In our society we revere scientists far more than we revere historians. Consequently, people are often more willing to listen to what scientists say about history than what historians say about history. Unfortunately, often times, when scientists try to speak or write about history, they make glaring mistakes.
For instance, I have already written extensively about how the 1980 television miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, written and presented by the astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, promoted all sorts of egregious misconceptions about the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia and about the supposed destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
The book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, written by the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker is one that has been bothering me for a long time. I promised that I would write an article about it in this article I wrote last year about violence in the pre-modern world, but I have been holding back until now because I am aware of how popular the book is and what an impact it has had on so many people’s lives.
Bill Gates, for instance, described it in a review as “one of the most important books I’ve read – not just this year, but ever.” Unfortunately, this book is filled with all kinds of historical inaccuracies and I think it promotes some ideas that, while they may seem comforting in the short-term, are actually deleterious in the long-run.
Pinker’s basic argument
In case you are unfamiliar with the book, Pinker’s basic historical argument is that all of human history up until the Early Modern Period is a chronicle of superstition, backwardness, barbarity, and relentless, inhuman cruelty. He contends that life in the pre-modern world was, to quote Thomas Hobbes, whom Pinker displays a professed fondness for, “nasty, brutish, and short”; violence was an unavoidable part of everyday life and no one even considered the idea that it was bad.
Then, Pinker contends, in western Europe during the Early Modern Period, people started to become civilized and then the Enlightenment happened and everything has been getting better ever since. Pinker says that, over the past few centuries, humanity has made stunning and remarkable progress in all areas. According to Pinker, we are currently living in the best, most peaceful, most prosperous time in all of human history and things are only getting better overall.
It is easy to see why this story is so appealing. There is a rugged, Whiggish simplicity to it. Furthermore, it is a comforting narrative in which we are not only clearly superior to our ancestors in every way, but also clearly heading in the right direction. It is a real shame that this whole narrative is riddled with inaccuracies and oversimplifications.
Because I do not have time to write a response to Pinker’s entire book, I will focus this review primarily on the sections in the first few chapters dealing with ancient and medieval history. Before I get into it, though, I want to make very clear that I am not disputing Pinker’s argument that violence was generally more common in the ancient and medieval worlds than it is today. What I am disputing, however, is Pinker’s overall portrayal of the ancient and medieval worlds.
From reading Pinker’s book, one comes away with the impression that everyone in pre-modern times was a brutal monster, gratuitous violence was an extremely common, unavoidable part of everyday life, and no one even considered that things like rape, torture, and genocide might be wrong. This is very much an inaccurate portrayal that is rooted in Pinker’s extensive and largely uncritical reliance on a small number of unreliable sources and works of outright fiction.
ABOVE: Image of one version of the front cover of Pinker’s bestselling book
Pinker’s assessment of prehistoric societies
In his book, Pinker presents the traditionally widely accepted view that prehistoric nomadic societies were unbelievably violent and almost constantly at war. This is very much the traditional view that most scholars have had of prehistoric societies. Prehistory is not my main area of expertise, so I will not dwell on it too much, but I will note that the traditional view advanced by Pinker has been challenged in recent years.
For instance, here’s a paper by Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg published in July 2013 that looks at lethal aggression in twenty-one contemporary nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. The paper concludes that, in general, these societies are far less violent than has traditionally been thought. They also observe that most documented cases of lethal aggression in these societies were classifiable as homicides committed by a single person against another person and that actual wars between hunter-gatherer tribes were quite rare.
My view is that the data just isn’t clear enough to make any pronouncements about how violent prehistoric cultures were, since our evidence of these cultures is extremely limited. Also, we need to be willing to recognize that there may have been significant variation in how violent these societies were; just because some hunter-gatherer groups were extremely violent doesn’t mean they all were.
Pinker’s assessment of ancient Greece
Pinker’s description of ancient Greek warfare is almost totally reliant on the portrayal of war in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad and the Odyssey are, however, works of fiction and they are not in any sense accurate reflections of what warfare in archaic Greece was really like. Classicists have known this for at least a century.
For instance, as I discuss in this article I wrote in March 2019 about the historicity of the Trojan War, the author of the Iliad seems to have had no idea how chariots were used in Bronze Age warfare. At the time when the Iliad was composed, chariots were no longer used for warfare, but the author of the Iliad seems to have had a vague impression that they had been used for warfare at some point in the past.
Thus, the author of the Iliad imagines chariots being used almost like golf carts, with the warriors riding the chariots to the site of the battle and then disembarking in order to fight on foot in hand-to-hand combat. In historical reality, it seems that warriors who had chariots actually fought in those chariots. Indeed, that was the whole advantage of having a chariot. The Iliad therefore portrays chariots being used in warfare in a way that they were probably never really used.
Fantastic and mythological elements appear all throughout the Iliad. For instance, deities are constantly intervening in the conflict, Achilles’s horses Balios and Xanthos can talk, and heroes are described as lifting massive boulders that no man alive in the poet’s age could lift. In Book Twenty-One of the Iliad, Achilles literally fights a river god who is mad about him dumping so many corpses into his waters. These poems were composed for entertainment, not to accurately document what Bronze Age warfare was really like.
ABOVE: Painting of Achilleus fighting the god of the river Skamandros, a scene from Book Twenty-One of the Iliad, painted in 1737 by the French painter Charles-Antoine Coypel. The Iliad is primarily a work of fantasy, not of history.
Citing the Iliad and the Odyssey as evidence that archaic Greek culture was exceptionally violent is like citing modern violent films as proof that contemporary American society is exceptionally violent. Humans have always told stories involving graphic violence; we still tell stories involving graphic violence today and we will probably still be telling stories involving graphic violence in a thousand years. All that these stories prove is that humans in general have a fascination with stories of violence.
