BernardyMeghan_Pinker, Chapters 1-3 Quiz

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Meghan Bernardy HST 345 Pinker, Chapters 1-3 Quiz (2012 E.D) February 12, 2024 1. What is the primary lesson that Pinker hopes to teach based on his very broad survey of attitudes toward violence in previous eras? The main message is that, long-term, there is a tendency toward greater peace and less violence, even though conflicts and violent episodes still occur in today's world. (Pinker, p. 30) 2. What was the “Pacification Process”? This is what Pinker refers to as the change from the disorderly hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies to the first agricultural civilizations with organized governments and cities, which seemed to have begun around 5,000 years ago. As civilizations developed, they created increasingly powerful, centralized governmental structures, which played a key role in reducing violence by controlling the use of force within the law. (Pinker, p.35-36) 3. When did the ‘Pacification Process begin? The Pacification Process began around 5,000 years ago. (Pinker, p. xxiv) 4. Is “pacification” always brought about through peaceful activity and intent? No. By lowering violence and instituting social and political order, "pacification" refers to the pacification of societies. Not all of these qualities are inherently peaceful or conflict-free, despite the fact that it is stressed that their respective roles contribute to preventing violence. (Pinker, p. 36) On page 58, Pinker details that “this gives us a more sinister sense of the word pacification: not just the bringing about of peace but the imposition of absolute control by a coercive government.” (Pinker, p. 58) 5. How does Dawkins description of humans as survival machines’ help explain our use of violence in the past? In summary, Dawkins argues that genetic variables, in contrast to those of species or people, impact natural selection. "Survival machines callously exploit other survival machines." (Pinker, p. 32). According to Pinker (p. 32–33), creatures are chosen to use violence when the advantages exceed the disadvantages. It is believed that if you become violent, you belong to a species where violence has developed in other individuals of the same species. Based on Dawkins' theory that humans are "survival machines," it is possible that our ancestors used violence to battle for resources and to ensure the success of their reproductive efforts.

6. According to Thomas Hobbes, what are the three motivations for humanity’s use of violence? “First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.” (Hobbes, p. 33). 7. How does a “Leviathan” soften (mitigate) or eliminate Hobbesian motives for using violence? Hobbesian incentives for violence are lessened or eliminated when a Leviathan establishes a system of social order and administration that provides security, resolves conflicts amicably, and discourages violent behavior. (Pinker, p. 54-55) 8. What do homicide rates in terms of percentage of the overall population suggest about the “peacefulness” of past or present societies that live close to a state of nature, like tribal societies, compared to modern nation states like the USA or even Nazi Germany? “So by this measure too, states are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent ones." With the development of social norms and governance structures, societies have made progress in reducing violence compared to the past use of greater levels of violence. (Pinker, p. 52) 9. What are the two or three critical components to the development of a ‘civilizing process’ in any society? “Urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer.” (Pinker, p. 64) 10. Does the “civilizing process" have a true beginning point in history? No. It does not have a true beginning. “He (Elias) proposed that over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration.” (Pinker, p. 72) 11. According to Pinker, Elias’ idea of a ‘Civilizing Process’ provides the most plausible explanation for what historical trend? It explains the decline in several violent crime categories in England, the Northeastern and Southeast regions of the United States, and the Southeast. It also brings up racial violence. (Pinker, p. 94-104) 12. What pattern of involvement in murder noticeably changed as homicide rates declined?

“When homicides among African Americans skyrocketed, going from three times the white rate in New York in the 1850s to almost thirteen times the white rate a century later, communities of lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honor (sometimes called ‘the code of the streets’’) to defend their interests rather than calling in the law." (Pinker, p. 97-98) 13. What patterns of murder remained constant even as rates of homicide dropped so dramatically between 1400 and 2000 CE? “The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men. Not only are males the more competitive sex in most mammalian species, but with Homo sapiens, a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood.” (Pinker, p. 104–105) 14. Why does the history of Holland’s homicide rate and its governmental development complicate Elias’ idea about the rise of self-restraint and civility in a given society? It's possible that other types of violence are not completely represented in historical homicide statistics, which provides us with an incomplete picture of how violence has changed across society. Acting as though one is alone and acting as though one is in the company of others involve different behaviors that we refer to as self-control, refinement, and attention. Elias' concept of a civilizing process offers the most likely explanation for this difference. (Pinker, p. 64-65) 15. According to Pinker, does the Leviathan have to be a brute force to promote civility, or is there something more important than the ability of the Leviathan to crush crime? Although the Leviathan's capacity for force is essential, it also depends on factors like legitimacy, social standards, economic advancement, and the spread of ideas. The Leviathan needs to be able to control aggression and use force to enforce morality, but it also needs to possess the knowledge and means to take the place of a legal system that is motivated by anything other than force, like honor or money. “Not only do the Leviathan’s incentives make commerce more attractive, but commerce makes the job of the Leviathan easier.” (Pinker, p. 77). “A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses." (Pinker, p. 79) 16. According to Pinker, what are the two ‘exceptions that prove the rule [the title = the presence of a civilizing process]’ in modern history? The exceptions to this standard are Germany during World War II and the absence of durable, centralized governments throughout Europe. (Pinker, P. 78–79)

