Read an article by Steven Pinker tonight at work: "A History of Violence" in which he argues that the world--of human beings--is less violent now than it has ever been. This idea runs contrary to the dominant narratives of decline at work these days (not that they are new by any means) which hold that everything is pretty much going to hell in a hand basket. All of this ties in to the old argument about humans in their natural state vs. humans under the influence of social institutions. The noble savage and all that, corrupted by civilization. As a young man I bought into it. Now I tend to think that it is not just simplistic but quite wrong. Hobbes was right. Violence, murder, warfare are all fundamentally part of what we are. Fundamentally but not exclusively. These unpleasant tendencies are countered by reciprocity, a successful evolutionary strategy, and by those social institutions that supposedly corrupted the noble savage. Pinker agrees: "Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler." I will admit that the hell in a hand basket hero in me reads that and wants to start ranting about Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the like, but I think Pinker is ultimately correct and he marshals some good evidence. Following Peter Singer he suggests that perhaps the empathy born of that kernel of reciprocity and cooperation is expanded outward by social institutions and historical change to encompass ever larger groups of people. This has made violence less and less acceptable over time and made us more acutely aware of it and its effects. But, Pinker warns, this is not necessarily reason for optimism about the future.
Why do I bring this up. Well, it is interesting in and of itself, but it has made me think about The Wire. The Wire presents a world in which people are mostly helpless in the face of our bureaucratic institutions which now serve mostly to thwart those ends they are intended to further. The Wire, as David Simon points out, owes much to the Greeks. Individuals move in a world in which they find themselves rendered hopeless by forces beyond their control. Though in fairness, steadfast individual effort is one of the few things that can make a difference in the world of The Wire. But reading Pinker makes me think about some of those institutions in a new light. Sure they are problematic at best, and often horrible, but they're mostly the best human beings have ever done. And it is because of their effects on us, the changes they have wrought, that we are so acutely aware of their many shortcomings. In other words, we couldn't have the sort of criticism of dysfunctional social institutions that The Wire does so well if those same institutions had not been successful at countering some of our worst tendencies and encouraging some of our best. Again, however, this is no reason to feel smug or even content. Those institutions require heavy maintenance, and as The Wire shows us, many of their parts no longer work.
