-Horkus

Bit of a quibble/clarification here: to the extent that “the State” is “inherently violent,” that’s because the state is created in response to violence, and to curcumstances that incite violence; and the state uses violence to establish an order that had not existed before. Generally (and I do mean generally), when previously independent tribes find themselves having to work together (i.e., to share land or resources or to fend off a common enemy), they’re forced to create and accept a new, trans-tribal form of government, and that government has to use force to impose a new order and stop the inter-tribal warfare that almost inevitably results from such forced closeness. The state uses violence to do its primary job because it does not (at least initially) have legitimacy in the eyes of people who still haven’t quite given up their original tribal loyalties.

One of the “green anarchist” types who “venerate” primitivism that Pinker excoriates actually agrees with Keeley mostly, but points out that HGS didn’t have bloody histories or newspapers or TV to make their world seem more violent than it is, so even a somewhat larger per capita combined war and murder death rate wouldn’t mean they’d experience society as violent – it might amount in practice to 1 or 2 murders every generation in a medium sized village, and that could mean a whole generation without a murder goes by.

Yet another g-a site (about “wilding” yourself) made another point that I left out — also pretty simple and obvious: violence and starvation are not the only ills they were subject to, another was potentially being enslaved – some of the violence is because they don’t WANT to be organized into a large empire or even nation and told what to do, so maybe violence is better than losing your freedom.

So even the venerators of primitives actually have less problems with this school than I would have thought.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/09/rational-optimist-or-scientific-racist/

Now as for Pinker’s argument, is he claiming that the introduction of the State, reduces violence? Because from where I’m standing, the State (and by extension, corporations) are inherently violent. One can defend their existence, but you shouldn’t ignore their violence.

In fact, you could say that modern society’s attitude to violence is more about “out of sight and out of mind”, than any reduction. After all, how many 9/11s have Iraq and Afghanistan experienced since 9/11?

Here’s an interesting graph from a British perspective – see how crime changed during the 20th century (chapter 6):

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf

Also, have you seen this:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money-%E2%80%93-notes-on-sex-

adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics.html

?

There certainly is an argument for variation in levels of violence in forager societies, but mixing homicide data from Enga, Yan, etc. with San and Efe does not make a useful data point for anything.

And, again, I suspect he’s using tine straight line telescope version of history (becuase he’s used that in the past and it is part of the evo. psych. approach). We stand here and look at great grand dad through a transit scope and notice that he was shorter. Therefore, as we go back in time everyone everywhere is ever shorter. Etc.