August 02, 2012
Poetry Changed the World
Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review:
What is the ethical power of literature? Can it diminish acts of injuring, and if it can, what aspects of literature deserve the credit?
All these questions, at first, hinge on another: can anything diminish injury? In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that, over 50 centuries, many forms of violence have subsided. Among the epochs he singles out for special scrutiny is a hundred-year period bridging the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during which an array of brutal acts—executing accused witches, imprisoning debtors, torturing animals, torturing humans, inflicting the death penalty, enslaving fellow human beings—suddenly abated, even if they did not disappear.
Attempting to account for “the sweeping change in everyday sensibilities” toward “the suffering in other living things” and for the protective laws that emerged during the Humanitarian Revolution, Pinker argues that the legal reforms were in some degree a product of increasing literacy. Reforms were immediately preceded by a startling increase in book production (e.g., in England, the number of publications rose from fewer than 500 per decade in 1600 to 2,000 per decade by 1700, and to 7,000 per decade by 1800) and by an equally startling surge in literacy, with the majority of Englishmen literate by the end of the seventeenth century, French by the end of the eighteenth, and Danish, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Scottish, Swedish, and Swiss by the end of the nineteenth century.
Pinker singles out one particular form of reading and one particular kind of book—the novel—though, as we will see, features of poetry that long predate the novels of this period are essential to literature’s capacity to reduce harm.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:01 AM | Permalink
Comments
here is edward herman & david peterson's critical critque of The Better Angels of Our Nature
http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-volence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson-1
Posted by: jim sharp | Aug 2, 2012 6:33:12 PM
Really interesting analgy between increase in literacy rates and decrease in violence
Posted by: Ivona Poyntz | Aug 3, 2012 12:58:43 AM
@jim re: the Herman review. Something I saw on a previous thread.
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: Simon | Aug 3, 2012 9:50:18 AM
@Ivona: "Really interesting analogy between increase in literacy rates and decrease in violence".
If we had remained illiterate we would have remained capable of throwing rocks only a 100 yards instead of throwing nukes across the planet.
Posted by: Raza | Aug 4, 2012 10:01:42 PM
Poetry
Picnics poetry’s first goal is to promote and advertise Poetry so that we can take advantage of the significance of arts and culture in the promotion of positive human interaction.
Posted by: poetry | Aug 7, 2012 6:28:34 AM
One part of Pinker's thesis is "clean"---namely, that the probability of a person dying by "direct" violence is smaller now than it was in the past. He thesis as to why is anything but "clean"---with his multitudinous better angels, etc. It is here where Herman and Peterson make an overwhelming case that Pinker is driven by ideology. And, as Pinker acknowledges in an interview, the primary purpose of the book is social and political: to illuminate what we are doing right, i.e., what caused this diminution of violence. Thus, his book is not a disinterested inquiry into whether or not violence has declined.
1) Pinker cherry-picks his sources, consistently using those that align with the US political establishment, and usually completely ignoring those that challenge it. For example, he accepts the simple "containment" explanation for the Cold War, and ignores the vast scholarship and declassified internal US government policy documents that show otherwise; he also never addresses simple questions such as (a) why the US would have to send so many more troops and drop so many more bombs to "defend" Vietnam (and elsewhere) from Communist expansion than the Communist aggressors were sending and dropping in order to aggressively expand there in the first place; and (b) why the US military budget has remained just as colossal after the ostensible Soviet expansionist threat was gone. He rejects high-end estimates of US-inflicted casualties on methodological grounds of precision, but does not apply the same qualms to estimated deaths caused by Soviet or Chinese government actions.
2) He considers but dismisses the simplest explanation for the "long peace"---namely, the development of nuclear weapons. Before the nuclear age, for centuries, there were constantly recurring wars between the greatest powers; after nuclear weapons, there were zero. This is a correlation of 1. Yet Pinker prefers other explanations with far lower correlations---"democracies don't fight each other, nor involve themselves in foreign disputes," "no two countries with McDonald's fight each other," etc., and that are otherwise highly dubious. The "democracy" explanation ignores how the US has bombed or invaded many non-nuclear countries. The "McDonald's" explanation ignores the fact that the establishment of a McDonald's requires prior agreement between the governments, and suggests that the countries concerned have already fallen within the US Neoliberal (no more of name-calling than using the word "Marxist") ideological orbit. Nor have two Stalinist countries fought each other.
Posted by: Caruthers | Aug 14, 2012 8:27:26 AM
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