be more violent or less violent, depending on how it is deployed. And then there is reason, the cognitive faculties that allow us to engage in objective, detached analysis.

Now we face the crucial question: Which historical developments bring out our better angels? I'm going to suggest there are four.

The first implies that Hobbes got it right: a Leviathan, namely a state and justice system with a monopoly on legitimate use of violence, can reduce aggregate violence by eliminating the incentives for exploitative attack; by reducing the need for deterrence and vengeance (because Leviathan is going to deter your enemies so you don't have to), and by circumventing self-serving biases. One of the major discoveries of social and evolutionary psychology in the past several decades is that people tend to exaggerate their adversary's malevolence and exaggerate their own innocence. Self-serving biases can stoke cycles of revenge when you have two sides, each of them intoxicated with their own sense of rectitude and moral infallibility.

Historical evidence that the Leviathan is a major pacifying force includes the first two historical developments that I spoke of, namely the Pacifying and Civilizing Processes, both of which were consequences of the rise of states. Also the fact that reversals in the trends, where violence re-erupts, tend to take place in zones of anarchy, like the American Wild West, failed states, collapsed empires, and mafias and street gangs that deal in contraband (so they can't call in the court system to enforce their interests in business disputes but have to resort to intimidation and revenge). A final kind of evidence is the demonstrable effectiveness of international peace-keepers, who use a kind of soft power on the international stage to keep warring parties apart.

The second pacifying force is identified by the theory of "Gentle Commerce." Plunder is a zero-sum or even a negative sum game: the victors' gain is the loser's loss. Trade, in contrast, is a positive-sum game. (We will hear more from both Leda and Martin that reciprocal altruism, such as gains in trade, can result in both sides being better off after an interaction.) Over the course of history, improvements in technology have allowed goods and ideas to be traded over longer distances, among larger groups of people, and at lower cost, all of which change the incentive structure so that other people become more valuable alive than dead. To be concrete: I doubt that the United States is going to declare war on China (though there's much that we don't like about that country), because they make all our stuff. And I doubt China will declare war on us, because we owe them too much money.

Some historical evidence comes from statistical studies showing that countries with open economies and greater international trade are less likely to engage in war, are less likely to host civil wars, and have genocides.

A third pacifying force is what Peter Singer called the "Expanding Circle," although Charles Darwin in first stated the idea in The Descent of Man. According to this theory, evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy. That's the good news; the bad news is that by default, we apply it only to a narrow circle of allies and family. But over history, one can see the circle of empathy expanding: from the village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to more recently to other races, both sexes, children, and even other species.

[André Luiz]

O Estado Moderno tornou a guerra os conflitos menos difusos.

E a inexistência de organizações ... estatais ... com o formato dos Impérios Antigos também contribuíu para alterar o tipo de guerra que se faz - nos últimos 200/300 anos não se faz mais guerra de extermínio nem para escravizar populações inteiras (como os imperios antigos faziam).

Bem, para os nazistas no front oriental a ideia era exterminar e escravizar

[pablito]

O Estado Moderno tornou a guerra os conflitos menos difusos.

E a inexistência de organizações ... estatais ... com o formato dos Impérios Antigos também contribuíu para alterar o tipo de guerra que se faz - nos últimos 200/300 anos não se faz mais guerra de extermínio nem para escravizar populações inteiras (como os imperios antigos faziam).

Bem, para os nazistas no front oriental a ideia era exterminar e escravizar

Sim, isso mesmo.

Quando escrevi meu post lembrei disso e pensei em escrever uma notinha de rodapé, mas achei que não precisaria

Mas é bom lembrar disso e que essa perspectiva "Antiga" de guerra foi um dos elementos que contribuíu para a queda do Reich.

[TMAG]

Delusions of peace

John Gray
Steven Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray


“Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries,” Steven Pinker writes in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. The celebrated Harvard professor of psychology is discussing what he calls “the Long Peace”: the period since the end of the second world war in which “the great powers, and developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.” As a result of “this blessed state of affairs,” he notes, “two entire categories of war—the imperial war to acquire colonies, and the colonial war to keep them—no longer exist.” Now and then there have been minor conflicts. “To be sure, [the super-powers] occasionally fought each other’s smaller allies and stoked proxy wars among their client states.” But these episodes do not diminish Pinker’s enthusiasm about the Long Peace. Chronic warfare is only to be expected in backward parts of the world. “Tribal, civil, private, slave-raiding, imperial, and colonial wars have inflamed the territories of the developing world for millennia.” In more civilised zones, war has all but disappeared. There is nothing inevitable in the process; major wars could break out again, even among the great powers. But the change in human affairs that has occurred is fundamental. “An underlying shift that supports predictions about the future,” the Long Peace points to a world in which violence is in steady decline.

