00:06:28.200Yeah, it's just sort of like most of it is just kind of platitudes about like, yeah, we all contain within us impulses to violence and like impulses to empathy.
00:11:37.740So these are all, you know, very low rates, right?
00:11:40.060If you go back to roughly 1,200, right, in the middle of the Middle Ages, you find rates of around 100 per 100,000.
00:11:48.080These are societies that have up to 100 times more homicides than we do now.
00:11:54.160I like to imagine the first guy who was just like watching a good chunk of their friends get murdered and was like, we should start writing this down, you know?
00:12:02.740And so if you look at the trend all across Western Europe, starting in around 1200,
00:12:09.200once we start getting written records, you see the same slow but very steady decline
00:12:14.260in homicide rates. There's lots of nuance to go over, but zooming all the way out,
00:12:19.920it's like you look at Western Europe, super violent in the year 1200, very nonviolent by
00:12:25.580the time we get like 1800s, 1900s. One of the genuinely really interesting things about this
00:12:29.820that the patterns of homicides to the extent that we know this is most of the homicides way way way
00:12:35.980back in the middle ages were like men killing men the drop in homicides is almost exclusively like
00:12:42.060stranger danger homicides like people killing each other like you know these like duels and0.95
00:12:45.840shit like do you spit your thumb at me sir right that man over there is wearing his handkerchief0.99
00:12:50.380directed towards me exactly exactly sir one of us must die we also see a faster and larger drop1.00
00:12:57.380among like the upper classes. So like the aristocracy stopped killing each other. And
00:13:01.440then eventually that kind of trickles down to like common folk, right? And so this trend is
00:13:07.680roughly accurate. But of course, Pinker then has to explain why this happened. His main explanation
00:13:13.220for this is the emergence of like the modern state. This is from Pinker's description of this.
00:13:19.760He says, during Norman rule in England, some genius recognized the lucrative possibilities
00:13:50.520To ensure that all homicides were presented to the courts, each death was investigated
00:13:54.160by a local agent of the crown, the coroner. And so, you know, what philosophers call like the
00:13:58.480state monopoly on violence explains why people wouldn't do this kind of entrepreneurial violence
00:14:03.400anymore. I don't need to kill you and your family. I can just report it to the local constable and0.99
00:14:08.680then he will put you on trial and he will punish you appropriately. And so this also explains why
00:14:14.580murders fell among the upper classes first is basically they had access to the court system,
00:14:19.740right? If a poor person says, oh, this person has like violated my rights in some way,
00:14:23.720they don't give a shit. The criminal justice system didn't give a shit back then, right? But0.99
00:14:27.040upper classes could start to use the court system as a way to settle disputes between each other.
00:14:32.680And then again, over time, as state capacity increases, we start getting poor people being
00:14:37.240able to use these systems. The second explanation is what he calls the civilizing process. He's
00:14:43.780basing this on a philosopher called Norbert Elias, who writes a book called The Civilizing
00:14:48.280process. And when we think of, you know, what is civilization, a huge component of it is resisting
00:14:54.820our impulses, right? All of us, a couple of times a day, you're probably like, I want to punch that
00:14:58.700fucking guy. But you don't do it because you're like, ah, you know, I'll go to jail or like,1.00
00:15:02.560it's not right. I wouldn't want somebody to do it to me, right? This is really the core thesis of
00:15:07.580Pinker's book. Over time, we've all gotten better at resisting our impulses, right? We have these
00:15:12.760better angels. He says, the habits of refinement, self-control, and consideration that are second
00:15:17.860nature to us had to be acquired. That's why we call them second nature. And they developed in
00:15:22.600Europe over the course of its modern history. Norbert Elias proposed that over a span of
00:15:26.880several centuries, beginning in the 1100s and maturing in the 1700s, Europeans increasingly
00:15:31.980inhibited their impulses and anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions and took
00:15:36.820other people's thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor, the readiness
00:15:40.980to take revenge, gave way to a culture of dignity, the readiness to control one's emotion.
00:15:45.660OK, I'm not saying that that is like wrong, but it feels like a pretty aggressive narrative to prescribe based on a relatively limited data set.
00:15:57.960This is actually the like the first part of the book where I was like, I don't know, like the first couple hundred pages of the book are actually like very good.
00:16:05.520Like most of us have about hunter gatherers. It's quite nuanced. He's got a lot of data.
00:16:09.260He's a very good writer, like really smart, really readable. And I found most of the stuff they're kind of fascinating.
00:16:15.660But then once he gets to the civilizing process, it's like, maybe, like, it's an interesting
00:16:21.240explanation, but he kind of presents it as like, well, this has now been proven.
00:16:25.940And you're like, well, I don't know that you can prove something like that.
00:16:28.180This is just one of those things where the number of variables bouncing around here is
00:16:33.740so high that any conclusion you come up with, even though it might be a partial explanation,
00:16:40.080it's almost necessarily not a full explanation, right?
00:21:32.340You know, when I spoke to Philip Dwyer, he says that, you know, this drop is roughly true.
00:21:37.000And the explanation that state capacity essentially took entrepreneurial violence and replaced it with state violence, like imprisoning people, executing people, et cetera, that's also roughly true, right?
00:21:48.740You find drops in various countries as the state matures.
00:21:51.740This happens at different times, but it tends to coincide with state structures, although it also depends on things like, you know, the rise of literacy.
00:21:59.400Religious institutions were really important.
00:22:50.660You're just never going to be entirely correct.
00:22:53.080This is where Pinker starts painting himself into a corner about, you know, if crime is dependent on the civilizing process, right, like how civilized we are, how well we can resist our impulses, that then has to become his explanation for like all trends in crime going forward.
00:23:07.780The next section of Pinker's book is about explaining violence in the United States, right?
00:23:14.180So as we've noted, America has like six times higher homicide rates than Western Europe to this day.
00:23:20.620And beginning hundreds of years ago, this has kind of always been the case.
00:23:24.020And the other thing to explain in America is differences in homicide rates.
00:23:28.380He notes he uses slightly older statistics, but if you look up murder rates in Maine, it's two per 100,000.
00:23:35.980So roughly on par with Western Europe.
00:24:25.040Nisbet and Cohen were influenced by David Hackett Fisher's Albion Seed, a history of the British
00:24:30.460colonization of the United States. They zeroed in on the origins of the first colonists from
00:24:35.040different parts of Europe. The northern states were settled by Puritan, Quaker, Dutch, and German
00:24:40.240farmers, but the interior south was largely settled by Scots-Irish, many of them sheep herders
00:24:46.120who hailed from the mountainous periphery of the British Isles beyond the reach of the central
00:24:51.080government. Herding may have been an exogenous cause of the culture of honor. Not only does a
00:24:56.840herder's wealth lie in stealable physical assets, but those assets have feet and can be led away0.99
00:25:02.880in an eye blink far more easily than land can be stolen out from under a farmer.
