Against Pinker's Violence

TLDR version of this critique might be: "Violence can be emotional, too, and Pinker is myopic for focusing, with reductionist logic, on physical harm and death in his definition and analysis."

I, personally, find Pinker's analysis incredibly thorough and compelling, and focus on death and it's systematic avoidance over time an extremely meaningful measure. This critique seemed to imply that if ones definition of violence is merely physical, then better to throw out the whole thing. I almost get the impression that Ben Laws never fully read the book, as many of his points are dealt with directly.

I do, of course, think there's room to think about the impact of emotional harm from and within societies, but that subject matter doesn't moot the impact of more animalistic harm.

Further, I have difficulty being swayed by appeals to logic that logic is, itself, unappealing.

This is largely academic posturing, which is the case with a lot of critical theory. Pinker makes it clear throughout Better Angels that his working definition of violence is limited to the physical kind. He's also adamant that his choice of topic is not an endorsement of any specific moral hierarchy, and if you read the book, you would know the tone is not entirely self-congratulatory, but often somber and introspective.

What this article claims is Pinker's "exercise of circularity" slash discursive violence is merely a sin of omission: because Pinker chose not to make his book about modern problems, the author jumps to the conclusion that he is partly responsible for these problems.

By this logic: Yesterday I didn't have a single conversation about inequality or racism—I guess that makes me complicit! That strikes me as kind of absurd, I don't know about anyone else.

Pinker wrote an interesting and thought provoking book. Certainly he is trying to make a point, and is a bit selective in the data and how he presents it. But this critique is not so much about the substance of the book, or any data that contradicts Pinker's thesis. It is more a blur of relativism and fancy language. I think it is interesting that physical violence has on many measures and timescales been declining, which the critic doesn't seem to refute. Instead he makes a very odd attack on Pinker for not writing a different history of different meanings of violence. I mean you could make this same critique about anything anyone has ever written, but that would be mere sophistry.

I seriously question if this isn't a parody of modern academic criticism.

I have not read the book in question, but I have read Pinker's previous book The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. In it, there is a section on the same topic where he argues that our belief that indigenous peoples lived simple and naturally peaceful is just a Western romanticization. After spending several chapters elucidating the origins and extent of this incorrect belief, he provides statistics on why indigenous societies are actually much more warlike than they are today. Since the section is too long to fit in here I've linked to Google Books. Just keep reading the text until you reach highlighted stopping point.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ePNi4ZqYdVQC&pg=PT95&dq=tha...

From looking at the graph, it is quite clear that modern society is much less violent than many other indigenous societies. It seems quite reasonable to conclude that societies are becoming increasingly nonviolent. I wish that the author of the review addressed this in his article.

[1] In the first paragraph of the section, Pinker references a Thanksgiving editorialist quote from Chapter 1. Here's the quote:

"I would submit that the world native Americans knew was more stable, happier, and less barbaric than our society today.... there were no employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown, crime nearly nonexistent. What warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter. While there were hard times, life was, for the most part, stable and predictable.... Because the native people respected what was around them, there was no loss of water or food resources because of pollution or extinction, no lack of materials for the daily essentials, such as baskets, canoes, shelter, or firewood."