Pinker’s analysis of what life was like in ancient Greece relies heavily on Johnathan Gottschall, a literary scholar who, as best as I can tell, has no formal background in history or classical studies in particular. In the entire section, Pinker does not even reference a single ancient Greek historical source or a single classicist.
In response to the argument that ancient Greek warfare was generally less deadly than modern warfare because people in ancient Greece were fighting with spears and swords rather than with “machine guns, artillery, bombers, and other long-distance weaponry,” Pinker merely quotes a graphic description from Gottschall of people getting slaughtered with spears and dismisses the issue.
It baffles me that Pinker could somehow think this even constitutes an argument; one graphic description of slaughter from a modern literary critic based on the Iliad, a work of fiction, does not constitute as proof that a spear is as deadly as a machine gun.
Ironically, one piece of historical evidence that we can perhaps gather from the Homeric poems is that many of the original listeners of these poems had probably never seen an actual battle first-hand; the poet frequently describes men fighting using similes comparing them to everyday scenes from the natural world, especially of animals, which many scholars have suspected is because the poet was trying to conjure up images of what a battle might look like for those who had never seen one.
ABOVE: A Reading from Homer, painted in 1885 by the Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Now, of course, in historical reality, the ancient Greeks were capable of being quite violent, but I think Pinker’s portrayal leaves a rather significant misimpression of just how violent life in ancient Greece really was.
Archaic Greek warfare was much smaller-scale than modern warfare and, in most cases, probably resulted in a lot fewer deaths. Battles were usually rather small-scale, with armies most often being composed of only a few hundred men at most, and they were usually fought over land. It was not a common occurrence for a city to be sacked and burned like the Greeks supposedly did to Troy.
Starting in around the late sixth century BC, as certain Greek city-states became larger and more powerful, Greek warfare became somewhat larger-scale. The Greco-Persian Wars (lasted 499 – 449 BC) were the first truly large-scale conflict involving the Greeks.
Naturally, with these larger conflicts came greater bloodshed. Some of the most notorious ancient Greek wartime atrocities were committed during the Peloponnesian War (lasted 431 – 404 BC), which was fought with the city-state of Athens and its allies on one side and Sparta and its allies on the other.
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dated to c. 480 BC or thereabouts depicting a Greek hoplite fighting with a Persian warrior
In 427 BC, at the urging of the Thebans, the Spartans slaughtered all the men of the city of Plataia (which was allied with Athens), sold all the women and children into slavery, and burned the city. That same year, the Athenians subdued a rebellion of the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. They initially voted to slaughter all the men and sell all the women and children into slavery, but voted to rescind this severe order at the urging of a man named Diodotos, son of Eukrates. Thus, the Mytilenians were spared.
Not all cities that rebelled against the Athenians were quite so fortunate. In 421 BC, the Athenians put down a rebellion of the city of Skione in Chalkidike in northern Greece. The Assembly voted to slaughter all the men and sell all the women and children into slavery. This time they actually followed through with it.
Most notoriously of all, in 416 BC, the Athenians laid siege to the island of Melos just because the Melians were Dorians (the same ethnic group as the Spartans) and they refused to side with the Athenians against their own kinsmen. That winter, the Athenians slaughtered all the men of Melos, sold all the women and children into slavery, and sent Athenian colonists to resettle the island.
These sorts of actions, though, were widely recognized at the time as extraordinarily brutal and there were many people at the time who opposed them. I’ve already mentioned how Diodotos spoke out against the slaughter of Mytilenians. I will also note that, in spring 415 BC, just a few months after the slaughter of the Melians by the Athenians, the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BC) produced his tragedy The Trojan Women, which is widely considered by classical scholars to be a harsh commentary on Athenian foreign policy.
The play is centered on the women of Troy, whose husbands and male relatives have all been killed, whose homes have been destroyed, and who are being taken as sex slaves by the very men who killed their husbands. It portrays their suffering vividly and moves audiences to sympathize with them. It’s hard to read the play and think that Euripides approved in any manner of what the Athenians had done to the Melians.
It’s also worth noting that, even in the fifth century BC, killing all the men and enslaving all the women and children wasn’t always the course of action when a city was defeated. For instance, in 404 BC, after the Athenians were utterly defeated by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans did not slaughter the Athenians and burn their city; instead they merely forced the Athenians to tear down their walls, give up their navy, give up all their overseas territories, and accept a Spartan-imposed oligarchic government.
ABOVE: Nineteenth-century engraving of the murder of the Trojan prince Astyanax, a young boy, the only son of Hektor and his wife Andromache
Pinker’s assessment of violence in the Hebrew Bible
In the following section, Pinker spends several pages describing in great detail examples of acts of violence from works that are included in the Hebrew Bible. At the end, after spending all those pages discussing the issue, he admits, “The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened.” Nevertheless, Pinker immediately goes on to argue that the fact that people in ancient Israel were telling stories about violence at all shows they were part of an exceptionally violent society, writing:
“Though the historical accounts in the Old Testament are fictitious (or at best artistic reconstructions, like Shakespeare’s historical dramas), they offer a window into the lives and values of Near Eastern civilizations in the mid-1st millennium BCE. Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, they certainly thought it was a good idea. The possibility that a woman had a legitimate interest in not being raped or acquired as sexual property did not seem to register in anyone’s mind. The writers of the Bible saw nothing wrong with slavery or with cruel punishments like blinding, stoning, and hacking someone to pieces. Human life held no value in comparison to unthinking obedience to custom and authority.”
The first problem here is exactly the problem I pointed out in the last section. Pinker is interpreting legends and fictional stories about violence as proof of a violent society, but this is, as I said before, a very flawed approach. The fact is, humans have always had stories about graphic violence. Not only do we still have those stories today, but they are among the most popular stories out there.
