July 31, 2012
pinker: the left critique
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.”[34] It kicks in for Pinker with communist expansionism and U.S. “containment.” It also kicks in with his notion that communism, but not capitalism, was both “utopian” and “essentialist,” “submerge[ing] individuals into moralized categories,” and causing some of the worst atrocities of the modern period. (328-329) But weren’t the racism and anticommunism of the Western powers and in particular the United States “essentialist” ideologies 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 and cultures 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?more from Edward S Herman and David Peterson at ZNET here. (h/t Gary L. Olson).
Posted by Morgan Meis at 05:04 AM | Permalink
Comments
Seems to be a long tedious article, written from an idealogical point of view. Authors don't seem strong on mathematics or the scientific method. To be honest I gave up a little way into it.
Posted by: Brian Mulligan | Aug 1, 2012 4:36:02 AM
I'd characterize it as "scholarly" rather than "long" and "tedious", what with its 240 footnotes and everything.
It's certainly ideological, but any discussion of the long-term incidence of violence is bound to be ideological.
I wish they wouldn't pick on Norbert Elias though. I don't know how well Elias work on "civilizing processes" has stood up in light of subsequent research, but it's not got any inherent political bias. He covers a lot of the same ground that Foucault did later in Discipline and Punish.
Posted by: JoshM | Aug 1, 2012 10:40:46 AM
This piece is a mess.
Posted by: Simon | Aug 1, 2012 3:10:45 PM
This reminds me of the similarly dreadful review of the book by John Gray, though to his credit Gray wasn't this prolix. Like Gray, it takes a thesis that's emphatically (even tediously) quantitative, being all about graphs and figures and numbers, and "refutes" it, first with a long list of modern conflicts, and then again with selective "problemetizations" of every analysis Pinker provides that sticks in a craw somewhere. Without any actual statistical technique whatsoever. They have even the chutzpah to put 'Poissonian process' and 'power law' in scare quotes somewhere along the way. I mean, who ever heard of doing statistics with math? If it feels psychologically or politically right, it must be. And proving the world isn't perfectly peaceful, or that numbers and datasets aren't perfect, is a good substitute for actually examining trend-lines in violence over human history. And when this seems too clearly flimsy an argumentative approach, call Pinker names. And man do we get names; he's capitalist, neoliberal, racist, triumphalist, neoconservative, genocidal, Islamophobic, not anti-anti-communist enough, essentialist, Panglossian, deterministic, Orientalist (am I ever glad I managed to survive a decade on the same continent with this creep. inside that hairy head of his the man's a bloody sociopath...) I was a bit surprised to find the word 'reductionistic' missing, especially given the cleanness of Pinker's thesis, but one can't expect even reviewers as thorough as these to remember everything.
Like Gray's review, the only useful conceptual point made is that Pinker uses population-relative and not absolute measures of violence. This is certainly an important issue, but to hear these fellows talk you'd think that point had never occurred to Pinker or anyone else, or that absolute violence is obviously the right metric to use here. All I can say is, when the United Federation of Planets is established with Admiral Picard ruling over fifty quadrillion people, it might not be entirely fair to judge them harshly because more people wind up dead in their wars than in ours.
This is the sort of article that merits psychoanalysis, and since name-calling is the very game here, it seems perfectly appropriate to dish it back. There's a certain species of (often humanistic, though these charlies aren't) mind whose intellectual itch is not to be scratched without bending over backwards. It is not enough to say that US foreign policy hasn't exactly had clean hands through the 20th century, or that democratic liberalism hasn't been nearly quite so superior to communistic efforts as we'd like. Oh no, there must be an actual equivalence, except even worse because of the hypocrisy. And the suggestion that life might be just the teensy bit nicer now than it's been in the past because of the efforts of people over time, that might as well be heresy for the quickness with these people jump to say 'whig history' . If your daily toilet is completed with the observation that, I dunno, the horrors of scientific militarism and totalitarianism and the two world wars expose as hollow the triumphalist visions of enlightenment progress, fine, whatever floats your boat I guess. But what a pity that this tripe is such a dominant strand of lefter-than-thou political discourse, to the extent that progress itself becomes a dirty word.
Posted by: prasad | Aug 1, 2012 7:04:35 PM
Super, Prasad!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 1, 2012 10:00:59 PM
Good one, Prasad. Wish you had vented at A.B. too :-)
Posted by: Ruchira | Aug 1, 2012 11:05:44 PM
Perhaps Prasad can cross-vent!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 1, 2012 11:54:42 PM
Cross-vent! Lol, many thanks, a lovely coinage.
Posted by: prasad | Aug 2, 2012 11:02:56 AM
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