I didn’t read it, because I don’t have to,
neither the book nor this article. Maybe I’ll read the book someday, when I run
out of toiletpaper.
It has been amusing to see how warmly the
establishment media welcomed Steven Pinker’s 2011 tome, The Better Angels of
Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking). A professor in the
Department of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker argues that the
“artifices of civilization have moved us in a noble direction,” with the result
not only that “violence has been in decline for long stretches of time,” but
also that “we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species'
existence.” This optimistic theme coincides with the 2009 Nobel Peace
Laureate’s ongoing wars on at least four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, and
South America) and the U.S. military’s spread to over 800 bases worldwide; the
U.S.-led NATO bloc’s rapid post-Soviet growth and proclamation of “out-of-area”
responsibilities; and the United States’ declaration of a right to kill its
“enemies” anywhere on the planet.
The New York Times greeted the book with a
flattering front-page article in the Sunday Book Review by the philosopher Peter
Singer, who called Better Angels a “supremely important” and “masterly
achievement;” Pinker, he added, “convincingly demonstrates that there has been
a decline in violence, and he is persuasive about its causes….” It
is easy to understand why Pinker’s invocation of an “escalator of reason” that
has lifted the more enlightened Western powers towards an atmosphere of
sweetness and light appeals to the many intellectuals who identify with these
powers, as does his naming of the deficiencies that he alleges have held other
peoples back from rising with them. But such a propaganda windfall for
the imperial bloc could only be purchased with a denial of reality.
Indeed, it is in the ideological and error-ridden narrative with which Pinker
sustains this denial for more than 800 pages that the book’s real appeal lies.
How does
Pinker get around the seemingly large numbers of wars and militarization
process that bother so many ordinary people and specialist observers such as
Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, and Winslow Wheeler? One Pinker method
is to confine focus to post-1945 wars among the great democracies, which have
not fought one another in this 67 year interim, and to ignore or downplay the
numerous wars that the great democracies have fought in the Third World.
He calls this the “Long Peace,” while the other wars have no name. Pinker
contends not only that the “democracies avoid disputes with each other,” but
that they “tend to stay out of disputes across the board,” an idea he refers to
as the “Democratic Peace.” This will surely come as a surprise to the
many victims of U.S. assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings, and
invasions since 1945. For Pinker, no attack on a lesser power by one or
more of the great democracies counts as a real war or confutes the “Democratic
Peace,” no matter how many people die.
“Among respectable countries,” Pinker writes,
“conquest is no longer a thinkable option. A politician in a democracy
today who suggested conquering another country would be met not with
counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter.” This
is an extremely silly assertion. Presumably, when George Bush and Tony
Blair sent U.S. and British forces to attack Iraq in 2003, ousted its
government, and replaced it with a regime operating under laws drafted by the
Coalition Provisional Authority, this did not count as “conquest,” as these
leaders never stated that they launched the war to “conquer” Iraq, but rather
“to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger,”
in Bush’s words. What conqueror has ever pronounced a goal other than
self-defense and the protection of life and limb? It is on the basis of
devices such as this that Pinker’s “Long Peace,” “New Peace,” and “Democratic
Peace” rest.
It also
rests on a patriotic rewriting of history and use of sources that will support
this rewriting. A dramatic example is his treatment of the Vietnam war.
Pinker makes that war a case where enemy fanaticism and the
“life-is-cheap” mentality of the Vietnamese were responsible for the heavy
casualties. He tells us that “The three deadliest postwar conflicts were
fueled by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communist regimes that had a
fanatical dedication to outlasting their opponents.” It was thus the Vietnamese
resistance and willingness to absorb the large casualties inflicted on them by
the U.S. invaders that fueled the war. There is not a word of criticism
of the invaders who sent large forces across the Pacific ocean to ravage a
distant land; certainly no suggestion of “fanaticism,” no mention of the UN
Charter, no word like “aggression” is applied to this attack. And there
is no mention anywhere in the book that the United States had supported the
French effort at re-colonization, then supported a dictatorship of its own
choosing; and that U.S. officials recognized that those fanatical resisters had
majority support as they killed vast numbers of Vietnamese to keep in power the
minority government the United States had imposed. Claiming 800,000 or
more “civilian battle deaths” in the war, Pinker never explains how vast
numbers of civilians could be killed in “battle” or whether these deaths might
possibly represent a gross violation of the laws of war. Or how this
could happen in an era of rising morality and humanistic feelings, carried out
so ruthlessly by the dominant Civilized power.