The fact that people within a society tell violent stories is not necessarily proof that the people in that society are exceptionally violent. Can you imagine what a scholar 2,000 years from now would think of contemporary American culture if they were to apply the same reasoning as Pinker to modern video games, television shows, and movies? Clearly Pinker has either never watched notoriously violent shows like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or The Walking Dead.
Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that many of the acts of violence Pinker references are actually portrayed negatively. For instance, Pinker retells the story of King David’s affair with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband Uriah, but he neglects to mention that this affair is explicitly condemned in the text multiple times and is portrayed as a disgrace on David’s kingship.
Now, there are some acts of violence described in the Hebrew Bible that are fairly unambiguously portrayed as admirable. The genocide of the Canaanites, for instance, is something that is notably written about favorably. It is extremely important to remember, though, that all the texts included in the Hebrew Bible were written by members of one particular elite religious faction.
These texts therefore do not reflect what everyone in ancient Israel and Judah believed or even necessarily the majority of people believed; they only reflect the beliefs of the people who wrote them.
Oh and, by the way, regarding Pinker’s comment that “The possibility that a woman had a legitimate interest in not being raped or acquired as sexual property did not seem to register in anyone’s mind,” I’m pretty sure it at least registered in women’s minds and, last I checked, women count as “anyone.” The problem is that we don’t have substantial writings from ancient Israelite or Judahite women.
ABOVE: Illustration by the French illustrator James Tissot (lived 1836 – 1902) of Samson slaying a thousand Philistines with nothing but the jawbone of a donkey
Pinker’s assessment of early Christianity and the Roman Empire
Pinker moves on from the Old Testament to talk about the New Testament, the Roman Empire, and early Christianity. He starts by quoting the Gospel of Matthew 10:34–37, a passage that has been widely misinterpreted. Here is the passage as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
“For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;”
Pinker doesn’t bother trying to interpret this passage, which is probably for the best, since I’m sure he’d mangle it. Many of his readers, though, will no doubt misinterpret this passage as evidence that Jesus was some kind of terrorist or violent revolutionary. That is not the case, however.
The historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who believed that the end of the world was imminent. He believed that the end would be preceded by a time of terrible wars, strife, and persecutions. When he says “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” he doesn’t mean that he is personally going to take a sword and kill people with it, but rather that he has come as a prophet of the end times. It’s a prediction of violence, not a threat.
ABOVE: Fourth-century AD Christian painting from the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter depicting the woman with the issue of blood taking hold of Jesus’s himation
After this, Pinker talks about some of the brutal ways the Romans executed criminals and prisoners of war in their arenas. He’s right that these were undoubtedly extremely violent spectacles, but he conveniently fails to mention the fact that there were many people at the time who found these sorts of executions disgusting.
For instance, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BC – 65 AD) describes in his Moral Letter to Lucilius 7 how he went to the arena during the intermission between gladiatorial fights hoping to see some peaceful entertainment, but instead was horrified to witness a series of bloody executions of the sort Pinker describes. Here is what Seneca says, as translated by Richard Mott Gummere:
“By chance I attended a mid-day exhibition, expecting some fun, wit, and relaxation, – an exhibition at which men’s eyes have respite from the slaughter of their fellow-men. But it was quite the reverse. The previous combats were the essence of compassion; but now all the trifling is put aside and it is pure murder. The men have no defensive armour. They are exposed to blows at all points, and no one ever strikes in vain. Many persons prefer this programme to the usual pairs and to the bouts ‘by request.’ Of course they do; there is no helmet or shield to deflect the weapon. What is the need of defensive armour, or of skill? All these mean delaying death.”
“In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators. The spectators demand that the slayer shall face the man who is to slay him in his turn; and they always reserve the latest conqueror for another butchering. The outcome of every fight is death, and the means are fire and sword. This sort of thing goes on while the arena is empty. You may retort: ‘But he was a highway robber; he killed a man!’ And what of it? Granted that, as a murderer, he deserved this punishment, what crime have you committed, poor fellow, that you should deserve to sit and see this show?”
Next, Pinker goes on to talk about Roman gladiators. He declares:
“Gladiators fought each other to the death; our thumbs-up and thumbs-down gestures may have come from the signals flashed by the crowd to a victorious gladiator telling him whether to administer the coup de grâce to his opponent.”
Pinker is right that gladiators were sometimes killed in the arena, but, as I discuss in this article I published in February 2019, this wasn’t always or even necessarily usually the case. Unlike the criminals and prisoners of war who were sent into the arena specifically to be executed, gladiators were slaves who had been specially trained by professional coaches known as lanistae to fight for popular entertainment. They were highly expensive to buy and train and there was a shortage of slaves who were fit to serve as gladiators. Consequently, gladiators’ owners tended not be very happy when they were killed in combat.
For this reason, by the early Principate, there was a complex system of rules and penalties in place that was designed to keep gladiators alive as long as possible. Gladiators who were injured in combat were given the best medical attention available. Historians estimate that probably only around one in ten gladiator fights actually ended in a death.
This isn’t to say that gladiator fights weren’t horrible or that they were just like modern combat sports; gladiators were slaves, meaning they were forced to fight, and many gladiators did indeed die. If one out every ten boxing matches ended with a boxer getting killed, one would hope that boxing would be quickly banned. Nonetheless, real-life gladiator fights weren’t quite as deadly as they are usually portrayed in modern movies and television shows.
Pinker’s claim that the thumbs-up and thumbs-down signals might originate from the signals given by the crowd to tell a gladiator whether or not to kill his opponent is wrong on several levels. First of all, it probably wasn’t the crowd who signaled to a gladiator whether he could kill his opponent, but rather the editor—the government official presiding over the match.
