I am going to speak about what may the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Violence has declined by dramatic degrees all over the world in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals.

STEVIN PINKER is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology; Harvard University. Author, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined  (forthcoming, October 6th).

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

photo credit: Max Gerber

In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature".  In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelation.

For publication schedule and details, go to Edge Master Class 2011: The Science of Human Nature.

A History of Violence

STEVEN PINKER: Believe it or not—and I know most people do not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. The decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to convince you that it's a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.

I'm going to present six major historical declines of violence; in each case, cite their immediate causes in terms of what historians have told us are the likely historical antecedents in that era; and then speculate on their ultimate causes, in terms of general historical forces acting on human nature.

The first major decline of violence I call the "Pacification Process." Until about five thousand years ago, humans lived in anarchy without central government. What was life like in this state of nature? This is a question that thinkers have speculated on for centuries, most prominently Hobbs, who famously said that in a state of nature "the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." A century later he was countered by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who says, "Nothing could be more gentle than man in his primitive state."

In reality, both of these gentlemen were talking through their hats:  They had no idea what life was like in a state of nature. But today we can do better, because there are two sources of evidence of what rates of violence were like in pre-state societies.

One is forensic archaeology. You can think of it as "CSI Paleolithic". What proportion of prehistoric skeletons have signs of violent trauma, such as bashed-in skulls, decapitated skeletons, femurs with bronze arrowheads embedded in them, and mummies found with ropes around their necks?

There are 20 archaeological samples that I know of for which these analyses have been done. I've plotted here the percentage of deaths due to violent trauma. They range as high as 60 percent, and the average is a little bit more than 15 percent.

Let’s compare that rate with those of modern states, and let's stack the deck against modernity by picking some of the most violent eras that we can think of. This is the United States and Europe in the 20th century. This is the entire world in the 20th century—and I've thrown in not only the wars, but also the genocides and the manmade famines. It's about three percent, compared to the 15 percent rate in pre-state societies. And here is the world in the first decade of the 21st century. The bar in the graph would be less than a pixel, about a three one-hundredths of one percent.

Sing, O Muse, of my wanderings at Google, where I encountered strange ideas, heros and demigods, at Sci Foo 2011.  
— Frank Wilczek, Recipient, Nobel Prize in Physics (2004)

The sixth annual Science Foo Camp (Sci Foo) was held August 12-14 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, organized and sponsored by the interesting consortium of Nature, Google, and O'Reilly Media. "Foo" Camp is an idea originated by Tim O'Reilly. It stands for "Friends of O'Reilly." At Sci Foo, about 200 leading scientists, technologists, writers, and other thought-leaders gather for a weekend of unbridled discussion, demonstration, and debate. For a sense of what goes on, check out previous Edge reports: Sci Foo—2007 by George Dyson,  A Slice of Sci Foo—2008 by Frank Wilczek, Sci Foo 2009 and Sci Foo Photo Album—2009.  

Sci Foo is different from all the other sci-tech-digerati conferences that have proliferated. In terms of signal to noise ratio for a conference, it's the cleanest signal you can find: everybody you meet, look at, talk to, listen to, is someone you want to know, someone you should know. It's unique in that regard, and it's the best couple of days of the year for most of the people that are fortunate enough to be invited to attend. There's a spirit, an energy, and ebulliance from all concerned about the scientific enterprise.

So who are these characters? I was able to corral a few dozen of them and ask them to ...

"Ask the question you are asking yourself. You have one minute."

Google's Open Sourcerer and Sci-Foo co-organizer, Chris Dibona and 30 other Sci-Foo attendees answer.

Martin Rees, President Emeritus, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; Author, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival ; Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Vittorio Bo,Director, Festival Della Scienzia, Genova; Nicholas Pritzker, Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Hyatt Development Corporation; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; Project Orion;Larry Brilliant, President of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund and Senior Adviser to Jeff Skoll; Jonathan Schooler, Professor of Psychology, University of California Santa Barbra; Juan Enriquez, CEO, Biotechonomy; was Founding Director, Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project; Author,The Unti, States of America; Philip Campbell, Editor-in Chief, Nature; Stewart Brand, Founder, The Whole Earth Catalog; Cofounder, Chairman, The Long Now Foundation; Author, Whole Earth Discipline ; Frank Wilczek. Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics, MIT; Recipient, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004; Author, The Lightness of Being;Cat Allman, Google’s open source Programs Office, Co-Organizer of SciFoo; Jennifer Jacquet, Postdoctoral Researcher, Fisheries Centre/Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia;Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief, Scientific American; Chris Dibona, Open Source and Public Sector, Google; Alex O. Holcombe, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney; Australian Research Council Future Fellow; Linda Stone, Hi-Tech Industry Consultant; Former Executive at Apple Computer and Microsoft Corporation ; Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute; Charles Seife, Professor of Journalism, New York University; formerly journalist, Science magazine; Author, Proofiness ; Michael Vassar,President, Singularity Institute; David Pizarro, Psychologist, Cornell University; Researcher in Moral Judgment;Debbie Cachra, Associate Professor of Materials Science, Franklin W Olin College of Engineering; Tim O'Reilly,Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc.; Dan Ariely, Center for advanced hindsight, Duke University; James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University; Author, The Upside of Irrationality; Saul Griffith, Chief Scientist, Other Lab; Manu Prakash, Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, Stanford ; Lisa Randall, Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Warped Passages; Alison Gopnik, Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author,The Philosophical Baby ; Eric Weinstein, Mathematician and Economist; Principal, Natron Group; Esther Dyson, Catalyst, Information Technology Startups, EDventure Holdings; Former Chariman,Electronic Frontier Foundation and ICANN; Author: Release 2.1; Max Tegmark, Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute; Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time; Jennifer Ouellette, Science Writer.

NYU researcher Jennifer Jacquet studies cooperation and the tragedy of the commons.

"If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?"

"I strongly urge you to read this truly epic interview with Jaron Lanier at Edge. ... It's an extraordinary interview, packed with insight and often grimly funny." Matt Zoller Seitz, Salon.com

"Fascinating conversation with Jaron Lanier, influential computer scientist. On economics of the Internet – implications of networked technology, destruction of middle class and dark side of new media". — Writing Worth Reading, The Browser.com

Introduction
by John Brockman

We used to think that information is power and that the personal computer enabled lives. But, according to Jaron Lanier, things changed about ten years ago. He cites Apple, Google, and Walmart as some of the reasons.

In a freewheeling hour-long conversation, Lanier touches on, and goes beyond the themes he launched in his influential 2006 Edge essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism." What he terms "The Local-Global Flip" might be better expressed as "The Lanier Effect". 

[57:52 minutes]