Steven Pinker of Harvard University wrote a book titled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. His premise is that, as knowledge has increased, man has become more enlightened and socially evolved in such a way that the world has become less violent. Vincent Torley requires only two well researched blog posts to put the lie to that nonsense. You can read them here and here. The blog posts are extremely well written and very, very interesting–definitely worth the read. That humans are somehow becoming less violent due to increased levels of knowledge and social understanding is a patently absurd.  After presenting and evaluating the salient statistics, here is Torley’s conclusion:

We are forced, then, to the conclusion that the 20th century was a uniquely violent era in history. The history of the 20th century completely explodes Pinker’s thesis that violence is becoming less common over the course of time. The only thing to be said in favor of the 20th century’s level of violence is that bad as it was, the Stone Age was even worse, without 15% of all deaths being due to violence.
There is, however, one routine form of violence which Pinker should have spent a lot more time discussing in his book: infanticide. It is the Abrahamic religions which deserve the credit for ridding most of the world of this scourge. In doing so, they saved the lives of literally billions of people. Secular humanism had nothing to do with it.

It is not only that Pinker is often wrong. His “scholarship” often takes a nasty turn. Here is Michael Egnor’s take on Pinker’s thoughts about medical ethics from an article he wrote for Evolution News and Views:

Which brings us to Steven Pinker, a professor of (evolutionary) psychology at Harvard, who has made a career out of using the popular press to point out the ugly implications of the current evolutionary materialist theory of the mind, and to champion those implications. As the evolutionary theories of the mind change hourly, Pinker has been prolific. His recent essay in The New Republic, “The Stupidity of Dignity,” is the clearest example I know of the materialist understanding of the mind applied to modern medical ethics. Pinker argues that our traditional understanding of human dignity, based as it is on several millennia of religious and philosophical insight, will have to be discarded in light of our new “evolutionary” understanding of human beings and of the human mind, for whom autonomy — the struggle for survival — is paramount. Pinker asserts that autonomy, not dignity, must be the basis for medical ethics, because dignity is antiquated “theocon” religious nonsense. Pinker fails to note that the autonomous are those who least need the protection afforded by medical ethics. It is precisely those who aren’t autonomous who most need protection based on dignity, and they need protection from those who are autonomous. The materialist understanding of man isn’t the basis for a new ethics. It’s the end of ethics.

Betty Blonde #279 – 08/12/2009
Betty Blonde #279
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