Second of all, the hand gesture made by the editor of the match to tell a gladiator to kill his opponent is described in Latin as pollice verso, which means “with a turned thumb.” This most likely refers not to a thumbs-down gesture, but rather to some kind of a thumb-to-side gesture. The gesture made by the editor to tell the gladiator not to kill his opponent is described in Latin as pollice compresso, which means “with a compressed thumb.” This almost certainly refers not to a thumbs-up, but rather to a closed fist.
Finally, it is worth noting that, at least during the Imperial Era, it was generally seen as poor taste for an editor to tell a gladiator to kill his opponent, especially if that opponent had fought well. One of the few places where the phrase pollice verso is attested in an actual ancient Latin text is in a satirical poem by the Christian poet Prudentius (lived c. 348 – c. 413 AD) ridiculing a certain Vestal Virgin for always urging gladiators to kill their opponents.
ABOVE: The painting Police Verso, painted in 1872 by the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, which popularized the misconception that the crowd signaled to a gladiator to kill his opponent with a thumbs down
Pinker argues that, in the Roman Empire, crucifixion was a “common punishment,” claiming that Jesus “was convicted of minor rabble-rousing” and that he was crucified between “two common thieves.” This is, however, a willful distortion of the gospel narrative.
The gospels do not say that Jesus was “convicted of minor rabble-rousing”; on the contrary, according to the gospels, he was accused of claiming to be the “King of the Jews,” which, for the Romans, was a very serious political offense. From the perspective of the Romans, Jesus was a dangerous seditionist who was threatening the peace and good order of the city of Jerusalem. Jesus was not a terrorist, but, from the Romans’ perspective, he might as well have been.
Likewise, Pinker describes the men Jesus was crucified with as “common thieves,” which makes it sound like they were merely petty pick-pockets. The actual Greek word that is used to describe them in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, though, is λῃστής (lēistḗs), which can mean “brigand,” “robber,” or “violent insurrectionist.” In Greek, there is a clear distinction between a λῃστής and a κλέπτης (kléptēs), a common thief.
In other words, according to the gospels, the two men crucified alongside Jesus were violent criminals and probably murderers. Under the current United States justice system, it is likely that such criminals would receive prison for life.
Crucifixion was a horrible, inhumane, and evil form of execution and the fact that the Romans used it at all is despicable. Nonetheless, they did not just dole it out to anyone who was convicted of even the slightest infraction. Notably, Roman citizens were usually exempt from crucifixion. It was a punishment usually only given to slaves and peregrini (i.e. non-citizens) and, even then, it was usually only given for serious crimes such as murder, robbery, insurrection, and piracy.
Some Roman authors refer to crucifixion as “crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicum,” which means “the cruelest and most disgusting penalty.” The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC) writes in his Defense of Rabirius 5.16, as translated by William Blake Tyrrell:
“Wretched is the loss of one’s good name in the public courts, wretched, too, a monetary fine exacted from one’s property, and wretched is exile, but, still, in each calamity there is retained some trace of liberty. Even if death is set before us, we may die in freedom. But the executioner, the veiling of heads, and the very word ‘cross,’ let them all be far removed from not only the bodies of Roman citizens but even from their thoughts, their eyes, and their ears.”
“The results and suffering from these doings as well as the situation, even anticipation, of their enablement, and, in the end, the mere mention of them are unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man. Or is that, while the kindness of their masters frees our slaves from the fear of all these punishments with one stroke of the staff of manumission, neither our exploits nor the lives we have lived nor honors you have bestowed will liberate us from scourging, from the hook, and, finally, from the terror of the cross?”
In other words, the Romans fully realized that crucifixion was brutal and extreme.
ABOVE: Illustration of the crucifixion of Jesus from the Syriac Rabbula Gospels, dating to c. 586 AD
Pinker goes on to talk at length about how early Christians venerated martyrs who had died in horrifyingly cruel ways. Most of the stories he retells, though, are probably fictional. Early Christians liked making up stories about brave martyrs maintaining their faith even in the face of the cruelest practices imaginable because such stories made themselves look good and the Roman authorities look evil. Some Christians really were martyred, but not nearly as many as the stories would lead you to believe.
After this, he goes on to talk about how early Christians believed that the wicked would be brutally tortured in Hell for all of eternity. He declares:
“By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe.”
It’s true that most (but not all) early Christians did believe that the wicked would burn in Hell for all of eternity, but Pinker seems to skip over the fact that they believed that such punishments would be doled out by God in the next life; the goal in this life wasn’t to inflict those punishments, but rather to save people from facing those punishments by getting them to repent and come to Christ.
Furthermore, Pinker leaves out a lot of information that seriously undermines his thesis that Christianity “set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture.” Notably, he scarcely even mentions the fact that the works of the New Testament contain some remarkably pacifistic teachings. For instance, in the Gospel of Matthew 5:38–48, Jesus is portrayed as saying this, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The saying about loving your enemies is also attested in Gospel of Luke 6:27–28, indicating that it comes from Q, an early written source or group of sources shared by the independent authors of both Matthew and Luke:
“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
Matthew 5:9 records another saying of Jesus advocating peace:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
Matthew 26:52 records this saying of Jesus:
“Then Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’”
These are not teachings that encourage “systematic torture.” While it’s true that various Christians throughout history have chosen to ignore these teachings, they are part of the Christian Bible and they are just as significant as the teachings that Pinker highlights.
