"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker

In the November issue of The American Conservative, I have a lengthy review of Steven Pinker's new book. Subscribers can read my review online, or you can buy a paper copy of the magazine at a newsstand for money (a remarkable concept, I realize).

Here is a small excerpt:

Disorder is a dauntingly vast topic. So, we are lucky that Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist whose 2002 work The Blank Slate may have been the outstanding book of the last decade, has turned his abundant energy and intelligence to understanding violence. No reductionist, Pinker attributes what he sees as the slow retreat from violence to "six trends" interacting with "five inner demons," "four better angels," and "five historical forces."  

These 20 factors -- ranging from the rise of Leviathan to the expansion of empathy and rationality -- aren't really enough to explain trends in violence, but they're certainly a start. And I can't think of anybody who could have done a better job. Pinker's range is extraordinary. For instance, The Better Angels of Our Nature includes the best introduction to brain anatomy that I've read. (And Pinker isn't even all that terribly impressed by fashionable fMRI scans.) Yet, his touch is light. He sums up the research on why marriage makes men behave better with Johnny Cash's definitive explanatory couplet: "Because you're mine, I walk the line."  

(And, in case you are wondering, yes, Pinker eventually does quote Edwin Starr's 1970 Motown hit single: "War! Huh, yeah, what is it good for?" Being Pinker, he presents a long list of the pragmatic uses of war, while remaining in emotional harmony with Starr's sentiment: "Absolutely nothing!")

For the parts of my review where I critique Better Angels, well, you can read the review. 

A few points: the topic of violence is gigantic and Pinker's book is remarkably thorough. So, don't assume that Pinker hasn't considered, at length, the various counter-arguments. My galley copy is festooned with my notes to myself in the margin like: "A-ha! P. is ignoring X. That undermines his whole argument." But then, 400 pages later, Pinker writes something like, "You have probably noticed that so far I haven't mentioned X, which might seem to undermine my whole argument. But, I have seven responses to X." 

Second, even though my American Conservative review is about 3,000 words long, I wound up having to leave out lots of good stuff. Some of it then went into my new Taki's Magazine column comparing Pinker's book on violence to Pat Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower in light of the violent homicide of Col. Kathafi.

Third, Graham H. Seibert has a good review of Pinker's book at Amazon.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Pinker v. Buchanan and the late Col. Kazzafi

From my column in Taki's Magazine:

The two big books of the moment are Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (which I reviewed in the November issue of The American Conservative) and Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (which I reviewed in VDARE). Pinker argues that the future belongs increasingly to peaceful cosmopolitan globalism, while Buchanan claims that ethnonationalism’s universal appeal can ultimately lead to national stabilization.  

How do the two books’ contrasting forecasts look following the spectacularly violent homicide of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi?  

Pinker, the noted Harvard psychology professor, contends (among much else in his 832 pages) that there exists a civilizing process that makes people behave less violently over time. 

Granted, Kathafi’s end turned out to be not quite as Facebookish as the sort of National Defriending that promoters of the Arab Spring had implied. The whole NATO Highway of Death routine followed by militiamen (apparently) executing him point-blank seems a little pre-Twittery ...

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Kazzafi is dead

Across Difficult Country has the details.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT: [Fill in the Blank] Rotting in Fields!

Timothy Egan opinionates in the NYT:

Migrants from Sanity 

With 14 million Americans out of work, you would think somebody could answer the desperation call from farmers offering to pay $150 to anyone willing to pick fruit in the orchards of Washington State. But no, the apples hang at peak ripeness, a near-record crop, and the jobs go begging, despite radio ads and an appeal by Governor Christine Gregoire to the other Washington for help. 

One thing the United States still does better than most countries is grow food. But one thing it now does worse than others is govern to solve problems. And so, the apples rot, businesses are crippled, and dreams of fresh life in a new country are dashed. This dystopian status quo exists because the simple-minded who control one of the major political parties have shut down all adult talk on the subject of immigration.

Almost every harvest season, we read stories in the New York Times about how some crop somewhere is rotting in the fields which proves that civilization will grind to a halt unless we import lots more illegal immigrant stoop laborers stat. Could it be, however, that NYT staffers are not quite as sophisticated in their understanding of farm labor economics as they think they are after spending a half hour on the phone with noted agriculture expert Tamar Jacoby?

Back during the Great California Pear Picker Shortage Crisis of October 2006, I enumerated in VDARE a handy seven point guide to the subject for clueless city slickers. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Height! What is it good for?

Over at GNXP Discover, Razib Khan asks about selection for height genes.