Nowhere does Pinker mention the massive U.S. use of chemical warfare in Vietnam (1961-1970), and the estimated “three million Vietnamese, including 500,000 children,…suffering from the effects of toxic chemicals” (Fred Wilcox[2]) used during this ugly and very unangelic form of warfare. What makes this suppression especially interesting is that Pinker cites the outlawing and non-use of chemical and biological weapons as evidence of the new evolving higher morality and decline of violence, so his dodging of the facts on the massive use of such weapons in Operation Ranch Hand and other U.S. programs in Vietnam is remarkably dishonest.
Nowhere does Pinker mention the massive U.S. use of chemical warfare in Vietnam (1961-1970), and the estimated “three million Vietnamese, including 500,000 children,…suffering from the effects of toxic chemicals” (Fred Wilcox[2]) used during this ugly and very unangelic form of warfare. What makes this suppression especially interesting is that Pinker cites the outlawing and non-use of chemical and biological weapons as evidence of the new evolving higher morality and decline of violence, so his dodging of the facts on the massive use of such weapons in Operation Ranch Hand and other U.S. programs in Vietnam is remarkably dishonest.
Pinker’s
Vietnam analysis relies heavily on Rudolf Rummel as a source for what Rummel
calls “democide,” or the “intentional government killing of an unarmed person
or people.” Rummel, a far-right analyst who believes that Barack Obama is
an anti-war activist attempting a coup d’etat in the United States, estimates
that while the “communist” North deliberately killed 1.6 million of their
fellow Vietnamese civilians, the United States deliberately killed only 5,500
Vietnamese civilians—or one-three-hundredth as many as allegedly murdered by
the “communists.” Rummel matches this kind of extreme apologetics for
U.S. violence in other areas as well, but for Pinker he is a preferred source.
In dealing with the U.S. treatment of Iraq
(1990-2010), Pinker’s bias is equally impressive. He ignores the
“sanctions of mass destruction” imposed between 1990 and 2003, which according
to John and Karl Mueller resulted in more deaths than “all so-called weapons of
mass destruction throughout history.” Although Pinker cites John Mueller
often in Better Angels, he never cites his (and Karl’s) 1999 article on this
subject in Foreign Affairs, or mentions this “violence” landmark. Pinker
minimizes the U.S. role in the Iraq invasion and occupation that began in March
2003 by distinguishing the invasion-violence from the follow-up violence,
allegedly strictly internal. He says that the initial stage of the war
was “quick” and “low in battle deaths,” and the major deaths occurred during
the “intercommunal violence in the anarchy that followed.” This ignores the
fact that all of the violence flowed from the invasion-occupation, and the U.S.
involvement in that “intercommunal” violence never stopped.
Pinker’s
analysis and use of sources on war-based deaths in Iraq is also
compromised. The study of Iraqi casualties by the Johns Hopkins
researchers published in the British medical journal The Lancet reported that
655,000 Iraqis had died during the roughly 40-month period from the March 20,
2003 invasion through July 2006, with some 601,000 of these deaths due to
violence. This is unacceptable to Pinker, who prefers the much lower
estimate of Iraq Body Count, which relies largely on news media reports of
deaths, while the Johns Hopkins team used a standard retrospective survey
method. Pinker objects to the “main street bias” of the Johns Hopkins
sample, but he raises no questions about Rummel’s bizarre conclusions or the
systematically low-ball estimates of “battle deaths” by an array of government-
and foundation-supported organizations devoted to showing that modern wars have
become more and more civilian-friendly since 1945. Elsewhere in Better
Angels, Pinker reverses course and reports that there were “373,000 deaths from
2003 to 2008” in the Darfur states of the western Sudan, accepting a body count
produced via the same retrospective survey method used by the Johns Hopkins
teams for Iraq. This is the preferential method of research in
action.