ABOVE: The Sermon on the Mount, painted in 1877 by the Danish painter Carl Bloch
Indeed, there were many early Christians who took the pacifistic teachings of the gospels very seriously. In around 248 AD or thereabouts, the Christian philosopher Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 AD) wrote an apologetic treatise in Greek titled Against Kelsos in which he responded in-depth to arguments posed by the Greek writer Kelsos in his anti-Christian polemic The True Word, which was probably written sometime around 170 AD or thereabouts.
In Against Kelsos 8.73, Origenes quotes a passage from Kelsos’s polemic accusing Christians of being unpatriotic because they refused to serve in the military. Origenes responds to this accusation by saying that Christians are strictly forbidden by Jesus himself from causing harm to any human being and that they therefore are not permitted to serve in the military. In defense of Christian pacifism, Origenes points out that pagan priests were forbidden from serving in the military because they were required to keep their hands free of blood. Origenes writes, as translated by Frederick Crombie:
“Do not those who are priests at certain shrines, and those who attend on certain gods, as you account them, keep their hands free from blood, that they may with hands unstained and free from human blood offer the appointed sacrifices to your gods; and even when war is upon you, you never enlist the priests in the army. If that, then, is a laudable custom, how much more so, that while others are engaged in battle, these too should engage as the priests and ministers of God, keeping their hands pure, and wrestling in prayers to God on behalf of those who are fighting in a righteous cause, and for the king who reigns righteously, that whatever is opposed to those who act righteously may be destroyed!”
Origenes goes on to argue that Christians actually do far more to help the emperor than the emperor’s own soldiers because Christians pray for the emperor’s well-being and he says that prayer is far more beneficial to the emperor than actually serving in the emperor’s army, because God can do more than any human can.
We do know from other sources and archaeological evidence that there were, in fact, many Christians in the Roman army in the third century AD when Origenes was alive. Nevertheless, the fact that Kelsos and Origenes both seem to have had the impression that Christians were forbidden to serve in the military shows that at least some Christians were evidently refusing.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Roman soldiers depicted on the Column of Marcus Aurelius, dating to the late second century AD
Finally, it should be noted that early Christians were the ones who brought an end to gladiatorial tournaments in late antiquity. As I discuss in this article I wrote back in February 2019, Christians seem to have strongly opposed gladiatorial combat from very early on. The early Christian writer and theologian Tertullianus (lived c. 155 – c. 240 AD), a North African of Berber origin who wrote in Latin, condemned gladiatorial games in the strongest possible terms in Chapter XIX of his treatise On the Spectacles. Here is what Tertullianus writes, as translated by Reverend S. Thelwall:
“We shall now see how the Scriptures condemn the amphitheatre. If we can maintain that it is right to indulge in the cruel, and the impious, and the fierce, let us go there. If we are what we are said to be, let us regale ourselves there with human blood. It is good, no doubt, to have the guilty punished. Who but the criminal himself will deny that? And yet the innocent can find no pleasure in another’s sufferings: he rather mourns that a brother has sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful.”
“But who is my guarantee that it is always the guilty who are adjudged to the wild beasts, or to some other doom, and that the guiltless never suffer from the revenge of the judge, or the weakness of the defence, or the pressure of the rack? How much better, then, is it for me to remain ignorant of the punishment inflicted on the wicked, lest I am obliged to know also of the good coming to untimely ends–if I may speak of goodness in the case at all! At any rate, gladiators not chargeable with crime are offered in sale for the games, that they may become the victims of the public pleasure. Even in the case of those who are judicially condemned to the amphitheatre, what a monstrous thing it is, that, in undergoing their punishment, they, from some less serious delinquency, advance to the criminality of manslayers!”
The later Christian writers Lactantius (lived c. 250 – c. 325 AD), Ioannes Chrysostomos (lived c. 349 – 407 AD), and Augustinus of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 AD) also condemned the gladiatorial contests as heinous and immoral. It was ultimately the Christian emperor Honorius (ruled as western emperor 393 – 423 AD) who shut down the gladiator schools in 399 AD and finally completely banned gladiatorial combat in 404 AD.
Pinker does not talk about any of this because it goes against his narrative that religious belief inherently encourages violence. The truth, though, is far more complicated. Some religious beliefs can sometimes encourage certain kinds of violence, but, other times, religious beliefs can discourage or even end certain kinds of violence. It’s not a simple matter of less religion automatically equals less violence.
ABOVE: Detail of an ancient Roman mosaic from Torrenova dated to the early fourth century AD depicting gladiatorial combat
Pinker’s assessment of the Inquisition, torture, and heresy
Pinker talks quite a bit about the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, and torture. It’s true that torture did exist during the Middle Ages and that some people accused of heresy really were tortured. Nonetheless, what Pinker doesn’t seem to realize is that very, very few people were ever actually tortured for heresy in the Middle Ages.
As I discuss in this article I wrote debunking popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages, the medieval church’s control over what people believed was extremely tenuous at best, even when it came to its own clergy. In many areas during many time periods, heresy was more common than orthodoxy.
Heresy was so common throughout western Europe during the Middle Ages that, most of the time, the church basically paid no attention to ordinary people who held views that the church deemed heretical. Instead, it focused on hunting down and prosecuting the leaders of heretical movements, who were preaching heretical ideas openly. Moreover, even the leaders of these movements often evaded capture because there was so little investment in hunting them down.
The Spanish Inquisition was only founded in 1478, which, depending on how you want to classify things, is either the very end of the Middle Ages or the beginning of the Early Modern Period. Contrary to how Pinker makes it sound, the vast majority of people brought before the Spanish Inquisition were never tortured and never executed and many of them were actually brought before the Inquisition for non-religious crimes.
Modern historians estimate that, of the roughly 150,000 people brought before the Spanish Inquisition over the course of its roughly 350-year-existence, somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people were actually executed. This number pales in comparison when you consider that the number of people murdered in the United States in 2018 alone was 15,498 people. This means that at least three times as many people were murdered in the United States alone in one year than were killed by the Spanish Inquisition in the entire history of its existence.
