Steven Pinker’s Concept of Global Violence Decline and the Response of the Scientific Community

Two widely discussed books on violence by Steven Pinker offer a grand metanarrative about the movement of humanity towards reason, progress, and humanism. The article briefly generalizes the main author’s methodological predispositions. The article also deals with the conceptual analysis of the theory. The scholar’s theory is based on several key ideas: the state, gentle commerce, the taming of manners, and the Enlightenment. The main point is that society, passing successively through such stages-ideas, moves in the direction of greater progress and limitation of violence. As for the criticisms, we illustrate the limitations of the method chosen and the inadequacy of its objectives. First, the author uses the criminological method of counting the number of murders per hundred thousand in a population, which can only characterize one segment of violence. Secondly, the measured violence does not always correlate with other violent crimes. We also point out objective difficulties in working with the available statistics. In particular, we are confronted with fragmented data and incomparable methodology of data collection from predecessors. In addition, we reveal many mistakes, inaccuracies, and in many cases even deliberate discrepancies within representative data. Steven Pinker often resorts to overly sweeping generalizations and comparisons of difficult-to-compare cases. Many scholars have also noted the author’s use of unprofessional literature. In terms of conceptual ideas, critics note the author’s ignorance of contemporary debates and disregard for differences in the works of those classics used in the work. We should also note the rather unfriendly tone of the discussion on the part of all the participants, since the dispute is about big ideas, which often leads to direct insults and labeling. In conclusion, we praise the communicative gesture of challenging the scientific community, but it seems clear that the main goal to give proof towards violence decline is inconclusive.