00:25:09.020Herders all over the world cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation. Herders. Though0.80
00:25:14.840contemporary southerners are no longer shepherds, cultural mores can persist long after the
00:25:20.420ecological circumstances that gave rise to them are gone. And to this day, Southerners behave as
00:25:25.920if they have to be tough enough to deter livestock rustlers. Yeah, that's what I've always said about
00:25:32.220Southerners. I always tell them, calm down, you don't have a flock to protect. Let's just speak
00:25:38.520like rational descendants of the Dutch. I looked into this book, Albion Seed. It appears to be
00:25:45.000relatively well regarded as a description of cultural differences in the United States,
00:25:50.460like before the revolution. But the problem with Pinker using this is that he is then citing
00:25:56.520two other researchers who take this theory and apply it 300 years later, and they apply it to
00:26:05.000homicide rates. Albion Seed, this original project, didn't talk about homicide rates.
00:26:10.140And, you know, if you read like debunkers of Albion Seed and Pinker's argument specifically, you read this stuff and you're like, oh, the herding culture in the American South.
00:26:20.120But every region of Europe includes like herding populations, right?
00:26:25.440There's like mountainous regions of Switzerland and France and Germany and those people also emigrated.0.92
00:26:31.060And if you look at the actual differences between like Scots-Irish immigrants in various regions of the United States, they're not that different.
00:26:39.280we're not talking about like 100 percent and zero percent hurt hurting culture is this is i'm sorry
00:26:45.380this is one of the weirdest explanations i know i will accept this explanation as to like why
00:26:51.520border collies have a lot of energy but beyond that i'm very skeptical like there's some guy0.89
00:26:57.240at a fucking gas station screaming at another dude over who gets to use the pump and steven0.97
00:27:03.880pinker's like yeah your ancestors were herders for sure great great great great grandpa was a1.00
00:27:09.000Herder. I'm always very skeptical of explanations for violence that are not like, shall we say,
00:27:17.740poverty forward. Right. Because culture is this very abstract thing. Violence is this very
00:27:24.400discreet thing. You need to tie one to the other. And I think that requires more work than like,
00:27:29.960yeah, I'm getting violence vibes out of Mississippi. Totally. And the researchers
00:27:34.280that Pinker is citing here had this theory that, like, people from moist, hilly regions
00:27:39.920would commit more homicides than people from dry plains.0.57
00:28:19.720Well, the Everybody Hurts one makes sense because I can just see you sick in bed, looking at the ceiling, listening to that song on repeat over and over again.
00:28:27.340Taking a break only to play Donkey Kong 64.
00:28:30.260So, that is his explanation of regional disparities. He then has to explain disparities over time. So, this is the section of the book where Pinker explains the crime rise of the 1960s and the crime fall of the 1990s, which you and listeners may be familiar with because this comes up in like every third episode that we do.
00:28:51.800Right. So basically his whole kind of civilizing process theory, the problem is that it can't really explain massive spikes in violence, right? Because like we were good at resisting our impulses and then we became bad at it and then we became good again. He has to tack on some sort of other explanation for why all of a sudden in the 1960s, Americans started killing each other way more.
00:29:15.080Right. Once you start identifying more as an American and less as a Scotsman, then your violent tendencies fade away.
00:29:22.580The beginning of his explanation is basically the lack of social trust, right?
00:29:27.260The civil rights movement exposed a moral blot on the American establishment, and as critics shone a light on other parts of society, more stains came into view.
00:29:35.840Among them, the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the pervasiveness of poverty, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the many illiberal military interventions, particularly the Vietnam War, and later the despoiliation of the environment and the oppression of women and homosexuals.
00:29:52.440So he uses some weird words, but basically people are looking around and seeing like the societal breakdown.
00:29:57.700He's saying institutional trust is low.
00:30:00.860That's one way of putting it, it seems.
00:30:02.720He says, as the civilizing process was entrenched, in the 1960s, you then have this informalizing process where we stop looking to the upper classes for the kind of mores of resisting impulses.
00:30:15.720We become more interested in giving in to our impulses.
00:30:19.200So here is the section where he lays that out.0.92
00:30:22.920The civilizing process had been a flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward.
00:30:28.000But as Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were leveled.
00:30:40.160The informalization affected the way people dressed as they abandoned hats, gloves, ties, and dresses for casual sportswear.
00:30:48.240It affected the language as people started to address their friends with first names instead of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss.
00:30:54.960and it could be seen in countless other ways in which speech and demeanor became less mannered
00:31:00.000and more spontaneous. We're not emulating rich people anymore. The leveling of hierarchies and
00:31:04.660the harsh scrutiny of the power structure were unstoppable and in many ways desirable. But one
00:31:09.640of the side effects was to undermine the prestige of aristocratic and bourgeois lifestyles that had,0.97
00:31:15.760over the course of several centuries, become less violent than those of the working class0.89
00:31:19.860and underclass instead of values trickling down from the court they bubbled up from the street0.91
00:31:25.920this is a disconcerting explanation the argument here is that like look some of
00:31:34.060sure questioning social hierarchies is good in some ways but one downside is that the upper
00:31:42.660class rules i think is i i think that he's mistaking metaphor for reality he has this
00:31:48.380whole thing about etiquette norms, you know, throughout the Middle Ages and the early state
00:31:51.840period where people, you know, they stopped spitting all over the place. They stopped bringing
00:31:55.300their knives to dinner, et cetera. And like, that's kind of an interesting metaphor for the
00:31:59.680way people learn to resist their impulses. But then he basically looks at the 1960s and he's
00:32:04.740like, the etiquette was changing. But like the etiquette is not necessarily perfectly correlated
00:32:09.680to rates of violence, right? You can have very good etiquette and also kill people and vice versa.
00:32:13.740Yeah. This informalization process has continued and crime rates fell again in the 1990s.
00:32:19.560I don't want to cast Pinker as a conservative necessarily, but I will say that this is something that if you read a lot of conservatives on, especially conservatives from several decades ago, they seem to believe very deeply that that the aesthetics of formality are like part of the social glue that binds us.
00:32:39.740Of course, what it actually is, is a claim to the top of the social hierarchy, right?
00:32:46.400Because you're someone who was raised with a certain type of etiquette and you are making
00:32:52.280the claim that that type of etiquette is not simply a set of norms in your community.
00:34:06.940But like, what's so fucking annoying is people just grabbing on to a couple elements of pop culture and just speaking as if they are indicative of like this massive social upheaval.