Make no mistake: between 3,000 and 5,000 people being executed by the Spanish Inquisition is still horrible; I personally believe that capital punishment is strictly immoral. Nonetheless, the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t quite as horrible as it is often made out to be.
ABOVE: Manuscript illustration from a copy of the Grandes Chroniques de France dated to between c. 1455 and c. 1460 depicting Amalrician leaders being burned at the stake. Burning heretics was a definitely real thing, but only a very small percentage of all heretics were actually burned.
Furthermore, Pinker gets many of his facts about the Inquisition laughably wrong. For instance, in the midst of talking about victims of the Spanish Inquisition during the Middle Ages, he lists three people who were supposedly burned alive. He does not specifically say that they were burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition during the Middle Ages, but the context certainly makes it sound like this is what he means:
- He claims that Michael Servetus was burned alive “for questioning the Trinity.”
- In reality, Servetus was not executed by the Spanish Inquisition or during the Middle Ages; he was actually burned alive on 27 October 1553 under the orders of the Calvinist town council of the city of Geneva, Switzerland, after having earlier gotten in trouble with Catholic authorities in France.
- Furthermore, he was burned alive not just for “questioning the Trinity,” but rather for totally rejecting the teaching of the Trinity, publishing multiple treatises openly advocating modalistic monarchianism, and also denouncing infant baptism as “an invention of the devil.”
- Pinker claims that Giordano Bruno was burned alive “for believing (among other things) that the earth went around the sun.”
- In reality, Bruno was not executed by the Spanish Inquisition or during the Middle Ages; he was actually burned alive by the Roman Inquisition on 17 February 1600 in the Campo de’ Fiori.
- Furthermore, as I discuss in this article about him that I published a few days ago, believing in heliocentrism was certainly not one of the final charges against him. We know this because, in 1616, when Galileo Galilei was first brought before the Roman Inquisition, they had to have an inquiry as to whether or not heliocentrism was heretical. If heliocentrism really had been one of the final charges against Bruno, the Inquisition could have simply relied on the precedent of his case and no inquiry would have been necessary. Thus, it seems heliocentrism was not one of the charges for which he was burned.
- In reality, Bruno was executed for advancing his own detailed, heretical theology, which held, among other things, that magic is real and that Jesus was just an exceptionally talented wizard.
- Pinker claims that William Tyndale was burned alive “for translating the Bible into English.”
- In reality, Tyndale was not burned alive at all; instead, he was strangled and his body was burned once he was already dead.
- Tyndale was not executed by the Spanish Inquisition or during the Middle Ages; he was executed in early October 1536 by authorities of the Holy Roman Empire in the Duchy of Brabant in what is now Belgium.
- Finally, he was not executed just for translating the Bible into English, but rather for advancing an entire heretical theology that was ultimately rooted in Lollard teachings.
In other words, of the three people Pinker lists as having supposedly been burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition during the Middle Ages, only two of them were actually burned alive at all, only one of them was executed by an Inquisition, none of them were executed by the Spanish Inquisition, none of them were executed in the Middle Ages, and none of them were executed for the reason he gives.
You really get the impression that Pinker didn’t put a lot of effort into researching his book. The best that can be said here is that maybe he just didn’t word his passage very carefully.
ABOVE: Woodcut from a 1563 printed edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs showing William Tyndale about to be publicly strangled and then burned
Pinker’s assessment of medieval knights
After talking about the Inquisition, Pinker inexplicably goes backwards in time to talk about medieval knights. He argues that they were not gallant heroes at all, but rather brutal thugs who lived for slaughter and were addicted to raping women. The only evidence he cites to support this conclusion is the Lancelot en Prose, a single work of fiction written in Old French in the early thirteenth century.
Just to give you a taste of what the Lancelot en Prose is like, it’s set in the fantasy kingdom of Logres (which never really existed) and it contains all manner of fantasy elements, including dragons, wizards, spells, the Holy Grail, and pet lions. It’s safe to say that the Lancelot en Prose probably reflects what life was like for real knights living in England in the thirteenth century about as accurately as Game of Thrones (i.e. not at all).
Despite this, Pinker seemingly fails to recognize that the source he is examining is a work of fiction set in a fantasy world very different from the world that the author actually lived in. Instead, he naïvely treats it as though it is an accurate reflection of how real knights lived, minus the obvious fantasy elements.
ABOVE: Illustration from a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript copy of the Lancelot en Prose showing Sir Yvain fighting a dragon with his pet lion
That concludes everything Pinker says about violence in the ancient and medieval worlds in chapter one of his book. Now I’m going to skip ahead a couple chapters, since he talks about medieval knights again in chapter three.
In this chapter, Pinker shows a couple woodcuts, one titled “Saturn” and another titled “Mars,” taken from The Housebook of Wolfegg Castle, a late medieval text produced between c. 1475 and c. 1480 and claims that they represent scenes of “daily life” in the Middle Ages. This is either extraordinarily naïve or a deliberate misrepresentation. The illustrations in The Housebook of Wolfegg Castle are not scenes of “daily life,” but rather astrological illustrations. Each illustration is actually composed of various scenes intended to represent the influence of each planet.
The first scene Pinker shows is titled “Saturn.” Saturn has the slowest orbit of all the planets visible to the naked eye and was associated with the ancient Roman god Saturnus, who was associated with time and agriculture. Thus, medieval people associated the planet with time, aging, death, punishment, and agriculture.