I’m a little over 6’4″, and I find being tall pretty useless other than for seeing over other spectators at golf tournaments.  Personally, I think genes for height exist in part to fool other people into thinking you are from a wealthy family. We’re used to people using nurture to try to fool other people about their nature, but I think this is the mirror image: this is genes trying to fool others into assuming you have rich relations. The main advantage to being tall was that other people figured you must come from a well-to-do family, which has many Darwinian benefits. 

Height used to be a good clue to how well fed you were as a child. For example, the Tory cabinet that Prime Minister Salisbury formed in 1895 averaged six feet in height, maybe five inches higher than the British national male average at the time. This difference of a couple of standard deviations reflected in part how much better fed and how much healthier aristocrats were than the masses, but fortunately that indicator is becoming less meaningful.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Marco Rubio

The recently elected senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has been talked up a lot as a VP nominee, because he's handsome (which appears to be GOP priority #1 these days), has a Spanish-surname, and got his start working for a Cuban-American Congresswoman who is half-Sephardic by ancestry so you know he's sound on the World's Most Important Issue: West Bank settlements. 

Putting a Cuban on the GOP ticket to win the growing Mexican vote makes about as much sense as when Newt Gingrich got the House to pass a statehood for Puerto Rico bill in 1998 to win the Mexican vote. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Last Reasonable Man in America

I review Pat Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower in VDARE.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Africa Command

The news that the U.S. military is going to fight the Lord's Resistance Army in central African reminded me that the U.S. military has had, for a few years now, an organization entitled "Africa Command." For reasons that need not detain us here, the 2,000 personnel of Africa Command are actually based in Stuttgart*. But you have to admit that "Africa Command" is a pretty cool name. That sounds like a 1966 adventure show that would have come on right after "Johnny Quest" and right before "Daktari." If I were seven years old again, I would definitely watch "Africa Command."

* Ruling elites in Africa are jokingly referred to by less privileged Africans as members of the Wabenzi tribe, after their favorite brand of automobile, so perhaps Stuttgart was chosen for its extensive natural resources of Mercedes and Porsches?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Disparate Impact

From the NYT:

Latinos Said to Bear Weight of a Deportation Program 

By JULIA PRESTON 

A deportation program that is central to the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement strategy has led disproportionately to the removal of Latino immigrants ...

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

People with too much time on their hands

For about 15 years now, I've been reading articles about how Real Soon Now government officials, concerned citizens, environmental activists and others are going to get together the final version of a plan to restore the Los Angeles River back to its pristine natural state instead of being the big, ugly concrete ditch it has been since 1942, all for only a few billion bucks.

Finally, a reporter on one of these stories went and asked some guy who lives next to the L.A. River about all these plans to fix a flood control project that isn't broken:

"This works exactly how it needs to," he said of the concrete abutment next to his house, with fences to keep out visitors, as water poured into the L.A. River below a Canoga Park High School football practice. "It funnels all the excess water away from residents and businesses. 

"The last thing we want to do is to encourage people to get close to the L.A. River - let's all hold hands and smoke pixie dust and sing `Kumbaya."'

It's worth noting that the Army Corps of Engineers built a lot of the L.A. River concrete ditch in 1942, presumably because they had nothing better to do that year. L.A. had been hit badly by a 50-year flood in 1938: 9.4 inches of rain fell in one stretch. (We had two bigger rain events in 2005.) About two days per year, it's the river from hell, and every few decades it's worse than that. Up until 1825, the LA River used to reach the sea at what's now Marina Del Rey, north of LAX. Then, there was a huge flood and it changed course to what's now the Harbor, about 20 miles south. You really wouldn't want the LA River to change course again.

With hindsight, it's easy to see that they should have set up a huge system of parklands alongside the river to absorb floods, but, they were kind of busy and didn't have the money, what with the Depression and WWII, and so they didn't do that. It's too bad, because my father discovered in 1994 by plotting on a map all the buildings that had to be condemned after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake that about 80% of them were on the old streambeds, which were typically around a half-mile wide swath of sand. As the Bible says, a building built on sand ... So, knowing what we know now (and how many people know that), it would have been great if they'd lined the river with golf courses and parks, but they didn't.

And they aren't going to do that now, either. 

So, Don't Ditch the Ditch.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Four-H Club

Back around 1982-83, a friend noted that victims of AIDS tended to belong to the Four H Club: homosexuals, heroin addicts, Haitians, and hemophiliacs. Later on, homosexuals seized control of the history of AIDS, so now the standard line has become that it was, somehow or other, the fault of Ronald Reagan and other homophobes. Not having gays in the military had something to do with it, too. 

The other H's don't have that kind of political muscle to rewrite history.