00:34:25.620And then the 80s were stuffy again.0.97
00:34:27.360Like this is just fucking happening constantly.0.75
00:34:29.560One of the patterns we will see next episode especially is you notice as he's further back in history, he does more kind of citing of experts.0.97
00:35:26.000This was a worldwide trend and a lot of the domestic stuff like mass incarceration can't really explain why this was almost universal.
00:35:34.200And then after he discards all of these other like much more complicated factors, he then says, look, the only thing left is that the culture got more civilized.
00:35:43.200He says, ultimately, we must look to a change in norms to understand the 1990s crime bust just as it was a change in norms that helped explain the boom three decades earlier.
00:35:53.780Sorry, but like it's not that a change in norms is not the explanation.
00:35:59.120It's that the change in norms is the change.
00:36:48.660One way in which the 1990s did not overturn the de-civilization of the 1960s is in popular culture.
00:36:54.540Many of the popular musicians in recent genres such as punk, metal, goth, grunge, gangsta, and hip-hop make the Rolling Stones look like the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
00:37:08.200Hollywood movies are bloodier than ever.
00:37:09.920unlimited pornography is a mouse click away and an entirely new form of violent entertainment
00:37:15.580video games has become a major pastime yet as these signs of decadence proliferated in the
00:37:22.480culture violence went down in real life the re-civilizing process somehow managed to reverse
00:37:28.520the tide of social dysfunction without turning the cultural clock back to ozzy and harriet
00:37:35.880I love that he lists off all of these examples of the lack of a causal link between pop culture and actual violence.
00:37:47.040And instead, he sort of posits it as a mystery.
00:37:50.660Right. And also he discards explanations like changing demographics, changing living standards, because they don't explain the entire shift.
00:37:59.140But I think most of those explain parts of it.
00:38:01.420Right. You don't need you don't need something. All right. This is making me annoyed.
00:38:06.320We're back to Freakonomics. We'll just type in that section of the episode.
00:38:09.300You don't need a simple narrative explanation of something that is incredibly complex. Right.
00:38:15.320He has this concept about like the civilizing process, which is already like way too vague and unquantifiable to be particularly meaningful.
00:38:24.820And then he's trying to like apply it in the micro. Right.
00:38:28.140If you want to say there is an enormous array of different norms and institutional shifts and technology, et cetera, that all come together and caused violence to decline drastically over the course of thousands to hundreds of years.
00:38:46.000And I call that all the civilizing process.
00:38:51.180But when you start to try to zoom in and you're like, OK, people aren't wearing hats and the Rolling Stones are singing about this and that.0.96
00:39:00.960You can't explain decade by decade crime rates based on a extremely abstract notion that you've pieced together based on like layperson's archaeology and like, you know, briefly reading the Magna Carta or whatever the fuck.
00:39:20.140Personally, I'm actually fine with just saying that the reasons why homicides declined in the 1500s are probably different from the reason they rose and fell in the 1990s.
00:39:31.100I don't need there to be one reason for crime.
00:39:49.540it's not just that the reason that violence has declined historically is due to the civilizing
00:39:54.680process. He's saying that the reason violence declines, period, is due to the civilizing
00:40:00.920process. And therefore, every time he sees a decrease or increase in crime, he must ascribe
00:40:07.060it to a decrease or increase in civilizing. And that doesn't actually mean anything,
00:40:12.960or at least it doesn't mean anything discreet enough that it's a real explanation of what's
00:40:17.940happening. So you end up getting this very lazy, very abstract explanation for something that
00:40:23.680actually has very discrete material causes. Not that we have our arms around those causes in full,
00:40:31.300of course, but like certainly we know that there are material inputs into crime that can be impacted
00:40:37.880by like public policy. And to sort of characterize all of that as the civilizing process, it's
00:40:46.660oversimplified in a way that I think is counterproductive to actually solving these
00:40:51.720problems. I will say that, keep in mind, this book gets worse as it goes along.
00:40:57.120That's a common theme in our books, that they just get worse because I think a lot of these
00:41:02.520guys have figured out that a lot of reviewers aren't making it past the third chapter or so.
00:41:08.720Like every Gladwell review is always like, the book opens up with an anecdote about this. And
00:41:14.060then it just sort of like trails off and it's like well when are you gonna get to the racist
00:41:17.740plane crashes chapter it's like the duke nukem shareware where like the free level one is really
00:41:23.700good and you're like oh i'll pay money to get like the next nine levels and they're all just0.80
00:41:26.700fucking garbage because the whole thing was just like tricking you into it another uh video game0.90
00:41:31.900reference dated to 1996 for our listeners i have been on the couch for seven weeks i have to have1.00
00:41:38.660some sort of hobby reading stephen pinker and playing fucking video games the duke nukem share
00:41:43.640is such a deep cut that I can't even believe it.0.92
00:41:46.520So this brings us to the second major portion of Stephen Pinker's book.
00:41:52.540He began the book talking about the decline in homicide over time.
00:41:56.880In the next section, he talks about the decline in state-sponsored violence.
00:42:01.660This is another thing that when you think about it at the most basic level, it's like true, right?
00:42:05.600That we used to burn witches at the stake.
00:42:07.960We used to execute much larger numbers of people, right?
00:42:11.300throughout western europe we have like thousands of people being executed you know we had public
00:42:15.360executions he has long really gross descriptions of the actual tortures that they did to people0.99
00:42:21.920you know they would like draw and quarter people they'd like pull out their fucking entrails like0.93
00:42:26.180slavery as like people like ben shapiro love pointing out was like very widely practiced0.99
00:42:30.580not just white folks this is their uh all this is their all slavers matter
00:42:34.920they bring out every time you talk about how slavery was bad but then you know i mean we had
00:42:39.700like large scale pogroms against jews you know especially in western europe with the murder of
00:42:44.260heretics and non-believers like the kind of mass murder of people because they had the wrong
00:42:48.020religion right these are things where like it is written into the law that like you will be killed1.00
00:42:52.280if you don't believe in jesus right or like you will be enslaved and that is totally okay as far0.94
00:42:56.880as the law is concerned this is another category of violence that humans have practiced on each
00:43:01.240other and has very significantly declined over time it's like institutionalized violence yes
00:43:06.800Yes, exactly. That's a better way of putting it as usual. So he notes that the institution of prisons started to be established in the 1500s. Burning of witches started fading in the 1700s. Things like the Crusades, these kind of large scale religious mass killings started to fade out in the 1600s. The idea of like proportionality of criminal punishment starts to emerge.
00:43:30.800I'm sorry. I don't mean to get cocky, but put me in 800 AD. I would have thought of proportionality. I would have been the first guy to do it.
00:43:40.800The funny thing is you're basically doing what Pinker is doing throughout the book. He's like, I'm smarter than these fucking middle-aged weirdos. These people are gross. I don't spit on the ground.1.00
00:43:47.820And when Pinker is doing it, he's being disgusting and cocky. And when I do it, I'm being snarky and fun.0.52
00:43:54.360Again, with this book, this is a trend that I think everybody would acknowledge existed, right?