In the Housebook illustration, we see a man disemboweling a horse while a pig sniffs his buttocks, an old woman walking with a cane, a man in the stocks, a man plowing a field, a man digging to plant crops, and a man being led to the gallows. These are all things that you might see occasionally in a town in medieval western Europe. They aren’t things that you would see all at once if you just happened to step outside.
Some of the things depicted are things that a medieval person might have seen every few weeks, every few months, or every few years. Some of them are things they might never have seen at all. The reason why they are all grouped here is because they are all supposed to represent the influence of the same planet.
ABOVE: The illustration “Saturn” from The Housebook of Wolfegg Castle, produced between c. 1475 and c. 1480, showing various scenes of the influence of the planet Saturn
The second illustration Pinker shows is titled “Mars.” People in western Europe during the Middle Ages associated the planet Mars with violence, warfare, and destruction. Thus, the illustration depicts scenes of violence, warfare, and destruction. Pinker presents this illustration as evidence that, during the Middle Ages, marauding knights were constantly raiding cities and raping, pillaging, and murdering people and that ordinary people lived in constant fear of being attacked.
Like the previous illustration, though, this illustration isn’t all one scene strictly speaking; it’s showing a variety of acts that medieval people attributed to the influence of the planet Mars. The illustration does show some things that probably really happened sometimes in the Middle Ages, but it does not at all represent an average day in the life of a medieval peasant.
It is worth noting that the illustration does not portray the scenes of violence it depicts as normal and acceptable; on the contrary, it seems to actually convey a moral message about the evils of violence. There are dozens of clues throughout the image that indicate this.
For instance, if you look in the bottom left corner you will see a depiction of a man lying on the ground with an exaggerated, dramatic expression of pure agony on his face as a scowling man grasps him by the hair and drives a long knife down into his skull. It’s pretty clear that the man getting murdered on the ground is the one the artist wanted us to sympathize with.
Notice that drama is placed ahead of realism; if you have someone by the hair and you want to kill them, it would presumably be much easier to slit their throat than to try to drive a knife down through the top of their skull, but it is far more dramatic for an illustrator to show someone raising a knife over someone’s head than it is to for them show the person preparing to slit the other person’s throat.
Everything about the image is exaggerated to send a clear and unambiguous message that violence of the sort depicted is sinful and evil. This is not a realistic depiction of a scene from everyday life; it is an exaggerated, propagandistic image. Unfortunately, Pinker’s failure to contextualize the image leads his readers to take it totally at face value as proof that villagers were routinely being slaughtered by knights in vast numbers.
ABOVE: The woodcut “Mars” from The Housebook of Wolfegg Castle, produced between c. 1475 and c. 1480
Citing the illustration “Mars” as evidence, Pinker declares:
“The knights of feudal Europe were what today we would call warlords. States were ineffectual, and the king was merely the most prominent of the noblemen, with no permanent army and little control over the country. Governance was outsourced to the barons, knights, and other noblemen who controlled fiefs of various sizes, exacting crops and military service from the peasants who lived under them. The knights raided one another’s territories in a Hobbesian dynamic of conquest, preemptive attack, and vengeance, and as the Housebook illustrations suggest, they did not restrict their killing to other knights.”
This is exactly the way feudalism is usually taught in high schools, but historians of the Middle Ages have recognized for many decades now that things are more complicated and that the heavily overgeneralized version of feudalism taught in high school history classes never really existed.
Governance was decentralized in some places in western Europe during some periods during the Middle Ages, but decentralized medieval governments varied so significantly from each other both in nature and in outcome that it is impossible to make accurate generalizations about them. Nowadays, historians of Middle Ages don’t generally use the term “feudalism” at all because it is so ambiguous and misleading.
This is not to say that warlords that we might think of as “feudal” never existed during the Middle Ages, but it is to say that they didn’t exist everywhere during every period and, in times and places where they did exist, they were all so different from each other that we can’t really generalize about what they were all like.
After this, Pinker cites an anecdotal account of a fourteenth-century English parish chaplain murdering someone. Then he goes on to talk about the popularity of cruel sports involving animals and the commonness of nose injuries. At this point, it’s a relief to see him actually relying on historical sources for once, rather than works of fiction.
Unfortunately, he immediately goes on to wildly overgeneralize, declaring that medieval people “by our lights seem impetuous, uninhibited, almost childlike” and quoting a lengthy passage from the German sociologist Norbert Elias (lived 1897 – 1990) that egregiously stereotypes medieval people as a bunch of ruffians.
It doesn’t even seem to occur to him that people in the Middle Ages all had different personalities. He hears about a few people getting in fights and getting nose injuries and automatically assumes that practically everyone must have been getting in fights and getting nose injuries.
Pinker attributes the “civilizing” of Europe to the rise of highly centralized governments with bureaucrats instead of feuding knights, which supposedly happened in the Early Modern Period. He seems completely oblivious to the existence of highly centralized governments with large bureaucracies in western Europe during the Middle Ages—or, for that matter, highly centralized governments with large bureaucracies outside western Europe in pre-modern times.
Indeed, Pinker never once in the entire book even mentions the existence of the Byzantine Empire, which, for most of its history, was a massive, highly centralized state with a large and complex bureaucracy. Judging from Pinker’s professed love for Thomas Hobbes and centralized government, you would think that the Byzantine Empire would be his paradise, but yet I’m not even sure if he knows it existed.
ABOVE: Folio 7v from the Paris Psalter, showing King David dressed in the purple robe of a Byzantine emperor with Wisdom on his left and Prophecy on his right
The “Enlightenment”? Which one?
That’s all I’m going to say about specific passages from Pinker’s book. Now I want to talk about some problematic overarching themes.