Perhaps the most revealing piece of war and
violence apologetics can be found in Pinker’s discussion of the new morality of
the U.S. military in Iraq—less name-calling in contrast with Vietnam, and a
“new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior,” whose “catechism” is that the
warrior is a “protector of life,” including not just his fellow marines but
“all others.” Pinker says that “The code of the Ethnical Warrior, even as
an aspiration, shows that the American armed forces have come a long way from a
time when its soldiers referred to Vietnamese peasants as gooks, slops, and
slants and when the military was slow to investigate atrocities against
civilians such as the massacre at My Lai.” Pinker provides no evidence
that U.S. soldiers don’t refer to Iraqis with derogatory terms, or that
civilian atrocities are investigated more aggressively (he never mentions Fallujah
or Haditha), or that this “new code of honor” is “indoctrinated,” let alone
taken seriously.
Piinker is a
transparent, but apparently unconscious, ideologue. This shows up everywhere,
but nowhere more clearly than in his belief that communism is an “ideology,”
whereas what he calls “classical liberalism” not only isn’t an ideology—it is
the set of true beliefs towards which “intelligence” causes humans to
gravitate. Pinker writes that a “romantic, militarized communism inspired
the expansionist programs of the Soviet Union and China, who wanted to give a
helping hand to the dialectical process by which the proletariat or peasantry
would vanquish the bourgeoisie and establish a dictatorship in country after
country. The Cold War was the product of the determination of the United
States to contain this movement at something close to its boundaries at the end
of World War II.” So, just as no U.S. politician would suggest
“conquering” another country, the U.S. foreign policy regime has been strictly
defensive, containing expansionist enemies.
Pinker’s
remarkable inversion of reality in portraying the post-World War II
period as a “Long Peace,” with residual violence stemming from communist
ideology and actions, points up the relevance of Chalmers Johnson’s comment
that “When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes,…then
ideological thinking kicks in.” It kicks in for Pinker with communist
expansionism and U.S. “containment.” It also kicks in with his notion
that communism, but not capitalism, is both “utopian” and “essentialist,”
“submerge[ing] individuals into moralized categories,” and causing some of the
worst atrocities of the modern period. But weren’t the racism and
anticommunism of the Western powers and in particular the United States
“essentialist” in the Pinkerian sense, and wedded to the “full destructive
might” of these powers? And didn’t these ideologies justify
exterminations and massive ethnic cleansings of inferior and threatening
peoples, replacing them with advanced peoples who put resources to a higher
use? Weren’t Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and
many other members of the Chicago School of Economics “free-market” ideologues?
The U.S.
push for markets and investor rights and political control, sometimes called
Imperialism, is for Pinker just natural and doing good, taking advantage of
“positive-sum” games with “gentle commerce,” as well as containing those with
ideology who kill people freely. Pinker doesn’t mention any such thing as
“aggressive commerce” or discuss the reality of the cross-border seizure of
property by the more powerful states. There are 17 citations to “gentle
commerce” in the Index to Better Angels, but none to the word “imperialism.”
In addition to his neglect of “aggressive
commerce,” Pinker ignores the post-World War II growth of U.S. militarism, with
its vested interests in weapons and warfare, and the expanding and
self-reinforcing power of the ”iron triangle” of the
military-industrial-complex to shape national policy. This may be why he
never mentions, let alone discusses, the classics on this topic by Seymour
Melman, Gordon Adams, Richard Kaufman, and Tom Gervasi,[3] or the extensive
writings of Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Kolko, and David Harvey,[4] or the more recent
work of Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Henry Giroux, Nick Turse, and
Winslow Wheeler.[5] These and other analysts have also featured the
encroachment of the permanent-war system on civil liberties and democracy,
suggesting that any neo-Fukuyaman perspective on “end-of-history” liberalism
and Pinker’s streaky but steady decline in violence is Panglossian nonsense
grounded in ideological thinking.
Instead,
Pinker prefers the work of James Sheehan, whose theme in his 2008 book, Where
Have All the Soldiers Gone: The Transformation of Modern Europe, is that
Europeans have changed their very conception of the state, and made the state
“no longer the proprietor of military force” but rather “a provisioner of
social security and material well-being,” in Pinker’s summary of the
book. But the soldiers are still there, NATO is still expanding, Modern
Europe is contributing troops and bombs to the Afghan war, was heavily involved
in the 2011 war in Libya, and along with the United States, currently threatens
Syria and Iran. Europe’s social security systems have been under attack
for years, and the well-being of ordinary citizens seems to be a declining
objective of Europe’s leaders, as well as those in the United States.