A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the region? Or was a subtle and refined civilisation wrecked by world war and the aftermath of decades of neo-colonial conflict—as Norman Lewis intimated would happen in his prophetic account of his travels in the region, A Dragon Apparent (1951)? It is true that the second world war was followed by over 40 years of peace in North America and Europe—even if for the eastern half of the continent it was a peace that rested on Soviet conquest. But there was no peace between the powers that had emerged as rivals from the global conflict.
 
In much the same way that rich societies exported their pollution to developing countries, the societies of the highly-developed world exported their conflicts. They were at war with one another the entire time—not only in Indo-China but in other parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet-Afghan war—these are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great powers pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other. When the end of the Cold War removed the Soviet Union from the scene, war did not end. It continued in the first Gulf war, the Balkan wars, Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts. Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. For Pinker they are minor, peripheral and hardly worth mentioning. The real story, for him, is the outbreak of peace in advanced societies, a shift that augurs an unprecedented transformation in human affairs.
 
***
 
While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence—the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics—his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation. He cites numerous reasons for the change, including increasing wealth and the spread of democracy. For him, none is as important as the adoption of a particular view of the world: “The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.” (The italics are Pinker’s.)
 
Yet these are highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have “coalesced” from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of “Enlightenment values,” Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs—“aborigines in the heart of Europe”—would be wiped out.
 
The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient.
 
There is a deeper difficulty. Like so many contemporary evangelists for humanism, Pinker takes for granted that science endorses an Enlightenment account of human reason. Since science is a human creation, how could humans not be rational? Surely science and humanism are one and the same. Actually it’s extremely curious—though entirely typical of current thinking—that science should be linked with humanism in this way. A method of inquiry rather than a settled view of the world, there can be no guarantee that science will vindicate Enlightenment ideals of human rationality. Science could just as well end up showing them to be unrealisable.
 
Admittedly, this was not a conflict that faced any of the thinkers Pinker cites. None of them based their view of the human animal on the findings of science. The Origin of Species appeared in the same year as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), but the most influential liberal humanist (who died in 1873) never mentioned Darwin in his seminal works. Although Mill wrote extensively on the need for “moral science,” his view of human beings was a mix of classical philosophy (especially Aristotle) and the ideas of personal development he imbibed from the Romantics. Mill never considered the possibility that his view of human beings could be falsified by scientific investigation. Still, one must not judge him too harshly. He did not have to consider whether his view of humankind squared with science because the science of evolution was only just coming into being.
 
Pinker and his fellow humanists have no such excuse today. Evolutionary psychology is in its infancy, and much of what passes for knowledge in the subject is not much more than speculation—or worse. There have been countless attempts to apply evolutionary theory to social life but, since there is no mechanism in society comparable to natural selection in biology, they have produced only a succession of misleading metaphors, in which social systems are mistakenly viewed as living organisms. Indeed, if there is anything of substance to be derived from an evolutionary view of the human mind, it must be the persistence of unreason.
 
As the related discipline of behavioural finance has shown in some detail with regard to decision-making under conditions of risk and uncertainty, human thought and perception are riddled with bias, inconsistency and self-deception. Since our minds are animal minds—as Darwin argued in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)—things could hardly be otherwise. Shaped by imperatives of survival, the human mind will not normally function as an organ for seeking out the truth. If science is the pursuit of truth—an assumption that begs some tricky questions—it doesn’t follow that anything similar is possible in other areas of human life. The idea that humans can shape their lives by the use of reason is an inheritance from rationalist philosophy that does not fit easily with what we know of the evolution of our mammalian brain. The end result of scientific inquiry may well be that irrational beliefs are humanly indispensable.
 