But here's a new scientific history of AIDS that explains the connections among the Four H's. The article spends a lot of time on the "paternalistic" French colonial doctors who went around innoculating Africans against diseases and occasionally, when the power went out, they could only boil their hypodermic needles instead of fully sterilize them. But, eventually, it gets to how AIDS became a massive disease, and, reading between the lines, you'll see that AIDS was more or less the disease of the "1960s on the March:" decolonialization, the UN, the Black Power Duvalier regime in Haiti, gay sex tourism, drugs, gay lib and so forth. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Press coverage of protests

It seems like the one set of protests over the last decade that the mainstream media were most positive about -- the 2006 illegal alien marches -- were the ones where press coverage turned out most counterproductive. Photos of a half million illegal aliens waving giant Mexican flags in the heart of American cities were a major factor in keeping the Bush-Kennedy-McCain amnesty from passing in 2006 and 2007.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Edward Luttwak

I'd been seeing the name of national security expert Edward Luttwak for decades, but until I read David Samuels' interview with him in Tablet I had no idea what a fun interview he is. Luttwak conceives of himself as a cross between Henry Kissinger and Jack Bauer of 24: Talleyrand and Rambo, combined. He interrupts the interview for phone calls in fluent Italian and Korean. (How many people in the world speak Italian and Korean?) He would make a good supervillain in a big budget movie. The only thing that would make this interview better is if at the end, Luttwak shot somebody in the knee to make him talk.

David Samuels, by the way, is one of the most consistently interesting feature magazine journalists in the country. I hope he achieves a breakout into name recognition like Michael Lewis has.

Here's a segment on Israel that's very Peter Turchinish:

Q. Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come out of the [Arab-Israeli] stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it? 

A. I’m not sure it’s a cost. 

Q. Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those borders is more important? 

A. Listen, ... Israel’s success as a state has been made possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of violence that are so high that they’re damaging, and there are also levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the state. Most of the time, the violence is positive. 

Q. When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean that they generate social cohesion inside Israel? 

A. Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.

But without Israel, there would be no Palestinian nation for Palestinian leaders to lead. So, it's all part of the Great Cycle of Life and everybody is happy (or at least the politicians have jobs).

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My thought process on Occupy Wall Street

1. Don't these people have anything better to do?

2. [Checks photos] Eh ... probably not.

3. Okay, go for it!

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Black infant mortality

The NYT writes: 

Precisely why the black infant mortality rate is so high is a mystery that has eluded researchers even as the racial disparity continues to grow in cities like Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Boston. 

In Pittsburgh, where the unemployment rate is well below the national average, the infant mortality rate for black residents of Allegheny County was 20.7 in 2009, a slight decrease from 21 in 2000 but still worse than the rates in China or Mexico. In the same period the rate among whites in the county decreased to 4 from 5.6 — well below the national average, according to state statistics. ...

And the article goes on, in the standard fashion, to talk about the black-white gap from various perspectives. 

Recent studies have shown that poverty, education, access to prenatal care, smoking and even low birth weight do not alone explain the racial gap in infant mortality, and that even black women with graduate degrees are more likely to lose a child in its first year than are white women who did not finish high school. Research is now focusing on stress as a factor and whether black women have shorter birth canals.

My guess would be that the differences would be part nature, part nurture. The nature side looks to me like at base, an r-K differential. The nurture side, however, needs investigating because matters could be improved. For example, what is the role of STDs?

The problem with most conventional thinking about racial differences is what I call the midget-giant gestalt issue, after the time when I was at UCLA and I saw a midget talking to a normal sized guy. But then a second midget walked up and I suddenly realized the midgets were six-footers and the normal sized guy was 7'-4" 290 pound basketball player Mark Eaton. 

Similarly, American race discourse is obsessed with black-white comparisons, which often don't get very far for lack of a third party to provide perspective. 

Thus, a table accompanying the article shows that the infant mortality rate among Hispanics is slightly lower than among whites, much less among blacks. (Click on the table above to see more columns.) That poor Hispanics have much, much lower infant mortality than poor blacks is not a new development.  I noticed that back in the early 1990s. But there is no reference in this 2011 article to Hispanics. You would think that this would be a key avenue of research because Hispanics have, evidently, found cheap ways to have healthy babies.

There are now 50,000,000+ Hispanics in the U.S. We're not supposed to notice their failures. Can we at least notice their successes? 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's latest war

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama said on Friday he was sending about 100 U.S. military advisers to Uganda to support central African allies pursuing Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, and other rebel commanders. ... 

"Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo," he said.

The Bush Administration sent 17 unarmed advisers to Uganda, but Obama is sending 100 armed soldiers. It seems as if Uganda -- Yoweri Museveni, Proprietor (since 1986) -- is pretty good at invading the Congo, but not so hot at putting down a rebellion led by a dim-witted lunatic.

The War Nerd, John Dolan, profiled America's newest enemy, the Lord's Resistance Army, back in 2002:

This week I’m honoring some great Christian killers: the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda. These kids — and they are kids, mostly 13-16 years old — get my vote for funniest army on the planet. ... 