00:43:59.880You're less likely to be tortured by an agent of the state now than you were in the 1500s.
00:44:24.560The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the humanitarian revolution.
00:44:32.100The pokey little world of village and clan, accessible through the five senses and informed by a single content provider, the church, gave way to a phantasmagoria of people, places, cultures, and ideas.
00:44:43.180And for several reasons, the expansions of people's minds could have added a dose of humanitarianism to their emotions and their beliefs.
00:44:50.760This is the time when you start to get novels as mass entertainment, which by definition are just telling stories about people who are like a little bit different than you.
00:44:58.320But then we also get really the beginning of like what anyone would call like a marketplace of ideas.
00:45:08.320This is the first time you can really debate things and have much wider societal understandings.
00:45:14.060Right. You're you're a guy who just learned how to read. And then you read a book that says, like, tearing people apart limb from limb is bad. And you're like, huh. Hang on. What's going on here? All of this resulted in expanding sense of empathy among the population. So he says, actually, let me send this to you.
00:45:29.720Some of this progress, and if it isn't progress, I don't know what is, was propelled by ideas, by explicit arguments that institutionalized violence ought to be minimized or abolished.
00:45:40.220And some of it was propelled by a change in sensibilities.
00:45:43.920People began to sympathize with more of their fellow humans and were no longer indifferent to their suffering.
00:45:48.940A new ideology coalesced from these forces, one that placed life and happiness at the center of values and that used reason and evidence to motivate the design of institutions.
00:45:58.920These are the first green shoots of ideas that get us modern democracies, right? You have to go from a society where you're just totally indifferent to other people's suffering. You hear this phrase, life was cheap, right? People were just dying all over the place. Infant mortality was like half of the fucking babies died. You have to go to a society where it's like, well, wait a minute, maybe babies dying is bad. Maybe torturing other people is bad. You have to sort of see these ideas in the population and then those over time become these much larger structures that we have now.
00:46:29.520I don't feel like I'm smart enough to argue the details of like how the Enlightenment changed our societies.
00:46:38.860I do feel like whenever I hear Pinker and some of his contemporaries talk about it, it feels like weirdly oversimplified, like something is not getting explained.
00:46:49.680And I can't quite put my finger on it.
00:46:51.980Yeah, I think what you're going through right now is what I went through during the reading of this book.
00:46:56.080So I read almost all of the book, and then I started reading, like, the critiques and the reviews of the book.
00:47:01.460And when I first read this, I was like, ah, we're not really going to debunk this on the show because, like, of course, right?0.88
00:47:06.300You start reading about other people, and then your mind expands to, like, oh, hey, maybe, like, poor people aren't poor because they're, like, a lesser species of human.
00:47:18.040And then as I started reading the responses to this, I realized that I think there's – I think an underrated form of bias is that all of the books that you read are written by writers, right?
00:47:29.900And I think as a writer, I think I'm biased to think that like it was writing that brought us to this sophisticated understanding, right?
00:47:38.600I think that like – I have a bias to think that my work matters and I think that ultimately that's what Pinker is expressing too.
00:47:44.680that it's like, well, people didn't know that torture was wrong. And they read something that
00:47:48.660was like, torture is wrong. And they're like, oh my God. Yeah. You'll see a tweet that's like,
00:47:52.320oh, that's my emotional support laundry pile. And you're like, oh, other people also have a
00:47:57.660massive pile of laundry they never quite put away. Pinker calls this the humanitarian revolution,
00:48:01.440but I would call this the TFW revolution. So again, I found this very convincing. And then
00:48:07.020I started reading people who like know more about the enlightenment than I do and seemingly than
00:48:12.660Pinker does. So the biggest problem with this, and interestingly, the researcher that came up
00:48:18.340with this idea that it was basically novels and like mass literacy that created this humanitarian
00:48:22.960revolution, her name's Lynn Hart, she admits very openly in her work that like there's a real
00:48:27.280correlation causation problem here, right? Because maybe people started reading and that gave them
00:48:32.100more empathy, but maybe people had more empathy so they started reading. The other problem is
00:48:37.460is just like a timeline issue. So this is an excerpt from an article called The Decline of
00:48:44.720Violence in the West from Cultural to Post-Cultural History by Gregory Hanlon. They really got to work
00:48:51.060on these titles, but I'm going to send you this. In common with many North American intellectuals
00:48:56.880under the sway of 19th century idealism, Pinker attributes major social changes to the appearance
00:49:02.160of great books penned by courageous and prescient authors. He frequently cites the famous work by
00:49:07.700Cesare Beccaria condemning torture and mutilation, but since he has no apparent knowledge of criminal
00:49:13.520justice history, he is unaware that magistrates had largely phased torture out of their repertoire
00:49:17.960a hundred years earlier. The bloodthirsty god hypothesis gave way to real progress after Locke
00:49:24.700advocated religious toleration, he writes, but he ignores the fact that neighbors had collaborated
00:49:29.340on a daily basis with heretics ever since the advent of the Reformation and that minorities
00:49:34.720usually evaporated through intermarriage rather than by extermination long before the English
00:49:39.400philosopher put pen to paper. So timeline wise, a lot of the shifts that Pinker is crediting
00:49:46.720to the Enlightenment actually happened before the Enlightenment. Right. And oftentimes the
00:49:51.100Enlightenment was kind of giving people reasons to explain what they were seeing. And maybe this is
00:49:56.100what i sort of couldn't put my finger on before uh when i said this feels like an inadequate
00:50:00.780explanation but the idea that like someone like lock was sort of the guy that thought of this
00:50:06.840and then wrote it down and everyone was like oh shit it's sort of almost certainly untrue right
00:50:13.000the what's actually happening is that there are all of these institutions and norms colliding up0.89
00:50:19.260against each other and then people start articulating what they're seeing and experiencing
00:50:25.320right which might have its own impact but it's not the spark right that sets these things off
00:50:30.200right i think this is where it becomes much more obvious that pinker is speaking from his bias as
00:50:34.460a writer and maybe some of his other biases because you know he he talks explicitly about
00:50:40.140ideas as like an exogenous force right you have the static society and then all of a sudden you
00:50:44.440inject a bunch of new ideas into them and then you get these massive shifts but one of the other
00:50:49.160historians that i spoke to for this eleanor yanega points out that arguments against slavery had been
00:50:54.220around for hundreds of years at this point. And Christians had gone out of their way to prohibit
00:50:59.180slavery of Christians. People absolutely knew that this was a barbaric institution. And, you know,0.99
00:51:05.780over and over again, other historians have pointed out that a lot of the shifts that he's talking