Science and humanism are at odds more often than they are at one. For a devoted Darwinist like Pinker to maintain that the world is being pacified by the spread of a particular world view is deeply ironic. There is nothing in Darwinism to suggest that ideas and beliefs can transform human life. To be sure, there have been attempts to formulate an idea of progress in terms of competing memes—vaguely defined concepts or units of meaning that are held to be in some ways akin to genes—although nothing like a scientific theory has been developed. Even if there were such things as memes and they did somehow compete with one another, there is nothing to say that benign memes would be the winners. Quite to the contrary, if history is any guide. Racist ideas are extremely resilient and highly contagious, as is shown by the re-emergence of xenophobic ethnic nationalism and antisemitism in post-communist Europe. So are utopian ideas, which have resurfaced in neoconservative thinking about regime change. The recurrent appearance of these memes suggests that outside of some fairly narrowly defined areas of scientific investigation, progress is at best fitful and elusive. Science may be the cumulative elimination of error, but the human fondness for toxic ideas is remarkably constant.
 
The irony is compounded when we recall that Pinker achieved notoriety through his attempt to reinstate the idea that the human mind is fixed and limited. His bestseller The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), an assault on the idea that human behaviour is indefinitely malleable, was controversial for several reasons—not least for its attack on the belief that pre-agricultural cultures were inherently peaceable. The book provoked a storm of criticism from liberal humanists who sensed—rightly—that this emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance. Pinker seems to have come to share this anxiety, and the present volume is the result. The decline of violence posited in The Better Angels of Our Nature is a progressive transformation of precisely the kind his earlier book seemed to preclude. But the contradiction in which Pinker is stuck is not his alone. It afflicts anyone who tries to combine rigorous Darwinism with a belief in moral progress. Darwinism is unlikely to be the last word on evolution and, rather than identifying universal laws of natural selection, it may only apply in our corner of the universe. But if Darwin’s theory is even approximately right, there can be no rational basis for expecting any revolution in human behaviour.
 
***
 
This is a troubling truth for humanists, including Pinker. It can be avoided only by pointing to some kind of ongoing evolution in humans, and Pinker is now ready to entertain “the possibility that in recent history Homo Sapiens has literally evolved to become less violent in the biologist’s technical sense of a change in our genome.” He concludes that there is very little evidence that this is so, but the fact that he takes the possibility seriously is telling. Social violence is coeval with the human species. This is not because humans have always been driven by an inbuilt instinct of aggression. Some of the impulses we inherit from our evolutionary past may incline us to conflict, but others— “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln called them—incline us to peaceful cooperation. In order to show that conflicts between the two will in future increasingly be settled in favour of peace, Pinker needs to be able to identify some very powerful trends. He does his best, but the changes to which he points—the spread of democracy and the increase of wealth, for example—are more problematic than he realises. The formation of democratic nation-states was one of the principal drivers of violence of the last century, involving ethnic cleansing in inter-war Europe, post-colonial states and the post-communist Balkans. Steadily-growing prosperity may act as a kind of tranquilliser, but there is no reason to think the increase of wealth can go on indefinitely—and when it falters violence will surely return. In quite different ways, attacks on minorities and immigrants by neo-fascists in Europe, the popular demonstrations against austerity in Greece and the English riots of the past summer show the disruptive and dangerous impact of sudden economic slowdown on social peace. All the trends that supposedly lie behind the Long Peace are contingent and reversible.
 
Hobbes is cited more than once by Pinker, but he misses Hobbes’s most important insight: that even if humans were not moved by the pursuit of power and glory, scarcity and uncertainty would drive them repeatedly into conflict with one another. Recurrent violence is a result of the normal disorder of human life. In some ways Hobbes—an early Enlightenment thinker and an intrepid rationalist—was overly sanguine about the capacity of humans to lift themselves out of conflict. Envisioning a social contract in which the power of violence is handed over to a peace-making state, he failed to take account of the fact that humans adapt to violence and often turn it into a way of life. (The novelist Cormac McCarthy presents an image of such a way of life in Blood Meridian, his fictional recreation of the mid-19th century American-Mexican borderlands.) When it is not a way of life, violence is often simply a method. Suicide bombing is morally repugnant but it is also cheap and highly effective, deploying an abundant and easily replaceable resource—human life—to achieve objectives that could be compromised if the perpetrators survived to be captured and interrogated. Humans use violence for many reasons, and everything points to their doing so for the foreseeable future.
 
