Obama: ‘The World Is Less Violent Than It Has Ever Been.’ He’s Right!

At a White House press event yesterday, President Barack Obama
dropped some real wisdom on the youts during
his answer to the last question from the crowd of Tumblr
users (starting at around 49 minutes): 

The truth of the matter is that for all the challenges we face,
all the problems that we have,…if you had to choose any moment to
be born in human history, not knowing what your position was going
to be, who you were going to be, you’d choose this time. The world
is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has
ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better
fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever
been.

Terrible things happen around the world every single day, but
the trend lines of progress are unmistakable. 

Amen. 

Just ask Stephen Pinker, who wrote a whole book about the
decline of violence and the rise of tolerance and learning in human
history, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker
spoke
with Reason‘s own Ronald Bailey a couple of years ago
about the thesis of his book:

reason: Let’s go through some of the
reasons and processes by which the world became less violent. It
began with what you call the pacification process, which involved
the creation of states.

Pinker: The first states seemed to have in
their wake a massive reduction of death in tribal raiding and
feuding, basically because it’s a nuisance to the overlords. So you
have things like the Pax Romana, the Pax Islamica, the Pax Sinica,
in China, where the emperors would much rather have the peasants
alive to stock their tax rolls and armies, and be slaves or serfs.
So they had a selfish interest in preventing too much internecine
feuding among their subject peoples and basically kept them from
each other’s throats. Not that it was a life that we would consider
particularly pleasant. You’re substituting a lot of violence among
tribes and villages and clans for a lesser amount—but still a
brutal form of violence—from the state against its
citizens. 

The next transition, after you have the government preventing
people from committing violence against each other, you now have
the problem of preventing the government from committing violence
against its own peoples. And that was, basically, the advent of
democracy and the various reforms of the Enlightenment.

reason: The next reduction in violence
occurred as a result of what you call the civilizing process.

Pinker: It’s a term that I borrowed from
the German sociologist Norbert Elias, in his book by that name,
where he figured out—even in the absence of quantitative data —that
Europe had become a less violent place in the transition from the
Middle Ages to modernity. We now know that he was right, now that
historical criminologists have gathered the quantitative data. But
he had noticed it just from narrative accounts of what daily life
was like. Just people cutting off each other’s noses, stabbing each
other over the dinner table in response to an insult—there seems to
be less now than there was then. He had an immediate explanation
and an ultimate explanation. The immediate explanation was a
psychological change. Namely that people exercise more self-control
and more empathy. They counted to 10 and swallowed their pride
rather than lashing out with a dagger when they’d been insulted.
They tried to get inside the heads of other people in general, to
figure out what they wanted. 

Or check in with another Reason
interviewee Lenore Skenazy as she advocates giving kids
more freedom and responsibility in her great Free-Range Kids blog
and book. One objection she often hears is that the world is more
dangerous for kids than it used to be. But that’s just not true,
says Skenazy in
this post from 2012 (and over and over on her
blog):

This is the first time in 45 years that homicide is not among
that top 15 causes of death in America. Put in Free-Range Kids
terms: The murder rate was higher when most of us parents were
growing up than it is now, for our kids. And since I know someone
will say, “So what? That just means kids are safer because we are
keeping them inside, or GPS’ing them, or making sure they are
supervised at all times!” let me quickly note that murder is down
among adults, too, and it’s not because we are
helicoptering them. Moreover, the murder rate is
lower than it has been for almost two generations, which means it
is lower now than even before parents began
hovering….

Our parents didn’t feel guilty or terrified when they let us
play outside and the murder rate was higher. Today’s kids deserve
the even-less-risky chance to enjoy a Free-Range
childhood. 

As for being better fed, here’s Bailey again, reviewing
Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource: 

Take agriculture. 10,000 years ago it took an average of 3,000
acres to feed one hunter-gatherer; farmers today can feed one
person using less than one-third of an acre. “Our innovation in
farming technology has multiplied the value of a plot of land by
nearly 10,000,” Naam notes. If crop yields per acre had remained
stuck at their 1960 level, half of the world’s remaining forests
would have been plowed down
by now.

Obama frames this good news as a plea against cynicism.
Reason prefers a spin that makes the broader case for
individual freedom and human ingenuity. But good news no matter
which way you slice it.