00:51:10.360about as moral or ideological were much more logistical. The other thing that really struck me
00:51:17.320in Philip Dwyer's response to Pinker's book is that it is true that European cities started
00:51:24.600banning like public executions in the 17 and 1800s. But it doesn't appear that this was for
00:51:30.880moral reasons. It was basically because the cities were becoming more densely populated and the
00:51:35.800crowds were too large and rowdy. It was like a football game. They banned public executions from
00:51:41.660London to move them to the suburbs. This is something I was I'm wondering if we're going
00:51:45.940to get into it all but i've heard before i've heard it said several times that a lot of like
00:51:51.580the antiquated forms of torture that we read about and are like disgusted by are actually
00:51:58.000mythical they're sort of like urban legend almost and don't really exist and or like there's maybe
00:52:04.720the sparsest piece of documentation that maybe this once existed and then someone extrapolated
00:52:09.580an enormous amount from that it's like those sex things that you talk about in high school like
00:52:12.860give her the dirty sanchez right right like the rusty dragon or whatever and it's like no one's0.56
00:52:17.680ever actually done this it's exactly like that it's also i mean one of the other researchers
00:52:22.780points out that instead of referring to actual historians in this section one of his main
00:52:28.500sources is a coffee table book of torture implements right like this is what they used
00:52:33.780to do to pull out your entrails and like that stuff is kind of funny and like it's good color
00:52:38.460to talk about in the book, but it doesn't tell you anything about the prevalence of these things or
00:52:43.440whether these implements were actually being used. I think one of the reasons why historians get so
00:52:49.640like worked up about this book, I mean, part of it is like ego that like Pinker is not citing their
00:52:53.700work, but part of it is just like the weird sloppiness that he has of like these long
00:52:58.540descriptions of how ugly and gross tortures were. But then he doesn't pick up the phone for like
00:53:02.820five minutes to be like, hey, dude, was this happening a lot? I also think that another way
00:53:07.480that actual academics are at a disadvantage is that this massive shift from kind of barbarism
00:53:14.400to civilization or whatever, there just isn't a clean explanation of it. One of the other
00:53:20.080historians that I talked to, Doug Thompson, he points out that, you know, Pinker is almost
00:53:24.000exclusively talking about Western Europe here, but the rise of state structures and the reduction
00:53:29.520of homicide and torture, et cetera, was a universal shift in other places too. This also happened in
00:53:36.640China and the Middle East and India and all over the place, oftentimes like a thousand years
00:53:42.200before it happened in Western Europe. And so Pinker is doing this weird thing where he's
00:53:47.040trying to tell this like universal human story, right? Of like how we went from like apes to
00:53:52.240civilized people, right? But he's only using one case study of Western Europe, which is kind of a
00:53:58.620weird outlier compared to other regions of the world that did this. And then a lot of the data
00:54:04.300in his own case study doesn't even really match his explanation uh i forget where i read this now
00:54:11.000but at the same time these like you know john lock all these treaties on like individual rights
00:54:14.980were coming out england increased the number of crimes for which you could get the death penalty
00:54:19.040at the same time they were actually reducing the number of people executed but still it's like that
00:54:23.340doesn't actually indicate a shift among powerful leaders right it's just kind of a mystery and
00:54:29.400like that doesn't make for a good airport book. Having a simple, easy to follow narrative will
00:54:35.660always be very pleasing to people, you know, even if it's essentially incorrect or at best
00:54:41.340oversimplified, which is why so many like experts and historians, et cetera, will never publish a
00:54:46.940good book because it's a completely different skill set. So those are the like logistical
00:54:53.080problems with Pinker's explanation for the decline of barbarism being due to the Enlightenment.
00:54:58.420there's also a philosophical problem. He is talking about the Enlightenment told the population that
00:55:05.300all humans are deserving of dignity and it's wrong to torture. And of course, this was happening at
00:55:11.460the same time as colonialism. And a lot of this was happening at the same time these thinkers
00:55:16.640were propping up the continued existence of slavery. What? This is the first I'm hearing
00:55:22.200about this. It's a little bit weird to say like, oh, well, these guys were right about everything
00:55:28.200And, like, we all learn to, like, respect the rights of humanity and whatever.
00:55:31.920But, like, there were kind of huge myopia as part of this.
00:55:36.460And so this is an excerpt from a very good review in The New Yorker.
00:55:42.280Pinker is virtually silent about Europe's bloody colonial adventures.
00:55:45.920There's not even an entry for colonialism in the book's enormous index.
00:55:50.060This is a pretty serious omission, both because of the scale of the slaughter and because of the way it troubles the distinction between savage and civilized.
00:55:57.480What does it reveal about the impulse control of the Spanish that even as they were learning how to dispose of their bodily fluids more discreetly, they were systematically butchering the natives on two continents?
00:56:08.480Or about the humanitarianism of the British that as they were turning away from such practices as drawing and quartering, they were shipping slaves across the Atlantic?0.58
00:56:17.320He also doesn't really cover the way that Enlightenment thinking was used to defend eugenics.
00:56:24.400A lot of these people had, like, really gross ideas about races, like Carl Linnaeus, who came up with this classification system for species of, like, the family and the order and the genus and all that stuff, also classified races as, like, according to their – basically to their superiority and inferiority.
00:56:40.740And what happened during this time was, you know, there were religious justifications for racism, why there had to be this preexisting hierarchy of superiority.
00:56:48.240And then as we get the scientific revolution, they use scientific justifications for the same outcome, right?
00:56:53.120So it's like, oh, it's not because they're heretics.
00:56:54.800It's because, oh, they're closer to apes in like evolution.
00:56:57.800I don't want to create too much of a straw man, but I feel like there's this like undercurrent of Western chauvinism running through a lot of these conversations where they want the narrative to be that like things were very rough before some very smart white boys had some very good ideas.
00:57:22.860but it's predicated on these ideas from British and French aristocrats 200-something years ago.
00:57:30.460It's a sort of denial of the context in which these men lived, right, that things were changing
00:57:35.060around them as they were writing, and that perhaps they did have new ideas, but also many of those
00:57:40.960ideas were articulations of things that they were seeing. There's something that feels like a little
00:57:45.460bit hero-worship-y about the way that some of these nerds talk about the Enlightenment, I guess,
00:57:50.120That sort of doesn't sit right with me.
00:57:52.120What I found in reading a lot of the historical scholars about Pinker's work was that what he's trying to do throughout is set up this dichotomy between us now and kind of pre-enlightenment, pre-civilization people, right?
00:58:07.080So he says people in the Middle Ages were gross, right?