No doubt we have become less violent in some ways. But it is easy for liberal humanists to pass over the respects in which civilisation has retreated. Pinker is no exception. Just as he writes off mass killing in developing countries as evidence of backwardness without enquiring whether it might be linked in some way to peace in the developed world, he celebrates “recivilisation” in America without much concern for those who pay the price of the recivilising process. Focusing on large, ill-defined cultural changes—a decline of the values of respectability and self-control in the 1960s, for example, which he tells us resulted from the influence of “the counterculture”—his analysis has a tabloid flavour, not improved by his repeated recourse to not always very illuminating statistics.
 
One set of numbers does stand out, however. “By the early 1990s Americans had gotten sick of the muggers, vandals and drive-by shootings.” The result is clear: “Today more than two million Americans are in jail, the highest incarceration rate on the planet. This works out to three-quarters of a percent of the entire population and a much larger percentage of young men, especially African Americans.” (Again the italics are Pinker’s.) The astonishing numbers of black young men in jail in the US is due to the disproportionate impact on black people of the “decivilising process,” notably the high rate of black children born out of wedlock and what Pinker sees as the resulting potential for violence in families (black or white) that lack the civilising influence of women. While “massive imprisonment” has not reversed this trend, it “removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them.” America’s experiment in mass incarceration is, apparently, an integral part of the recivilising process.
 
The vast growth of the American penal state, reaching a size not achieved in any other country, does not immediately present itself as an advance in civilisation. A large part of the rise in the prison population has to do with America’s repressive policies on drugs, which Pinker endorses when he observes: “A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets.” While it may be counter-productive in regard to its stated goal of controlling drugs use, it seems America’s prohibitionist regime offers a useful means of banging up troublesome people. The possibility that mass incarceration of young males may be in some way linked with family breakdown is not considered. Highly uneven access to education, disappearing low-skill jobs, cuts in welfare and greatly increased economic inequality are also disregarded, even though these factors go a long way in explaining why there are so many poor blacks and so few affluent whites in prison in America today.
 
Talking to the vacuum cleaner salesman and part-time British agent James Wormold in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, the Cuban secret policeman Captain Segura refers to “the torturable class”: those, chiefly the poor, who expect to be tortured and who (according to Segura) accept the fact. The poor in America may not fall exactly into this category—even if some of the practices to which they are subject in US prisons are not far from torture. But there is certainly an imprisonable class in the United States, largely composed of people that Pinker describes as decivilised, and once they have been defined in this way there is a kind of logic in consigning this category of human beings to the custody of America’s barbaric justice system.
 
Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence. They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.


http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/

[genjikhan]

@TMAG

Pelo que entendi,nesse texto o autor está desiludindo a esperança que esse cientista(Steven Pinker) têm de usar a Ciência para corrobar à utopia que ele criou de que o mundo está menos violento,certo?

[Sdelareza]

De acordo com uma análise estatística feita por um grupo de pesquisadores liderados por Matthew Jackson, parece que o comércio internacional ajuda a prevenir conflitos armados entre países.

A visão que predomina é que o comércio internacional representa uma fonte segura de lucros financeiros e a guerra algo muito arriscado que certamente traria muito custos.   

O estudo destaca que não se trata somente das relações comerciais entre dois países (afinal países que lutaram entre si
nas duas guerras mundiais tinham algum tipo de comércio), mas o fato que agora os países costumam ter muito mais parceiros
comerciais do que antes.

Eis alguns trechos do artigo (como ele é protegido contra copia, reescrevi aqueles mais relevantes):
- A incidência de conflitos entre 1820 e 1949 foi dez vezes maior do que entre 1950 e 2000. (Essa comparação, mesmo relevante, deve ser vista com cautela pois o primeiro período é maior que o segundo)
- Em 1850, os países tinham em média cinco parceiros comerciais relevantes. Hoje, são mais de 30. Além disso, existiam antes poucas alianças comerciais, bilaterais ou multilaterais. Hoje, são dezenas destas e centenas daquelas.

Quase todos os conflitos atuais são obviamente localizados em regiões com ausência de alianças multilaterais.

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ciencia/2015/12/1719596-cientistas-apontam-correlacao-entre-mais-comercio-e-menos-guerras.shtml

[Buckaroo Banzai]

https://spotniks.com/conheca-os-paises-onde-nao-ha-um-misero-mcdonalds-e-entenda-porque-nao-te-los-e-pessimo-para-paz-mundial/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree#Golden_Arches_theory