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17. Why do lower classes resort to violence at higher rates in modern western societies? “This is not surprising, as it first appears, since criminologists have long known that unemployment rates don't correlate well with rates of violent crime. Indeed, in the three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the American homicide rate fell by another 14 percent." “For example, in unequal societies, poor neighborhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.” (Pinker, p. 119) 18. Does Pinker contend that the use of violence by lower socio-economic class individuals is due to their economic struggles? “The problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country, possibly because the real cause of the differences is not inequality per se but stable features of a state's governance or culture that affect both inequality and violence.” (Pinker, p.119) “For example, in unequal societies, poor neighborhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.” (Pinker, p. 119) 19. Why is it foolish to attribute lower-class use of violence to a lack of morality’? Their financial and economic problems have nothing to do with their morality, but with the lack of protection given to these communities by the government. (Pinker, p. 119) 20. Does the high rate of homicide in the United States, compared to every other modern westernized country, disprove Elias’ theory? It does not entirely ignore historical patterns or the notion of the civilizing process. (Pinker, p. 116–118). 21. Why are there greater levels of violence in the southern United States than in other regions? “The most sweeping answer is that the civilizing mission of the government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it did the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe." (Pinker, p. 98–99) 22. Is the high homicide rate in the USA entirely attributable to ‘gun-happy’ Americans? "It's not just that America is gun-happy. Even if you subtract all the killings with fire and arms and count only the ones with rope, knives, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, and so on, Americans commit murders at a higher rate than Europeans." (Pinker, p. 92)

23. Was the violence of the ‘wild west’ [of the USA] tamed by gun-slinging sheriffs alone, or were other forces as or more important? If so, what forces? “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 Pinker-tons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.” (Pinker, p. 99). “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." 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." (Pinker, p. 99). “Self-help justice depends on the credibility of one's prowess and resolve, and to this day, the American South is marked by an obsession with credible deterrence, otherwise known as a culture of honor. The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment. The psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen have shown that this mindset continues to pervade southern laws, politics, and attitudes. Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, they found, only in those sparked by quarrels” (Pinker, p. 99). 24. Can the crime surge in the 1960s and 1970s be explained by socio-economic variables, and if not, what explains the surge? "The decade was a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic, racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs, not to mention medical advances that made victims more likely to survive being shot or knifed." (Pinker, p. 108) 25. Does Pinker agree with the ‘abortion’ theory of the ‘Freakonomics’ authors, Levitt and Donohue? Why or why not? “For example, he showed that the handful of states that legalized abortion before 1973 were the first to see their crime rates go down. But these statistics compare the two ends of a long, hypothetical, and tenuous casual chain—the availability of legal abortion as the first link and the decline in crime two decades later as the last—and ignore all the links in between.” (Pinker, p. 120) 26. Does the health of the economy and the rate of unemployment explain violent crime rates in the modern West?

Yes. “A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her children... When they held constant all the cavorts that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter.” (Pinker, p. 106) 27. When did crime rates begin to truly plummet after their shocking climb through the 1960s and 1970s? "In 1992, a strange thing happened. The homicide rate went down by almost 10 percent from the year before, and it continued to sink for another seven years, hitting 5.7 in 1999, the lowest it had been since 1966." (Pinker, p. 116) 28. What explains the plummet in crime rates? “Nonetheless, I think two overarching explanations are plausible. The first is that the Leviathan got bigger, smarter, and more effective. The second is that the Civilizing Process, which the counterculture had tried to reverse in the 1960s, was restored to its forward direction. Indeed, it seems to have entered a new phase.” (Pinker, p. 121) 29. Does mass incarceration really explain the decline in crime, which began in 1990? Yes. “Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the decline of crime, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts. Imprisonment physically removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets,incapacitating them and subtracting the crimes they would have committed from the statistics.” (Pinker, p.122)

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