00:58:10.560And this whole idea of like life was cheap, right?0.99
00:58:13.300People lost their babies and they didn't give a shit.0.99
00:58:15.820You're at dinner and somebody gets stabbed at the next table and you don't care.0.99
00:58:19.100he's trying to set up this false dichotomy. But what actual scholars of the time say is that like
00:58:25.720people were totally capable of empathy. People cried when they lost their babies. It was like
00:58:29.480really traumatic for them. It was not quote unquote normal to be surrounded by death all
00:58:34.420the time. They felt the same kinds of trauma and depression as we did. And there is this
00:58:40.440really gross line of like barbarism during these times. But there's also a long tradition of like
00:58:45.420charity. A lot of people used the church to say like, oh, we must give alms to the poor.
00:58:49.980That was existing at the same time. And what Pinker is really trying to do is he's trying
00:58:54.760to set up this ideology where we're just constantly congratulating ourselves, right?
00:58:59.400Like, well, thank God we're not like that. I don't spit on the floor. But people who are more
00:59:03.720familiar with the time say that, you know, people back then were capable of empathy,
00:59:08.540but they were selective about who they extended it to. And that's what we do now.
00:59:12.660Right. I don't want to make like a morally relativistic argument, but like prison conditions in the United States are extremely bad. Right. We have like very endemic rape in prisons. And that's something that like they joke about in PG-13 movies. And it's not that we're incapable of empathy. It's that we don't extend our empathy to men being raped in prison because we think it's kind of funny that they're being feminized. And we think they probably deserve it because they're in prison for one reason or another. Right.
00:59:38.940And the fact that things, you know, gross punishments are less severe, less likely now than they used to be, fair enough.
00:59:47.760But I think it's actually more important to draw the similarities between us and previous human beings, not to congratulate ourselves, but to think about all of the ways that we're making the same mistakes that humans have been making for 10,000 years.
01:00:00.840You know, I don't want to step outside of the bounds of my knowledge here, but like the human brain hasn't evolved a massive amount in the last 500 years or whatever.
01:00:36.780Is like we used to be like this and now we are like this.
01:00:40.460In the process, hand-waving away all of the mass violence that exists right now and avoiding the question of why that happens if we are now in the basking in the glow of enlightenment ideas.
01:00:56.100Yeah, and I don't want to be too hard on Pinker. I think we all have limitations intellectually. And I think for somebody like Pinker who comes from Scotch-Irish heritage, I think the oblong cranium is prone to vengeance.
01:01:10.940So the next thing that Pinker talks about is war.0.83
01:01:15.740We've talked about how humans do violence to each other. We've talked about how states do violence to their own people. But what about states doing violence to other states?
01:01:24.780He has a section called The Long Peace, which is about the startling decline of interstate war
01:01:31.100since World War II. Controlling for World War II. Yeah, since the big war. He says,
01:01:39.080now we're ready for the most interesting statistic since 1945, zero. Zero is the number that applies
01:01:45.420to an astonishing collection of categories of war during the two-thirds of a century that has elapsed
01:01:50.120since the end of the deadliest war of all time.
01:03:33.880And I'm going to send this to you. He notes that we also have far fewer genocides. So he has a chart, which is based on a database of killings by state actors around the world since 1900.
01:03:48.740This is just a chart of deaths per year.
01:03:52.180Deaths per hundred thousand per year. This is per capita deaths.
01:03:54.440Yeah. Some spikes aside, you had a massive, you had a massive spike in worldwide deaths during the World War II era. And then it sort of climbs downward pretty continuously to the present day with small spikes for like, you know, Cambodia, the genocide in Pakistan, genocide in Rwanda, but still nothing even remotely close to World War II. And so we're, you know, in an era of unparalleled peace.
01:04:21.840So the thing is, I think that like people have just sort of like a basic allergy to like talking about this and admitting to it because it feels like you're sort of celebrating or like you're implying that things like this will never happen again.
01:04:37.700Like if you look at the deaths in sort of large scale genocides, they have reduced, right?
01:04:43.060He says, the two decades since the end of the Cold War have been marked by genocides in Bosnia, 225,000 deaths, Rwanda, 700,000 deaths, and Darfur, 370,000 deaths.
01:04:54.120These are atrocious numbers, but as the graph shows, they are spikes in a trend that is unmistakably downward.
01:04:59.780The first decade of the new millennium is the most genocide-free of the past 50 years.
01:05:04.740And so, you know, you compare that to like anything like the Holocaust, 6 million people, we're nowhere near that.0.86
01:05:09.360And he's also right that like, you know, for most of human history, like Germany and France were at fucking war with each other.
01:05:15.180And we don't have like – that's kind of unthinkable now.
01:05:18.460And even in, you know, the conflicts that do take place, the fact that deaths are so reduced is like a pretty big deal.
01:05:27.520As far as the reason why there's fewer conflict deaths, that is almost entirely just better medical care.
01:05:34.360You know, for essentially all of human history, including now, the majority of deaths in war are not like direct battlefield deaths.
01:05:42.140It was mostly like wounds getting infected, right?
01:05:45.060And then you have disruptions to populations.
01:05:47.040You have the spread of like typhus and tuberculosis and disruptions of food supplies.
01:05:53.520And he notes that during the Korean War, 4.5% of the population died from disease and starvation per year.
01:06:01.140And even in like the most horrific conflicts that we have now, like the Civil War and Democratic Republic of Congo, it's nowhere near that.
01:06:07.900It's like 1% of the population over the entire conflict.0.94
01:06:11.240This is something where if he's making the case that like as a human being, you're much less likely to die of violence than you were as a hunter-gatherer, I think on the most basic level, that is absolutely fucking true.
01:06:21.680But that is like 95% because of just better medical care.
01:06:24.880It also seems to be distinct from the sort of like almost moral case that he's been making, right?
01:06:32.440That there has been a shift in our collective thinking that has led to less violence as opposed to like, yeah, we figured out bacteria a little bit.
01:06:41.640The thing is I am front-loading the explanation of medical care.
01:06:44.920This is something that he does mention in the book.
01:06:46.340I don't want to say that he's completely alighting this, but this is like fifth or sixth on his list of reasons.
01:06:51.140I would put this like the number one most important reason why we see fewer conflict
01:11:03.040Hitler read Marx in 1913, and although he detested Marxist socialism, his National Socialism substituted races for classes in its ideology of a dialectical struggle toward utopia.
01:11:15.540Some historians consider the two ideologies fraternal twins.
01:11:20.000We're not doing Marxism anymore. When you think of the Nazis, you're like, man, too much Marxism.
01:11:23.500When he says some historians, he means Jonah Goldberg.
01:11:50.480This is the thing. I was like, should I make Peter read this? Are we going to talk about this? This was the first paragraph in the book where I was like, what the actual fuck are you talking about? Like he even mentions here, Hitler detested Marxist socialism. Hitler like would not shut the fuck up about how much he hated communism. That was like one of his main driving fucking ideologies.
