Atheistically Speaking Book Club discussion

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

Chapter 3: The Civilizing Process

This chapter has a lot of controversial topics. I'm really interested to see what everyone thinks of them.

The part about honor culture really stuck with me since the first time I read the book. I was fascinated by the study with the job inquirer admitting to murder, and the study where southern students were insulted. If this theory is true, it's amazing that such an outdated cultural relic can persist for so long.

I really wish he would have gone into why women are so much less violent than men before explaining how women decreased the violence in the west by marrying the men and closing the saloons. I was also really interested in his explanations for the increase in violence in the 60's, but I don't know that it was fully explained.

Near the end of the chapter, Pinker argues against the Freakonomics theory for the crime decline in the 90s. Has anyone else read that book? Even when I read this book the first time, it had been too long since I read Freakonomics to tell how thorough the criticisms were.

I'm also wondering what everyone thinks of this theory, especially with all of the confederate flag controversy lately. I think it does a pretty good job explaining American attitudes, but I would have liked to see America compared to other nations that have similar histories. Maybe we're unique as one of the first democracies.

Why has the South had such a long history of violence? The most sweeping answer is that the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe. The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early” to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms—which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual. This power sharing, historians have noted, has always been sacred in the South. As Eric Monkkonen puts it, in the 19th century “the South had a deliberately weak state, eschewing things such as penitentiaries in favor of local, personal violence.”86 Homicides were treated lightly if the killing was deemed “reasonable,” and “most killings . . . in the rural South were reasonable, in the sense that the victim had not done everything possible to escape from the killer, that the killing resulted from a personal dispute, or because the killer and victim were the kinds of people who kill each other.”

Due to mailing issues I got my copy just last wendesday. Already at page 100 though. Fascinating read this is. It once more makes me realize how priviliged we are to live in the West and in this Age. This books confirms that northen West Europe is a very, very safe place to live indeed.
So often people around here (The Netherlands) complain about all kinds of trivia and sometimes I respond simply by: name me a country or place where it is better....
Doesn't mean that the assault in France just yesterday wasn't horrible! But doesn't the fact that we are so horrified by it subscribes the fact that such events are so rare?

Did anyone listen to the latest episode of Waking Up or Common Sense with Sam Harris and Dan Carlin? They talk a lot about the threats of violence we face now compared to the past, the difference between honor cultures and religions, and they specifically reference this book. It's an interesting discussion.

Just about to listen to it today! Can't wait.

Just about to listen to it today! Can't wait.

I enjoyed Better Angels. Read it a few years ago. Loved the idea that violence is falling. Shermer's book covers the same concept. Better Angels pushed me to The Anthropologist & the Atheist.

Randy wrote: "I enjoyed Better Angels. Read it a few years ago. Loved the idea that violence is falling. Shermer's book covers the same concept. Better Angels pushed me to The Anthropologist & the Atheist."

Which Shermer book are you talking about? Is it The Moral Arc? I haven't read it, but from the subtitle it sounds like it disagrees with Better Angels. I don't think Pinker really gives science as a cause for declining violence, and instead he has to spend quite a bit of time explaining away the large death tolls caused by new destructive technologies in the past century.

What is "The Anthropologist & the Atheist"? I can't find anything about it.

Even if you don't re-read Better Angels with us, feel free to join the discussion on the chapters as we go through them!

Never mind, the argument for science as an explanation for the decline of violence is at the end of chapter 4. I forgot about it.

Sorry, my bad! Yeah Shermer's Moral Arc and the book I was talking about was The Bonobo & the Atheist! Just downloaded Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley.

Lots of cool charts, graphs and theories in this chapter. While understanding that there are always going to be questions with correlation and causation in subjects like this I was okay with most of the theories put forth to explain the drops in violence (homicide). A couple of things did stick out.

The theory of the Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias proposed two exogenous triggers to explain the decline in violence in medieval Western Europe. The second trigger he proposed was an economic revolution, where medieval economies slowly changed from a zero sum game to a positive sum game.

"Positive-sum games also change the incentives for violence. If you're trading favors or surpluses with someone, your trading partner becomes more valuable to you alive than dead. pg 76"

If we accept this, and Singer does, then I think that this is also a good place to start as an explanation for the difference in violence in socioeconomic classes. The higher socioeconomic classes benefit much more. Singer went a different way.

"The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call "self-help". pg 83"

I don't have a problem with the justice system theory, just that it was presented as the main reason.

I also did not like the last part of the chapter that began with DECIVILIZATION IN THE 1960s. That part felt a little disjointed and it seemed like explanations were being thrown against the wall to see if any would stick.

Figure 3-11 (pg 93) was kinda funny. Take out a few outliers like CA and some New England states and those homicidal states skew conservative and highly religious.

It's funny, I was listening to Penn's Sunday School, and he states that people have been saying for 15,000 years that the world has been getting worse, but for 15,000 years, it's been getting better!