Following the U.S. lead, Europe is moving from “cradle-to-grave nurturance”
back to “military prowess”—exactly the opposite direction from that Pinker
believes they have taken.
As Islam is
now a Western target, we may be sure that Pinker gets aboard this
bandwagon. Invoking a “civilizational clash with Islam” that he alleges
poses the greatest threat to international peace and security, Pinker writes
that “more than half of the armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries
of insurgencies.” He adds that “Thirty of 44 foreign terrorist organizations
in the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism in 2008” were
“Muslim terrorist organizations,” underscoring his Islam-equals-violence
theme. “[O]nly about a quarter of Islamic countries elect their
governments,” his anti-Muslim rant continues; the “laws and practices of many
Muslim countries seem to have missed the Humanitarian Revolution;” and the
“Muslim world…is sitting out the decline of violence.” Nowhere does
Pinker mention a Western role in any of the “embroiled Muslim countries;” that
no Muslim regime has attacked or occupied a Western country; that the roots of
so-called “Muslim terrorist organizations” are to be found in peoples’
resistance to Western military and political interference inside Muslim
countries; that the Western colonial powers have supported unelected
dictatorships in one Muslim country after another; and that the “Muslim world”
lacks the luxury of sitting out any alleged “decline in violence,” because it
has been systematically subjected to the violence of the Western powers for
many decades.
Pinker likes to attribute the sense of increased violence to multiple “illusions,” one of which is caused by the development of communications media that make it possible to record bloody events, and transmit them to the world. As he explained in a guest appearance on CBS TV’s The Early Show in mid-December 2011: “Not only can we send a helicopter with a film crew to any troubled spot in the world but now anyone with a cell phone is an instant reporter. They can broadcast color footage of bloodshed wherever it occurs and so we’re very aware of it.” Apparently, he believes that news media cover the world on a non-discriminatory basis, reporting on Guatemalan peasants slaughtered by their army, civilian victims of U.S. drone warfare in Afghanistan, and Honduran protesters shot dead by their own military, as aggressively as they report on civilian protesters shot dead on the streets of Tehran, or the victims of the Syrian government or of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The naiveté here is staggering.
Pinker likes to attribute the sense of increased violence to multiple “illusions,” one of which is caused by the development of communications media that make it possible to record bloody events, and transmit them to the world. As he explained in a guest appearance on CBS TV’s The Early Show in mid-December 2011: “Not only can we send a helicopter with a film crew to any troubled spot in the world but now anyone with a cell phone is an instant reporter. They can broadcast color footage of bloodshed wherever it occurs and so we’re very aware of it.” Apparently, he believes that news media cover the world on a non-discriminatory basis, reporting on Guatemalan peasants slaughtered by their army, civilian victims of U.S. drone warfare in Afghanistan, and Honduran protesters shot dead by their own military, as aggressively as they report on civilian protesters shot dead on the streets of Tehran, or the victims of the Syrian government or of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The naiveté here is staggering.
Another
“illusion” in Pinker’s vision is the belief that war-related deaths and other
deaths by violence have increased over the years. Thus in his section on
“The Pacification Process,” he describes the violent potential for which he
believes psychologically modern humans had been naturally selected prior to
transitioning from their “hunter and gatherer” phase to a sedentary lifestyle
over the past 12,000 years. “If Hobbes’s theory [of the evolution from
barbarism to civilization and Leviathan] is right”—and Pinker believes that it
is—“this transition should also have ushered in the first major historical
decline in violence.”