01:12:10.560they're the fucking first ones that go in the poem and look i'm not like i'm not a fucking0.99
01:12:17.080anthropologist so like when i read the first or like when you tell me about the first you know0.98
01:12:21.680whatever 75 of this book or whatever it is i'm like yeah it doesn't sound right but okay yeah
01:12:28.840and then he says one thing that i know a little bit about and it's like way off that's just like
01:12:34.280a huge red flag in my brain you know what i mean so the next thing that stephen picker talks about
01:12:39.880in his book is what you actually mentioned earlier, right? Can we just take out World War
01:12:46.340II from the statistics, right? Like for most people growing up now, it sounds weird to say
01:12:53.860like, oh, the world is becoming more peaceful. Obviously, people are gonna be like, what the
01:12:57.060fuck? What about World War II, right? So the next section of the book, and he really goes into this0.99
01:13:02.340in detail, is if things are getting better, why was the 20th century the bloodiest century in
01:13:08.920right human history right so here is this the 20th century was the bloodiest in history
01:13:17.320is a cliche that has been used to indict a vast range of demons including atheism darwin government
01:13:22.960science capitalism communism the ideal of progress and the male gender male gender but is it true
01:13:28.320the claim is rarely backed up by numbers from any century other than the 20th or by a mention of
01:13:34.440the hemoclysms of centuries past. Hemoclysm is like this weird made up word that basically means
01:13:39.480like the bursting of a blood vessel and has come to mean like this period of mass death between
01:13:44.700basically World War I and like the Mao dying. You know, I think the sort of like natural,0.88
01:13:50.760almost intuitive explanation of World War I and World War II is sort of we had this confluence
01:13:57.380of this old political order and incredible violent technology and that sort of culminates
01:14:04.940in a world war that is bloodier than anything we've ever seen followed by another one and then
01:14:11.320we sort of all learn our lesson in some way a new international order is established that sort of
01:14:16.840reckons with the fact that we can all destroy each other i've heard that before but what i've
01:14:22.220never heard is like the 20th century is the bloodiest in history well are you counting let's
01:14:29.080all count how many people died in the fourth century peter in the 13th do you know do you
01:14:32.960even know peter this is a weird argument to make mostly because like in some ways i think yeah okay
01:14:37.140it's true if you if you're arguing with me that's true i don't know how many people died in uh most
01:14:42.200other centuries you admit it but what i do know is that the world war ii death toll was like 70
01:14:47.400million people or something i don't feel like they were hitting those numbers back in 600 bc
01:14:54.220or whatever the fuck ah but peter the mistake that you're making don't don't talk to me about0.99
01:14:58.820per capita there's no fucking way we're getting there we're getting there there's no fucking way0.99
01:15:04.440i'm sorry but the like the there's just no fucking way that the hold on i i'm trying i love it you're0.98
01:15:13.300like what's the dumbest place he could go with this per capita rates the only way to do this0.97
01:15:19.400is to be like back when there were eight people one of them died uh and are we there's no fucking0.98
01:15:26.560way that those percentages have been matched in the in history i can't i i refuse to believe it0.68
01:15:32.480oh peter i refuse to believe it peter allow me to send you a chart that lists the population
01:15:38.720and the death toll as a percentage of the global population.0.99
01:17:16.460Which had a death toll of 19 million, adjusted for inflation, and that's 132 million.
01:17:20.980Now, the interesting thing about this, and which should completely disqualify it from this list, is that it spans 1,200 years.
01:17:29.160damn it you noticed i was gonna lead up to this he also has the atlantic slave trade which spans
01:17:36.500400 years several of these span multiple centuries which the which defeats the entire premise i i0.86
01:17:43.740found a really good review that's like okay pinker you want to adjust by per capita let's adjust by0.95
01:17:49.780year bitch if we if we spread out the meaty slave trade across 1200 fucking years and world war ii0.99
01:17:56.840across six years, World War II is then again the fucking worst. So why are you controlling0.99
01:18:01.700for one thing, but you're not controlling for this other fucking thing? I was going to look0.98
01:18:05.460up to that. One of them is also just Joseph Stalin. Yeah. One just says Joseph Stalin.0.87
01:18:09.740Seems to encompass like a wide range of activities. But the other thing that's odd here
01:18:15.760is that he's doing this by atrocity rather than by century, which is what he initially said. So
01:18:24.220So he has the Second World War and then Mao Zedong, which again, just a guy, Joseph Stalin, the First World War, the Russian Civil War, Chinese Civil War of the 20th century.
01:18:36.280All of these occurring in the 20th century, but they're split up.
01:21:01.500Like, well, what's the worst thing that humans have ever done to each other?
01:21:03.300And he starts putting together these numbers and eventually he publishes a book.
01:21:06.380According to historians, basically all of these numbers are egregiously wrong.
01:21:10.280So when it comes to the An Lushan revolt, the problem is it didn't kill two-thirds of the Chinese population.
01:21:17.460What happened was a shitload of people died.
01:21:19.060So the actual number that academics tend to use apparently is around 13 million, which is still a shitload.
01:21:24.220But what happened is when a huge number of people died, the people who administer the census also die.
01:21:29.880So what happened was it looks like two-thirds of Chinese people died.
01:21:34.200What happened is they were just massively undercounted in the second count because the census administration was completely destroyed.
01:21:39.520So 36 million people disappeared, but they just disappeared from the count. They didn't actually die. It's actually the same with the Mongolian conquests. Basically, 40 million people did not die in the Mongol conquest. In fact, Genghis Khan typically went out of his way to kill as small a number as possible because he wanted people around to administer his empire. It doesn't make sense to do this kind of mass killing.
01:22:02.940It appears that what happened was the actual like Mongol conquesters would typically inflate the numbers afterwards basically to brag like, oh, I killed 50 million people.
01:22:13.720And then the victims of these, the people left behind, would also exaggerate to say like they're so terrible they killed 50 million people.
01:22:20.260So both kind of the quote unquote good guys and the bad guys have a reason to inflate the body counts and these get written down.
01:22:26.700We just don't have reliable numbers here.
01:22:28.320To the extent that we can say anything, it's like roughly 11 million, not 40 million.
01:22:33.380But also one of the things I noticed in a lot of the like academic dissections of this chart, this chart is the subject of like more like academic, just like beshitification than any other part of this book.0.98
01:22:47.620What a lot of experts say is that for large scale atrocities, even arguably for like World War II, getting a specific number is not all that interesting of a project.0.98
01:24:35.100He basically says that it doesn't count.
01:24:36.840So he has a whole section about the nature of randomness.
01:24:40.440He says it like when the Germans were dropping bombs on London during the Blitz, you know,
01:24:45.140the altitudes were so high they couldn't meaningfully aim.
