The world is becoming a better place all the time...

[ska invita]

...according to this:

A series of new books argues that all the essential statistics show the world is making progress, materially and ethically

[...]

Richards's book is full of ideas and numbers that sustain his thesis. Global life expectancy, for example, is now 68 years and rising. Mobile phones – once the preserve of wealthy yuppies – are now owned by 40% of Africans, connecting an entire continent to the rest of the world. Despite the world's conflicts, the number of people killed in wars has been dropping for decades.

Only 70 or so years ago – the span of a single lifetime – the world was still dominated by huge colonial empires. Now independent countries have emerged, with more and more of them becoming democracies. Infant mortality rates are down and still falling. "We are progressing ethically, we are progressing morally and just becoming a better species," Richards said.

Another example of a recently published book with an optimistic message is The Better Angels of Our Nature by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, which examines global statistics on violence, both criminal and that which springs from warfare. The pattern is clear, Pinker argues. When it comes to war deaths, rape, murder and domestic violence, all the trend lines are headed downwards to a more peaceful future.

In another book, Winning The War On War, American University professor Joshua Goldstein argues that global conflicts are causing fewer and fewer deaths. A third recent book on war, The Human Security Report, shows average annual battle deaths have dropped from 10,000 per conflict in the 1950s to less than 1,000 now.

But it is not just declining war and violence that is shaping our modern world. Writer Charles Kenny's book, Getting Better, was published this summer and examined positive trends in global development. Kenny argued that the worldwide effort to get hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is working. Statistics on health and education are simply improving worldwide, no matter what individual situations or countries may buck the wider trend.

\More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/30/world-improving-say-american-authors

Are you convinced?

 

[quimcunx]

Well the tories are certainly doing their best to reverse that trend.

 

[ferrelhadley]

A lot of people have had a lot of improvement over the past 50 years.

But its not as much as it could have been and not as much as it should have been.

The question as to whether the median or the modal human being has had their life improved is one as of yet unanswered.

 

[elbows]

Im not convinced by the simple 'things keep getting better and will continue to do so', but I certainly agree that all manner of things have improved a lot, with the rapid changes post-world war 2 being the most obvious. The problem is that for everything we've gained, there are all sorts of things we have lost too. Issues of inequality and wasteful consumption often make me describe we have now as a grotesque form of plenty, but this view should not be allowed to totally overshadow the gains. Increases in life expectancy should be shouted about, but inequality and unnecessary suffering really take the shine off for me and stop me from acknowledging the gains as much as I probably should. And I have a bit of trouble with the pace of life too, we seem to have got a bit carried away, on a fossil fuel high, locked in the fast lane of progress but the destination does not appear to be as originally advertised.

My primary concern for the future is that all sorts of fundamentals are becoming unsustainable and the unravelling will be a right mess. I can't help but get excited about the potential that this has to end all sorts of particular horrors and limitations of the modern age, but we stand to also lose many of the things that have been responsible for the good progress too, so I can't exactly say Im looking forward to it and what it will mean for me and every other human. The struggle gaining clearer direction, and with more plausible chance of a just result is appealing, but thats easy for me to say if I don't expect to be a casualty of the struggle myself.

 

[Nylock]

If they are drawing their stats from the period when the world had access to easily extractable resources like oil and had 'room to grow' both demographically and economically, then it will be interesting to see how these theses pan out during the next 70 years of contraction and increasing scarcity in both space and resources..

(sorry, a bit drunk so i hope the above makes sense of sorts)

 

[Random]

Sound like the kinds of books that come out just before a huge messy war.

 

[rover07]

Are you convinced?

Yes.

 

[two sheds]

I'd be interested to see how they calculate this:

A third recent book on war, The Human Security Report, shows average annual battle deaths have dropped from 10,000 per conflict in the 1950s to less than 1,000 now.

less than 1,000 deaths per conflict per year? How does that relate to a couple of hundred thousand plus dead in Iraq, just for one? Perhaps they aren't counting unimportant people.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Victories are sometimes achieved. What are the conclusions as to how we should react to this? "Keep on campaigning and fighting so that things get even better" or "don't worry so much now, it's not so bad any more"?

