I am halfway through Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in which he argues that through various cultural influences, violence has been undergoing a steady decline throughout history, until today it has reached the lowest point ever. So for those of you who have been wringing your hands about the wars, terrorism, and mass shootings, you may take heart in the fact that things have never been better, while mankind takes a well-deserved bow. Though I would normally read an entire book before I considered reviewing it, yet I was so struck by something Pinker said, that I had to put the book down and just let it breathe for a while. But first, a few preliminary remarks:
The first book I read by Steven Pinker was The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, in which he argues that much of human nature is innate. I never really bought the empiricist philosophy that there are no innate ideas, that everything is learned from experience, and that human nature is completely malleable. Therefore, I enjoyed reading a psychologist whose way of thinking accorded with my own. As a result, it was something of a surprise to read his new book on the decline of violence, since those who believe in an innate human nature typically present man as hardwired and inflexible. One might have expected him to have a more pessimistic attitude regarding man’s violent proclivities.
As if that was not enough to chew on, I discovered that Pinker endorses the Great Man Theory, which holds that history has been shaped by the actions of a small number of great men, whose various abilities stood them apart from the rest. The most well-known advocate of this theory is Thomas Carlyle. In opposition to this, Herbert Spencer argued that it is society that produces men who suit the times, and they are merely the instruments through which historical forces produce their inevitable results. Leo Tolstoy was another detractor of this theory, who, in War and Peace, argued that history was the net result of the individual wills of millions of people, and that if Napoleon had not been willing to go to Moscow, the French would have pulled him off his horse, and replaced him with someone who would fulfill their destiny.
Along these lines, Pinker argues that if Hitler had been killed during the Beer Hall Putsch, then the Third Reich, World War II, and the holocaust might never have happened. I have always leaned more toward Spencer than Carlyle, so I always figured that if Hitler had died in his crib, something like Nazi Germany and its associated horrors would have happened anyway. When we invaded Iraq, there was a lot of Great-Man thinking going on there too. The way some people talked, if we could just get rid of Saddam Hussein, democracy would burst forth and spread throughout the region. To me, this was naïve. It reminded me of The Wizard of Oz, in which we discover that once the Wicked Witch is melted by a bucket of water, her minions are basically good creatures, who are grateful to Dorothy for freeing them from the witch’s tyranny.
Because great men play a critical, irreplaceable role in the course of history, it follows that any chance occurrence that eliminates them is equally decisive, as the example of the counterfactual concerning Hitler’s death indicates. According to Pinker, if the driver of the car containing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary had not made a wrong turn, causing him to drive down a street where Gavrilo Princip happened to be, giving him the opportunity to assassinate the Archduke, World War I might never have happened. Again, I am inclined to think that the situation in Europe in 1914 was so unstable that if it had not been an assassination, it would have been something else; if it had not happened in June, it would have happened in July.
Pinker’s conclusion that violence has declined to the lowest point ever in the twenty-first century depends solely on the data of death and destruction, and thus is strictly a factual claim; whereas his belief in the Great Man theory involves metaphysical questions of free will, chance, and necessity, along with the notorious difficulty in assessing counterfactuals in matters of history. But he makes a good case for both.
At any rate, I was proceeding at my usual slow pace in getting through Pinker’s weighty tome, when right at the beginning of Chapter 7, he took up the subject of dodgeball. Pinker admits that he was not very good at sports, except in those areas where the game consisted primarily of the ability to withstand pain on the one hand, and inflict it on the other. One of his favorites was “murderball, in which one boy clutched a volley ball while the others pummeled him until he let go.” Another game was Knucks, a card game in which the loser is whacked on the knuckles with a deck of cards, resulting in scabs and bruises that had to be concealed from disapproving mothers.
These games were frowned on by adults. According to Pinker, the only game organized by adults that allowed for inflicting pain was dodgeball. With deep regret, however, he notes the passing of an era: “But now the Boy Gender has lost another battle in its age-old war with camp-counselors, phys ed teachers, lawyers, and moms. In school district after school district, dodgeball has been banned.” Although Pinker approves of the trend away from violence in general, he argues that this is taking things way too far: “The prohibition of dodgeball represents the overshooting of yet another successful campaign against violence, the century-long movement to prevent the abuse and neglect of children.” It is with nostalgia that he looks back at a time when boys could inflict pain on one another in a healthy game of dodgeball, and it is with ill-concealed contempt that he compares the banning of this game with Political Correctness.
Although I disagreed with Pinker’s version of the Great Man Theory, it was in the spirit of objective inquiry that I considered his arguments with dispassion. But when it comes to dodgeball, that is something else entirely. My disagreement with him in this matter is not one of fact, but of attitude. And it is deep and visceral.
In general, I always hated physical education. I was smaller than average. When teams were formed, I was always picked last (accompanied by a groan from the side that got me). Mostly it was the bigger boys who got the ball and did things with it, while I just tried to stay out of the way. Whether I stayed out of the way or not, the occasions for bullying were frequent. Once, during basketball, a big guy dribbled the ball in my vicinity, and I knocked it away. That made him mad, so he started pounding on me. When football was the game, I never got the ball, but was told to block. One time, when someone twice my twice my size came charging at me, I sidestepped him, and went flying into the mud. He got up and pounded on me. And it only got worse in the locker room: “Hey kid, wanna trade pokes?” Bam!
The problem with PE was that it was segregated as to gender. Boys just seemed to go all barbarian once there were no girls present. When I hear people advocate the separation of genders for education in general, I cringe. At an all-boy school, with no girls to distract them, the boys would have had nothing better to do than pound on me. In the movie Blackboard Jungle (1955), Glenn Ford becomes a teacher at a high school, and it is a jungle indeed. Mean, scary, and dangerous, the students are a bunch of savages. Later in the film, Glenn Ford is taken on a tour of another school. And what a bunch of polite, well-mannered, well-dressed students they are, attending to their lessons, right after singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” The point is to show that not all teenagers are bad. But what no one seems to notice, even though it was obvious to me, is that the good school had both boys and girls in it, whereas Ford’s high school was for boys only.
I cannot help but mention that the Great Man Theory plays a role in this movie too. When Vic Morrow pulls out his switchblade knife, Sydney Poitier warns Ford, “Watch out chief! He’s floating on Sneaky Pete wine.” The other students help subdue Morrow, and once he is expelled, we discover that all the rest of the students are basically good, and now that this Wicked Witch has been eliminated, all the problems are solved.
Anyway, among my many miseries in high school was dodgeball. As usual, I would try to stay out of everybody’s way. Unfortunately, this usually meant that I was one of the last few standing, as the boys on the other team picked up the volley balls and moved in for the kill. I’ll bet Steven Pinker was like those guys who would grin maliciously just before they threw the ball with such force that it wrapped around my face.
I can see where all this might be fun, provided you enjoy hurting people. But if you do not, it is just so much pointless brutality. For all the bullying and whatnot, I would sometimes win a fight. But it was no fun for me to knock someone down, even if he started it. I remember feeling sorry for one kid as he ran off crying. So even when I won, I lost. Given the chance, I would never have tried to wrap a volley ball around some guy’s face, not even someone like Pinker. I just never saw the fun in it. For all the statistics and arguments presented by Pinker to show that violence has declined to the lowest point ever, when I read that in several school districts, dodgeball has been banned, that cinched it.
The Millennium has arrived.