01:24:47.760so it's essentially random where the bombs fall. And by coincidence, a lot of the bombs fell on
01:24:51.880some neighborhoods, whereas other neighborhoods got no bombs at all. And of course, people read
01:24:55.520patterns into this, right? They're like, ooh, the Germans are going after Camden or something,
01:24:59.100and they're sparing Bloomsbury, whatever. But this is just the nature of randomness. Things
01:25:03.040look like patterns, but they're actually just complete statistical flukes. And then he explicitly
01:25:08.900says that this is what happened with the 20th century. By coincidence, we got Hitler, we got0.68
01:25:13.360Mao, we got Stalin, we got Order One and Two. All this stuff happened to take place in the same0.87
01:25:19.100century, but it doesn't really like mean anything. It's so funny that you get someone like to look
01:25:24.080at someone like Hitler, one of like the most studied characters in history, and be like,
01:25:28.740this was so random. This is so random. So here is the section where he lays that out.
01:25:36.800This underscores the difficulty of reconciling our desire for a coherent historical narrative
01:25:41.800with the statistics of deadly quarrels. In making sense of the 20th century, our desire for a good
01:25:47.920story arc is amplified by two statistical illusions. One is the tendency to see meaningful
01:25:53.680clusters in randomly spaced events. Another is the bell curve mindset that makes extreme value
01:25:59.840seem astronomically unlikely. So when we come across an extreme event, we reason there must
01:26:05.660have been extraordinary design behind it. That mindset makes it difficult to accept that the
01:26:10.420worst two events in recent history though unlikely were not astronomically unlikely even if the odds
01:26:16.360had been increased by the tensions of the times the wars did not have to start and once they did
01:26:22.000they had a constant chance of escalating to greater deadliness no matter how deadly they
01:26:26.320already were the two world wars were in a sense horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical
01:26:32.440distribution that stretches across a vast range of destruction that's what i've always said about
01:26:38.540world war ii this is a banana's way to think about history but like a double banana's way to think0.94
01:26:44.360about world war one and two this is the shit happens uh theory of history yeah over a long0.93
01:26:50.560enough time like a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters kind of explanation of history like0.99
01:26:55.560what the fuck are you talking about dude yeah stuff happens in context and we want to understand0.97
01:26:59.380that context what this is like intellectual laziness manifested as like math he's acting0.99
01:27:05.040as if these are just like, you know, wars happen over the course of time. And like, you know,
01:27:08.640you look across 2000 years and like, there's gonna be a few more wars in the third century
01:27:12.640and then in the eighth. But why isn't this level of randomness able to explain the decline of
01:27:17.320violence, for example? Well, exactly. And also these wars specifically, I don't want to belabor
01:27:22.500this because it's so fucking obvious to point it out, but it's like World War I came out of
01:27:26.580the diplomatic institutions that had been set up over the course of the 1800s, right? All these0.66
01:27:31.560weird diplomatic alliances that start falling like dominoes when like this dumb assassination0.97
01:27:36.560happens, right? And then World War II happens as a result of World War I, the international order
01:27:41.400that was set up. There's so much fucking resentment in Germany, this boils over and then becomes the0.91
01:27:44.980Nazi regime. And like, I know that's like a super fucking simplistic way to put it, but it's like0.99
01:27:48.340these two things explicitly draw upon recent history. And they're also the first two wars0.51
01:27:54.000that happened after the Industrial Revolution, right? The deadliness of the Holocaust could0.97
01:27:58.500not have happened in any other fucking century. Even if Genghis Khan wanted to kill six million1.00
01:28:03.620people in six years, he couldn't have done it because they didn't have trains. They didn't
01:28:07.460have bureaucratic institutions. We didn't have the ability as human beings to do anything on this
01:28:13.160scale. If you're talking about a long period where there's not a whole lot of technological
01:28:16.500advancement, maybe this argument holds up. But the 20th century atrocities, specifically he talks
01:28:23.180about the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, could only have happened in the 20th century.
01:28:26.940This must be the least satisfying way to explain this away, where like he has this major problem in his theory, which is, you know, if we currently live in a drastically less violent time, why in relatively recent history did we see enormous spikes of unparalleled violence, right?
01:28:49.040Huge problem in his broad narrative. And his two explanations are, one, here's a chart with just manifestly inaccurate numbers that explains that this is actually not that weird. And two, statistically, there will be centuries where a couple hundred million people die. It's beyond lazy. It's like bizarre.
01:29:14.760Similar to Marxism when you think about it.
01:29:19.040This is where he starts revealing like what his project is, right?
01:29:23.860As we get closer to the present day and as we get closer to the conclusions that he draws from all of this history, this is where the ideology comes into play.
01:29:31.780He also talks in the section about, you know, we think that the 20th century was the bloodiest because we're not adjusting by per capita.
01:29:38.380But he also says we have like this recency bias, right?
01:29:40.860Of course, we reach for things that happened more or less in living memory, right?
01:29:44.620But I don't think it's a form of recency bias to give those wars more prominence because those wars created the order that we live in today.
01:29:52.280They created the understanding of genocide that we had.
01:29:56.400They created the conditions we're living in.
01:29:58.720It's not bias to say that like World War II looms very large over the political debates and the understandings of things like history in the state that we have now.
01:30:07.460The An Lushan revolt plays less of a role in our current thinking.
01:30:11.280And so, of course, we're going to focus on World War II more than we focus on that.
01:30:15.860When people call the 20th century the bloodiest in human history, I don't even know that you need to fucking adjust it for per capita, right?
01:30:21.980The fact that that many people were killed in that short of a period of time, that's the bloodiest.
01:30:26.280You know, what's disconcerting about this is like these events happened recently enough that there are like very direct lessons to be learned, right?
01:30:34.060About the international order, about ideologies that still exist, are still popular.
01:36:07.860You should think, is this true or is this something I want to believe?
01:36:12.260I feel like after digesting part one, I have two broad critiques.
01:36:16.500One is that he's claiming to be representing a counter narrative, right?
01:36:21.900He claims that the dominant narrative is that things are bad and things are getting worse.
01:36:27.860I don't think that that's correct. Two, his argument seems to imply, if not outright state, that like peace has the force of history behind it, that you can take your hands off the wheel and things will get better.
01:36:45.500I think that's a very dangerous idea. A lot of, you know, peace is forged, right? These improvements in social structures and institutions are forged by people who want change for one reason or another. And I think to present the idea that history moves itself allows good people to step back and bad actors to be the only ones who are actually driving history.
01:37:14.340Right. It's this Davos view of the world where people in power are trying to abstract everything out to this like thousand year timeline so they can avoid joining the fight to address the problems that we have now.
01:37:27.680They have no idea what it's like to deal with the Scots-Irish on a daily basis.0.74