There was another, way crazier and more fun: Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Little Joseph came from a very devout Christian family: his aunt Alice founded the LRA and passed it on to him when she died. Aunt Alice started some of the great traditions of the LRA, like telling your troops that if they just wore her special amulets, bullets won’t hurt them. Aunt Alice had everybody in the LRA believing God hisself would be their kevlar vest. This turned out to be untrue, but there was a great escape clause: by the time the chumps found out the amulets didn’t work as advertised, they were DEAD! Now that’s the way to run a complaint department” Thousands of satisfied customers and dissatisfied but uncomplaining corpses. ... 

People won’t see this — won’t see how simple and practical the African style of warfare really is. The LRA is at war with the Ugandan Army, but it’s war Central-Africa style. We’re not talking Gettysburg or Verdun here. The idea isn’t to have big battles but to sneak up on an enemy village and kill all the civilians, take their livestock and steal their stuff.

Mr. Anon comments: "It takes a child to raze a village."

Reporters like to call this “insane,” which is crap. Which would you rather do, get sent off to another continent to fight heavily-armed opponents (war Western-style) or kill the neighbors who wake you every damn morning with their stupid lawnmower (war African-style)? Especially if you can see they’ve got a nice DVD player in there? Personally, I’d much rather kill the neighbors and steal their stuff. And if they’ve got a daughter just hitting puberty — well, that’s just gravy.

I hope the Department of Defense has gotten the malaria drug issue straightened out. Over the last decade, Marines sent to Liberia tend to get malaria at very high rates. There had been complaints about the side effects of the prophylactic drug they are supposed to take, and some think they are skipping it.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Oktoberfest

Anthropologist Kate Fox writes for the BBC:

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call "ambivalent" drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour. 

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours - cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life - about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as "integrated" drinking cultures. 

I like to have a good map of stereotypes in my head, so here's the missing piece of the puzzle for me when it comes to drinking cultures: if the Italians sip wine with every meal and the Scandinavians occasionally binge drink on hard liquor, where do the Germans fit in?

My theory is that alcohol helps people have two different personalities, sober and convivial, which can be convenient.

This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption - most integrated drinking cultures have significantly higher per-capita alcohol consumption than the ambivalent drinking cultures. 

Instead the variation is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations about the effects of alcohol, and different social rules about drunken comportment. 

This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research, but also in carefully controlled scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it very simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol. 

The British and other ambivalent drinking cultures believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when in these experiments we are given what we think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic "placebos" - we shed our inhibitions. 

We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.

My impression of Italy from the week I spent there in 1980 was that Italian men didn't need disinhibiting to get over their shyness so they could start hitting on women. That's just what they did, at least in the touristy cities. It was like a country full of Silvio Berlusconis. Above is Ruth Orkin's 1951 photo American Girl in Italy, and that's what Florence was like in 1980, too.

By the way, the American Girl in the photo is 83 today and said in August:

“Some people want to use it as a symbol of harassment of women, but that’s what we’ve been fighting all these years,” Craig said in a telephone interview from her home in Toronto. “It’s not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!”

The girl in the picture and the photographer were out trolling for reactions. The photographer liked the reactions the American Girl got the first time she walked down this particular street in Florence, so she had her go around the block and do it again, which sent the hubba-hubba meter to eleven. (But, that's still pretty much what it was like in 1980, so this picture is merely exaggerating reality to convey reality, which is pretty much what photography is all about.)

P.S. The American Girl went back to America, then went back to Italy and married an Italian man.

P.S. Sorry about posting this twice. If you commented on the version I just deleted, I've moved your comments to the end of this comment thread.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

It's hard to get good terrorist help these days

From the NYT:

But Mansour J. Arbabsiar, 56, the man at the center of an alleged Iranian plot to kill a Saudi diplomat in Washington, seems to have been more a stumbling opportunist than a calculating killer. Over the 30-odd years he lived in Texas, he left a string of failed businesses and angry creditors in his wake, and an embittered ex-wife who sought a protective order against him. He was perennially disheveled, friends and acquaintances said, and hopelessly disorganized. 

Mr. Arbabsiar, now in custody in New York, stands accused by federal prosecutors of running a global terrorist plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran, and that was directed by the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Many of his old friends and associates in Texas seemed stunned at the news, not merely because he was not a zealot, but because he seemed too incompetent to pull it off.

Somebody should ask an economist what we should do about the poor quality of terrorist recruits. Being an economist, he'll probably suggest: more immigration!

This guy reminds me of the mastermind of the sales tax fraud when I was a juror: both were Iranian used car dealers. (Also, here's my review of the British comedy about inbred Pakistani suicide bombers, Four Lions.)

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer