The world is a veritable cornucopia of riches for those of us professing the pessimists’ faith. Nary a day goes by without a thousand new proofs that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. After all, since the very emergence of our species — somewhere between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago, if you’re a scientist, or 6,000 years if you’re a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination — humans have been in conflict with each other and have chosen (or have evolved) to resolve many such conflicts violently. Think William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the pessimists’ bible. Think Stephen Harper’s egregious crime legislation.
It’s true there are those naïve Micawbers who assiduously hunt for hope wherever it might be found, as Harvard-MIT professor Stephen Pinker does in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. Taking the bullish phrase from the final line of Lincoln’s first inaugural address, the subtitle gives away the plot. Now Prof. Pinker is one of my cherished gurus, whose book The Language Instinct completely altered my ideas about grammar and communication and whose curly hair I would kill for. But 800 pages documenting the decline in our own time of violence? Why, it’s positively uplifting.
The book’s title may also be unfortunate, since things didn’t actually work out so well for Lincoln and the United States. The president, newly elected, gave his address on March 4, 1861. The country was on the verge of war. Caring vastly more about the integrity of the union than about slavery, Lincoln implored the better angels of Americans’ nature to keep the union of the states strong. The Civil War began exactly five weeks later. The demons of Americans’ nature were unleashed in full fury.
It was the deadliest and perhaps most savage battle in American history. The death toll was far greater than that for the First and Second World Wars plus Vietnam combined. Battling to preserve slavery, nearly 30 per cent of all southern white males aged 18 to 40 were killed. The southern secessionists surrendered on April 9, 1865. On April 14, Lincoln was assassinated in an attempt to prevent surrender and keep slavery intact. Formal slavery ended, but de facto slavery and apartheid became the rule throughout the U.S. South for the next century.
Pessimists of the world, rejoice — those with better natures were few and far between.
But say (reluctantly) that Prof. Pinker is right, as his awesome 100 pages of footnotes seems to indicate. Despite the gory headlines, the world apparently is a safer place today than it once was.
But to that I say, so what? It doesn’t help any of those around the world helplessly caught up in violent circumstances that they can barely comprehend, even if there may be fewer of them. And it doesn’t have the slightest influence on the policies of governments or the efforts of arms manufacturers and their lobbyists.
Look at Canada, Stephen Pinker’s birthplace, as it happens. We happen to be solid evidence for his argument. Crime is lower and the country is safer today than it’s been for decades, which has no effect whatsoever on the government’s unforgiving crime policies. In fact much of the kind of data on which Prof. Pinker relies has been outlawed in Stephen Harper’s Canada, where reality is whatever the government says it is. So countless Canadians who commit minor crimes will be jailed, disproportionately from aboriginal communities, their better angels will be kicked out of them, and they will return one day to society as hardened criminals truly given to violence.
Or look, above all, at Prof. Pinker’s own adopted country. Having given us an anguished Lincoln, he might want to try next an anxious Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower. Exactly 100 years after Lincoln’s “angel” address, Ike, a Republican and a military man, delivered his own farewell message after eight years as president. Largely forgotten today and tragically ignored from the get-go, Ike’s speech was arguably the most significant presidential address in American history, doubly shocking given its conservative source. Ike warned of the emergence in the United States of a vast, mighty and insatiable military-political-industrial-complex with “unwarranted influence on government” that could “endanger our liberties and democratic processes.”
Ike’s potential homegrown menace has long since ceased to be hypothetical. Forget Prof. Pinker’s more secure world. Forget the absence of an enemy like the Soviet Union. Forget the absence of any competing armies. Forget totally the rational route — drastically slashing the American armed forces and their billion-dollar toys. The Pentagon, the gargantuan defence industry and its countless suppliers (including an army of former generals), members of Congress, the ubiquitous lobbying industry (including packs of former politicians), the armchair ideological warriors always prepared to sacrifice others for their beliefs — nothing gets in their way.
As renowned American diplomat George Kennan wrote years ago: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.” Why not the Muslim world?
In first-year university, I was taught in Economics 101 that we couldn’t have both guns and butter. Ike agreed. “Every gun that is made is a theft from those who hunger,” according to this most establishment of men. Imagine what he’d say today, under yet another American president who presides over a tottering hegemon, when America’s military budget approaches $1-trillion, which equals:
a) about as much as the rest of the world’s military budgets combined;
b) 27.4 per cent of all U.S. federal spending;
c) twice what it was in the decade before 9/11;
d) far more than it was in the days of the Cold War rivalry with the USSR;
e) not nearly enough for the Republican Party, despite their crocodile tears about the budget deficit;
f) more than enough for a new generation of ultra-sophisticated unmanned drones that can kill any Muslim the Americans choose to target in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia or Kenya or Mali or Libya or Yemen, including large numbers of unlucky civilians, without fearing a single American casualty or confronting tiresome issues related to international law.
A 2009 Brookings Institution report estimated that U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan had killed 10 civilians on average for every militant. President Barack Obama simply adores them — the drones I mean, not the hapless civilians.
Forget Prof. Pinker’s heroic attempt at optimism. Our species has a long way to go — maybe another 6,000 years — before serious pessimists have to re-think basic premises. Just watch what happens to Canada’s prisons. But don’t look for too many angels.
This article was first published in The Globe and Mail.
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