 

[SaskiaJayne]

Everybodies world is different, I guess the Libyans would say their world is getting better after yrs of it being bad & months of it being really bad, whereas we might moan its getting worse as some of us are getting worse off, but overall, I suppose the world is getting better in the ways described in the link. At the moment anyway.

 

[LLETSA]

Sound like the kinds of books that come out just before a huge messy war.

And prove that some clever, well-educated people can have a frighteningly childish view of the world.

 

[DotCommunist]

Everybodies world is different, I guess the Libyans would say their world is getting better after yrs of it being bad & months of it being really bad, whereas we might moan its getting worse as some of us are getting worse off, but overall, I suppose the world is getting better in the ways described in the link. At the moment anyway.

except for all those black ones who are up shit creek without a nato issue paddle

 

[SaskiaJayne]

except for all those black ones who are up shit creek without a nato issue paddle

This is true, we are never going to waste missiles at £900k a throw to free the people of Zimbabwe are we?

 

[rover07]

Thats true Mugabe's ZANU party spent 10 YEARS fighting for freedom with no help from the West.

 

[goldenecitrone]

Am reading the Pinker book now. Lots of graphs and research showing how homicide rates have plummeted in different societies around the world, and hypothesizing why some societies are still considerably more violent than others. Very interesting.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

This is true, we are never going to waste missiles at £900k a throw to free the people of Zimbabwe are we?

I think he's on about both black Libyans and migrant workers from other countries getting abused, lynched or massacred by the plucky freedom fighters.

 

[JimW]

Pinker's a notorious bender of the facts to his ideology. John Gray had a review of the latest book which wasn't a spectacular take-down, but he makes the point that Pinker blithely ignores how much of the violence has been exported from the capitalist core to the periphery, including but not just in the proxy wars. This review of an earlier book really sets out how Pinker goes about his business: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/11/25/021125crbo_books

 

[goldenecitrone]

Pinker's a notorious bender of the facts to his ideology. John Gray had a review of the latest book which wasn't a spectacular take-down, but he makes the point that Pinker blithely ignores how much of the violence has been exported from the capitalist core to the periphery, including but not just in the proxy wars. This review of an earlier book really sets out how Pinker goes about his business: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/11/25/021125crbo_books

What ideology does he hold, Jim? From the first 100 pages I've read he's trying to work out why North America has a much higher homicide rate than western Europe.

 

[elbows]

And did he get anywhere with figuring that out? If not then that gives some clues as to what positions are palatable to him and what is unthinkable to him.

 

[goldenecitrone]

And did he get anywhere with figuring that out? If not then that gives some clues as to what positions are palatable to him and what is unthinkable to him.

He has several hypotheses, one of which is the influx of Scottish and Irish herders in the nineteenth century.

 

[JimW]

What ideology does he hold, Jim? From the first 100 pages I've read he's trying to work out why North America has a much higher homicide rate than western Europe.

You get a sense from this para in that New Yorker piece:

Pinker's idea is that it [biology] explains much more than some people—he calls these people "intellectuals"—think it does, and that the failure, or refusal, to acknowledge this has led to many regrettable things, including the French Revolution, modern architecture, and the crimes of Josef Stalin. Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this.

He's a relentless justifier of inequality and the way things are because it's all pre-programmed, which becomes a default neoliberal position:

In general, the views that Pinker derives from "the new sciences of human nature" are mainstream Clinton-era views: incarceration is regrettable but necessary; sexism is unacceptable, but men and women will always have different attitudes toward sex; dialogue is preferable to threats of force in defusing ethnic and nationalist conflicts; most group stereotypes are roughly correct, but we should never judge an individual by group stereotypes; rectitude is all very well, but "noble guys tend to finish last"; and so on.

ETA: By which, I'm not saying don't read him, but you have to be wary of the social claims he makes and wants to give primacy to based on some idea that they're hard-wired, when as often as not it's actually the limits of his understanding and a bit of back-projection.

