“Believe it or not […] violence has declined over long periods, and today we may live in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth […]. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children” (Pinker, S., 2011, The Better Angels of our Nature)
I turn my eye to my everyday battles, the sexism and racism I still experience in the streets and online. I realised that I often find myself experiencing the world in an opposite perspective to what Pinker’s quote portrays. However, I agree with the central premise that violence has decreased throughout history. What we witness today is still brutal and biased. However, we are experiencing less violence than at any other time in history. How can this assertion be justified without cancelling the voices of all who work today to end racism and sexism? How can we agree with such statemennt when we the world is still at word in the name of property and religion? How can I say this just some days after Tyre Nichols’s funeral? What is the point of bringing this subject to light? Because what such a statement achieves in the general public is blindness, it justifies numbness; worst of all, it inoculates against feeling outraged at inequality. In an article in The Guardian, John Gray criticised Pinker (and Peter Singer) for praising the Enlightenment ideas that so much have contributed to the inequality of both is and gender we are struggling to eliminate today.
There are several scenarios we have to take into consideration. Global scale, national scale, gender scale, race scale, etc. Of these scenarios or frames, when we look at their history, we can constate that the level of violence experienced has diminished. For example, although gendered violence is still a global problem, it was less than 150 years ago when it was accepted, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged by both religions as the state. We globally raise against regimes that what to perpetuate policies of gender violence. This is a positive outlook, and the reasoning behind its sound, yet left without a further explanation, has a potentially dangerous outcome.
On the one hand, it would allow those who perpetuate the negative models of freedom to claim that there is no urgent need to change how we behave towards one another. On the other hand, it would relax those who actively work towards it, offering a sense of completion that is not yet true. I don’t know in what context Pinker state this, and taking on reading the whole work is not in my winter ’23 schedule. I was revising old lecture notes on Hegel and came across this quote by psychologist Steve Pinker. I was reflecting on freedom and morality. I am dedicated to reading some giants this winter: Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) and Merlau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945). I give myself time until the end of March. Some might say that is enough time, yet some dedicate their academic life to just one of these texts.
In my last semester at the UvA, I was inscribed to follow a vibrant course on Merlau-Ponty. However, I needed more focus and enthusiasm. It was 2021, the global lockdown had been going on for almost two years, and following philosophy courses via zoom made me depressed and demotivated. Therefore, I dropped out to put all the energy and focus I could gather into writing my thesis.