But not only is there no credible evidence that war characterized human life prior to “civilization,” there is massive evidence that war is among the artifacts forged by civilization. The anthropologist Douglas P. Fry even calls the belief that humans faced a far higher probability of violent deaths in “nonstate” than “state” societies “Pinker’s Big Lie,” and adds that “in all cases, [war] was recent, not ancient activity—occurring after complex forms of social organization supplanted nomadic hunting and gathering.”[6] In a forthcoming collection edited by Fry, the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson assails what he calls “Pinker’s List” of 21 “Prehistoric” graves, and concludes that the list “consists of cherry-picked cases with high casualties,” and misrepresents “war’s antiquity and lethality.”[7]
Pinker employs the same kind of truth-bending method in his survey of wars and atrocities over the past 2,500 years. He asks: “Was the 20th Century Really the Worst?” He insists that the only way to compare the scale of violence across vast stretches of time is to treat death tolls as percentages of the world’s population, but adjusted to a “mid-20th century equivalent,” when the world’s population stood at 2.5 billion. This adjustment process enables Pinker to allege that the 55,000,000 deaths he attributes to World War II were modest when compared to the adjusted-total of 429,000,000 deaths stemming from the An Lushan Revolt in China around 750 AD. Hence, the technologically more advanced weapons of the 20th Century did not produce the bloodiest era after all. To think otherwise is an “illusion.”
But this is a sleight-of-hand method, and manufactures its own counter-illusion. Figure 5-6, “Richardson’s data,”[8] is based on Lewis Fry Richardson’s mid-20th Century book, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. It depicts 315 armed conflicts between 1800 and 1950.
But as Pinker derives this figure from an outside source, it does not inflate earlier death tolls the way Pinker does when comparing the An Lushan Revolt with World War II. The consequence is that in Figure 5-6, two armed conflicts stand out for their deadliness: The First and Second World Wars. But as this confutes the declining-violence-half of Pinker’s narrative, he urges readers to “Cover up the two outliers with your thumb” in order to produce the impression he wants to sustain: That the alleged “randomness” of these wars renders their timing and deadliness irrelevant to understanding them. Voila! The two World Wars were “statistical illusions.” That they occurred in the 20th Century teaches us nothing about modern times. “The most destructive event in history had to take place in some century,” he adds, taking flight from the real world, “and it could be embedded in any of a large number of very different long-term trends.” Where there is a will, there is a method.
Pinker completely ignores the phenomenon of structural violence, or the kind of violence that is “built into the structure” of social relations, and “shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances,” in Johan Galtung’s famous rendering. On a planet with more than 7 billion people facing mounting ecological pressures, the increasingly savage global class war of the 1 Percent against the other 99, and the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” that afflicts billions of people even in “normal” times—to extend Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze’s writings on India to the world as a whole—takes a toll every day that overshadows the violence of war.
But not only is there no credible evidence that war characterized human life prior to “civilization,” there is massive evidence that war is among the artifacts forged by civilization. The anthropologist Douglas P. Fry even calls the belief that humans faced a far higher probability of violent deaths in “nonstate” than “state” societies “Pinker’s Big Lie,” and adds that “in all cases, [war] was recent, not ancient activity—occurring after complex forms of social organization supplanted nomadic hunting and gathering.”[6] In a forthcoming collection edited by Fry, the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson assails what he calls “Pinker’s List” of 21 “Prehistoric” graves, and concludes that the list “consists of cherry-picked cases with high casualties,” and misrepresents “war’s antiquity and lethality.”[7]
Pinker employs the same kind of truth-bending method in his survey of wars and atrocities over the past 2,500 years. He asks: “Was the 20th Century Really the Worst?” He insists that the only way to compare the scale of violence across vast stretches of time is to treat death tolls as percentages of the world’s population, but adjusted to a “mid-20th century equivalent,” when the world’s population stood at 2.5 billion. This adjustment process enables Pinker to allege that the 55,000,000 deaths he attributes to World War II were modest when compared to the adjusted-total of 429,000,000 deaths stemming from the An Lushan Revolt in China around 750 AD. Hence, the technologically more advanced weapons of the 20th Century did not produce the bloodiest era after all. To think otherwise is an “illusion.”
But this is a sleight-of-hand method, and manufactures its own counter-illusion. Figure 5-6, “Richardson’s data,”[8] is based on Lewis Fry Richardson’s mid-20th Century book, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. It depicts 315 armed conflicts between 1800 and 1950.