 

[SaskiaJayne]

I think he's on about both black Libyans and migrant workers from other countries getting abused, lynched or massacred by the plucky freedom fighters.

Possibly, but its always struck me how despotic regimes are never overthrown by UK/US except for reasons of self interest, mainly oil.

 

[ska invita]

Short thing with Pinker here:

Q.CAN YOU DISTIL THE ARGUMENT OF YOUR NEW BOOK?
A.Violence has declined, on many scales of time and magnitude, with reductions unfolding over periods stretching from millennia down to just a few years. That’s true for everything from warfare and genocide to our treatment of children and animals.

What is some of the evidence for such a grand claim?

Before states emerged, constant tribal raiding and feuding led to death tolls from violence that averaged about 15 per cent, many times higher than today even aggregating over the twentieth century with all its wars and genocides.

The second notable development is the transition of everyday life from the Middle Ages to the present, which saw about a 35-fold reduction in murders.

Thirdly, humanitarian reforms about the time of the enlightenment ended many barbaric practices, such as torture and mutilation as a form of criminal punishment. In fifteenth-century France, a popular form of entertainment was hoisting a cat in a sling on a stage and watching it howl as it was burned to death. People would bring out the whole family to watch public executions, which were often acts of prolonged torture.

Another development, which people take for granted but military historians are astonished by, is the disappearance of great power war and war between developed countries since the end of World War Two. Now the remnants of war are in the poorer parts of the world and the rich countries seem to have thought better of it.

Of course, it wouldn’t be progress if wars had only ceased in rich countries, but in the last twenty years rates of war all over the world have plummeted. The number of civil wars and the death toll from civil wars are at an all-time postwar low.

Finally, there’s the reduction of violence on smaller scales. In America, a century ago we had 150 lynchings a year; now it’s zero. Domestic violence has come down, rape is down, smacking children is down in most of the western world. Treatment of lab animals is far more humane than when I was a student.

more

 

[butchersapron]

Charles Kenny is basically a NGO-imperialist. Improvements are due to soft neo-liberalism (which he calls liberty and democracy) rather then far greater improvements being possible but being held back by that same neo-liberalism.

 

[JimW]

The odd thing with this reduction in violence, particularly interpersonal, is I'm sure that's broadly true, but given that it appears to be an entirely social and political phenomenon (which also explains the limits of the phenomenon), I wonder where that leaves evolutionary psychology? Does he set out any theory in the book? Rapid evolution or something? I think he gets my goat because on the one hand it seems obvious that there are biological imperatives and limits to what being human is or can be, but the interpretation I've seen so far from ev. psychologists seems wooden-headed and superficial. Maybe I've just not read enough.

 

[gosub]

the calm before the storm

 

[Fruitloop]

Pinker's a notorious bender of the facts to his ideology. John Gray had a review of the latest book which wasn't a spectacular take-down, but he makes the point that Pinker blithely ignores how much of the violence has been exported from the capitalist core to the periphery, including but not just in the proxy wars. This review of an earlier book really sets out how Pinker goes about his business: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/11/25/021125crbo_books

That was a pretty awful review tbh. Quite a dishonest, self-serving misreading of what Pinker is saying. Pinker is well aware that in some respects violence has been shifted around, but the core fact is that in many crucial respects is has indeed declined, and on that central fact- the departure point for Pinker's whole effort - Gray fails to land a single blow.

 

[elbows]

This is probably the wrong decade to be publishing these sorts of books, we shall see.

 

[Brubricker]

The notion that ethics are statistically documentable is absurd on its face. I seem to remember the period of 1848-1914 being lauded in similar terms. We all know how that one wound up.

 

[yield]

Sound like the kinds of books that come out just before a huge messy war.

The notion that ethics are statistically documentable is absurd on its face. I seem to remember the period of 1848-1914 being lauded in similar terms. We all know how that one wound up.

Yeah as Random said it smacks off... is it hubris? Sincerely I'm worried.
Things are changing at a frantic pace.