Atheistically Speaking Book Club discussion

This is the discussion thread for the first part (of eight) for The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Preface
Chapter 1: A Foreign Country
Chapter 2: The Pacification Process

I read this book three years ago, and I liked it a lot, but it was a tough read. I haven't decided yet if I will read through it again with the group or just skim through to refresh my memory.

What are your thoughts on the book or the thesis before you read? What have you heard about it, and why are you interested in reading it?

I'd already read through chapter 6 a few months ago and then kind of lost motivation, and the main message that's stuck with me is that secularism and humanism have done far more to make the world a kinder, more peaceful, more moral place than religion ever did. I love that there's all sorts of real-world data to counter the stupid argument that religion makes people and societies more moral. I'm really excited to pick this back up and hear what other people have to say as well!

And a great appetizer: Steven talking on this on TED:

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pink...

(I'll try to do both books. School year is ending in a few, so I got some more time on my hands....)

I liked the look in the first chapter at ancient books like the Iliad and the Bible as a way to see what civilizations in the past thought was acceptable violence. While at least the majority of these books are fiction, we can still get an idea about the people who wrote it.

On crucifixion:
"Though I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I find it impossible to put myself in the minds of the ancients who devised this orgy of sadism. Even if I had custody of Hitler and could mete out the desert of my choice, it would not occur to me to inflict a torture like that on him. I could not avoid wincing in sympathy, would not want to become the kind of person who could indulge in such cruelty, and could see no point in adding to the world’s reservoir of suffering without a commensurate benefit.
...
The crucifixion of Jesus, of course, was never treated lightly. The cross became the symbol of a movement that spread through the ancient world, was adopted by the Roman Empire, and two millennia later remains the world’s most recognizable symbol. The dreadful death it calls to mind must have made it an especially potent meme. But let’s step outside our familiarity with Christianity and ponder the mindset that tried to make sense of the crucifixion. By today’s sensibilities, it’s more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution. (Imagine that the logo of a Holocaust museum was a shower nozzle, or that survivors of the Rwandan genocide formed a religion around the symbol of a machete.) More to the point, what was the lesson that the first Christians drew from the crucifixion? Today such a barbarity might galvanize people into opposing brutal regimes, or demanding that such torture never again be inflicted on a living creature. But those weren’t the lessons the early Christians drew at all. No, the execution of Jesus is The Good News, a necessary step in the most wonderful episode in history. In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) than to allow an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity.
According to this way of thinking, death by torture is not an unthinkable horror; it has a bright side. It is a route to salvation, a part of the divine plan. Like Jesus, the early Christian saints found a place next to God by being tortured to death in ingenious ways. For more than a millennium, Christian martyrologies described these torments with pornographic relish.
...
The early Christians also extolled torture as just deserts for the sinful. Most people have heard of the seven deadly sins, standardized by Pope Gregory I in 590 CE. Fewer people know about the punishment in hell that was reserved for those who commit them:

Pride: Broken on the wheel
Envy: Put in freezing water
Gluttony: Force-fed rats, toads, and snakes
Lust: Smothered in fire and brimstone
Anger: Dismembered alive
Greed: Put in cauldrons of boiling oil
Sloth: Thrown in snake pits

The duration of these sentences, of course, was infinite."

What happens to the vast majority of us who commit almost all of these "sins"? Do we get one punishment for the first eternity and another for the next?

It really is strange though to think of what life must have been like in the past. In the beginning of chapter 3 (I accidentally read ahead a little) there are a few pictures of everyday life in medieval Europe. I can't imagine walking past things like this every day. People must have lived with so much more fear and stress. (Though the flying horse cropped out of the images in the book lightens the scene a bit.)

"The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.1 No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions."

I want to be an informed citizen but the news is all too often depressing, violent, hyperbolized and it distorts reality. If anybody has any advice or sources of information that are accurate and realistic, I would love to know about them.


"Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles."

The section outlining all the violent acts in the Old Testament should be REQUIRED reading for anyone who looks to the bible for moral guidance.


"As we shall see in chapter 8, a major design feature in human nature, self-serving biases, can make each side believe that its own violence was an act of justified retaliation while the other’s was an act of unprovoked aggression."

Unfortunately this is why violence will persist to some degree. Sociopathic violence is rare, it's the violence done by those who are sure it's justifed or it's preventative that continues.

Jay wrote: "I want to be an informed citizen but the news is all too often depressing, violent, hyperbolized and it distorts reality. If anybody has any advice or sources of information that are accurate and realistic, I would love to know about them."

Unfortunately, I don't think there will ever be a news source that is more realistic, just because good news usually isn't interesting or useful. We could be reporting on every church service that didn't end in a mass killing last week, but who cares? I think later in this book Pinker writes about one of the biggest criticisms he got about his thesis: don't tell people violence is decreasing, because if they don't think it's a problem they won't work to decrease it further. I don't agree with that criticism, but I think it's important to continue to focus on the violence in our world and how to work to eliminate it.

Practically though, I get my main news from shorter news summaries rather than long news shows. I personally use NPR and BBC World news summaries. With the summaries, I stay informed and can decide what stories I want to read more about, but I don't have to be subjected to hours of witness reports or anything that's just filling time and adding drama.

I have never read a Steven Pinker book so I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy this book. No problems so far as I breezed through the preface and Chapter 1 in one sitting and two days later I knocked out Chapter 2. I am really enjoying it so far.

Chapter 1 is for the most part an historical look at violence through literature and written history. As mentioned in earlier comments the sections on the Hebrew Bible and on the early Christians and their love of torture are quite entertaining. Then there are the medieval knights. And then Grimm's Fairy Tales. And then Mother Goose. And then the coffee ad.

Chapter 2 starts with a discussion of the logic/reasons for violence and why we should expect violence to decrease with the introduction of the state. Pinker compares the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and uses chimp studies to try to show what violence might have been like in early humans. The rest of the chapter is a comparison of violence in hunter-gatherer societies through early states and modern states. While this chapter was not as 'fun' as the first one I found it much more interesting. Now I want to read Leviathan. I am looking forward to Chapter 3 and the controversial topics that Danielle mentioned.