But as Pinker derives this figure from an outside source, it does not inflate earlier death tolls the way Pinker does when comparing the An Lushan Revolt with World War II. The consequence is that in Figure 5-6, two armed conflicts stand out for their deadliness: The First and Second World Wars. But as this confutes the declining-violence-half of Pinker’s narrative, he urges readers to “Cover up the two outliers with your thumb” in order to produce the impression he wants to sustain: That the alleged “randomness” of these wars renders their timing and deadliness irrelevant to understanding them. Voila! The two World Wars were “statistical illusions.” That they occurred in the 20th Century teaches us nothing about modern times. “The most destructive event in history had to take place in some century,” he adds, taking flight from the real world, “and it could be embedded in any of a large number of very different long-term trends.” Where there is a will, there is a method.
Pinker completely ignores the phenomenon of structural violence, or the kind of violence that is “built into the structure” of social relations, and “shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances,” in Johan Galtung’s famous rendering. On a planet with more than 7 billion people facing mounting ecological pressures, the increasingly savage global class war of the 1 Percent against the other 99, and the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” that afflicts billions of people even in “normal” times—to extend Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze’s writings on India to the world as a whole—takes a toll every day that overshadows the violence of war.
Steven Pinker’s Better Angels is terrible as
a work of scholarship and as a guide to the real world. But it is an
outstanding snow job, with over a hundred figures, a great many footnotes, and
a flood of assured words and arguments that requires a certain amount of work
to understand. That its positive message, so well geared to the demands
and drift of Western imperialism, would be well received in establishment
circles is perfectly understandable. Less so is its uncritical treatment
by so many people who should know better.
---- ENDNOTES ----
---- ENDNOTES ----
[1]
This review originally appeared in the November-December 2012 issue of the
International Socialist Review, pp. 63-67. A longer version of it,
including a comprehensive list of sources and hyperlinks, can be found at
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for
Western-Imperial Violence,” ZNet, July 25, 2012.
[2]
Fred A. Wilcox, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam (Seven
Stories Press, 2011), p. 35. Also see the webpage maintained by the
Canadian environmental research firm, Hatfield Consultants, which is devoted to
the firm’s Agent
Orange Reports and Presentations from 1997 through the present.
[3]
See Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline
(Touchstone, Rev. Ed., 1985); Gordon Adams , The Politics of Defense
Contracting: The Iron Triangle (Transaction Publishers, 1981); Richard F.
Kaufman, The War Profiteers (Doubleday, 1972); and Tom Gervasi, The Myth of
Soviet Military Supremacy (Harpercollins, 1987).
[4]
See Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How
We Got There (Pantheon Books, 1982); Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Hill and
Wang, 1992); and Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global
Dominance (Metropolitan Books, 2003); Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third
World (Pantheon, 1988); and David Harvey, The New Imperialism ( Oxford
University Press, 2005).
[5]
See Chalmers A. Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American
Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2nd. Ed., 2007); Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2004); and Johnson,
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2008 );
Andrew J. Bacevich, The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security
Policy Since World War II (Columbia University Press, 2009); Henry A. Giroux,
The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex
(Paradigm Publishers, 2007); Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades
Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2009); and Winslow T. Wheeler, The
Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security (U.S. Naval Institute
Press, 2004).
[6] Douglas P. Fry, “Peace in Our Time,” Book Forum, December/January, 2012.
[6] Douglas P. Fry, “Peace in Our Time,” Book Forum, December/January, 2012.
[7] R.
Brian Ferguson, “Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality,” which
is scheduled to appear in a collection edited by Douglas P. Fry, War,
Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views
(Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Also see Ferguson, “The
Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East,” which will appear in
the same Fry-edited collection. For some early criticism of Pinker’s
upside-down assertions about the onset of war in human history and the alleged
decline of violence with the advent of the “Leviathan,” see, e.g., by
Christopher Ryan, “Steven
Pinker’s Stinker on the Origins of War,” Psychology Today, March 29, 2011,
which was based on Pinker’s 2007 TED lecture on the same topic; and Christopher
Ryan, “Pinker’s
Dirty War on Prehistoric Peace,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2012.
[8]
Figure 5-6 appears on p. 205 of Pinker’s book. Pinker takes Figure 5-6
from Brian Hayes, “Computing
Science: Statistics of Deadly Quarrels,” American Scientist, Vol. 90, No.
1, January/February, 2002, p. 13.
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