Pinker has an obsession with the Enlightenment. He believes that, before the Enlightenment, more-or-less all of humanity lay trapped in the clutches of ignorance and superstition, but then the Enlightenment came along and changed everything. He thinks the Enlightenment is the solution to all our problems. He loves the Enlightenment so much that he gave his sequel to The Better Angels of Our Nature the title Enlightenment Now.
There are several problems with this idolization of the Enlightenment. The first problem is that the so-called “Enlightenment” itself is a lot more complicated than Pinker makes it sound. It was a complex movement composed of all kinds of different thinkers who ferociously disagreed with each other about all sorts of issues. There’s not a single issue that they all completely agreed on. For instance, they mostly agreed that reason is good, but yet they all had different conceptions of what exactly “reason” is.
Indeed, it becomes obvious from reading Pinker’s book that he isn’t really a fan of the whole Enlightenment; he picks and chooses which parts of it he likes and which parts he doesn’t. Pinker ignores the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers openly advocated for people to commit certain acts of violence.
For instance, the great French philosopher and avowed atheist Denis Diderot (lived 1713 – 1784) himself, who is widely viewed as one of the most eminent figures of the Enlightenment, famously declares in his poem “Les Éleuthéromanes,” which he wrote in 1772:
“S’il osait de son cœur n’écouter que la voix,
changeant tout à coup de langage,
il nous dirait, comme l’hôte des bois:
‘La nature n’a fait ni serviteur ni maître;
je ne veux ni donner ni recevoir de lois.
Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre,
au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.’”
This means, in English:
“If mankind but dared to listen to the voice of his heart,
changing everything suddenly with the language,
he would say to us, like a guest in the woodlands:
‘Nature has made neither servant nor master;
I wish neither to give nor to receive laws.’
And his hands would weave the entrails of the priest,
for the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings.”
Not only did some Enlightenment thinkers advocate violence, but a great deal of violence has actually been committed in the name of the Enlightenment. The Jacobins, the leaders of the most radical faction during the French Revolution, thoroughly identified themselves with the Enlightenment and with the ideas of Enlightenment authors, especially Voltaire and Diderot. They committed the atrocities of the Reign of Terror in the name of these ideas.
Pinker has a solution for this, though; he’s decided that the term “Enlightenment” only applies to the particular writers he likes. He writes in his book:
“Many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights and did not represent the stream of reasoning that connected Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant.”
Ok. So, apparently, according to Steven Pinker, Thomas Hobbes is an Enlightenment thinker, but, for some reason, Denis Diderot and Voltaire aren’t.
ABOVE: Portrait painted in 1767 by Louis-Michel van Loo of the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who is apparently not an Enlightenment thinker according to Pinker
Another aspect of the Enlightenment that Pinker totally overlooks is the huge role that even his favorite Enlightenment thinkers played in justifying the brutal enslavement and subjugation of African and Native American peoples by white Europeans. In fact, I’m not even sure if Pinker realizes just how much of an important preoccupation this was for them.
For instance, Pinker lists the renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant (lived 1724 – 1804) as one of his beloved Enlightenment thinkers, but he completely neglects to mention the fact that Kant himself developed a racial hierarchy that placed white Europeans at the top and Black Africans and Native Americans at the bottom. Here is a passage he wrote about Native Americans (as quoted in this chapter of the book Postcolonial African Philosophy):
“The race of the American cannot be educated. It has no motivating force, for it lacks affect and passion. They are not in love, thus they are also not afraid. They hardly speak, do not caress each other, care about nothing and are lazy.”
Similarly, here is a passage he wrote about Black people:
“The race of the Negroes, one could say, is completely the opposite of the Americans; they are full of affect and passion, very lively, talkative and vain. They can be educated but only as slaves, that is they allow themselves to be trained. They have many motivating forces, are also sensitive, are afraid of blows and do much out of a sense of honor.”
In addition to these things, Kant also wrote extensively about how to punish enslaved Black people for disobedience, declaring that white slave masters ought to beat enslaved Black people with canes made of split bamboo instead of with whips, because (according to him) Black people have such thick skin that, if you simply whip them, they won’t feel enough pain to motivate them to change their habits.
I’m sure that Pinker would try to justify Kant’s racism by claiming that this was merely a holdover from a pre-Enlightenment age and not a significant part of Enlightenment philosophy itself. This assessment, however, wouldn’t really be accurate. It is true that some Europeans have always been prejudiced against so-called “outsiders,” but the kind of complex, highly developed, deterministic system of racial hierarchization that we find in the writings of Enlightenment authors like Kant is a really a new development. We generally don’t see this kind of deterministic racial hierarchization in, say, the writings of medieval writers like Dante Alighieri or Francesco Petrarca.
In other words, as much as Pinker may like to deny it, the rationalization and systematization of prejudice is just as much a central aspect of the Enlightenment as the concept of the “rights of man.”
ABOVE: Portrait of the revered German Enlightenment philosopher and notorious racist Immanuel Kant
The Enlightenment before the Enlightenment
Pinker also doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the fact that many so-called “Enlightenment” ideas are actually much older than the Enlightenment and can be found in cultures outside western Europe. I’ve already mentioned the existence of pacifism in the ancient world with Jesus and Origenes, but I’d like to take a moment to point out a few more conspicuously modern statements from various ancient authors.
As I discuss in greater depth in this article from September 2019, atheism as we think of it today was extremely rare in the ancient world, but there were many people in ancient and medieval times who expressed skepticism about certain religious ideas and teachings. For instance, the poet Xenophanes of Kolophon (lived c. 570 – c. 475 BC) believed in deities, but he mocked the traditional notion that deities were anthropomorphic. Here are three fragments of his work, as translated by Kathleen Freeman:
“(FRG 14) But mortals believe the gods to be created by birth, and to have their own (mortals’) raiment, voice and body. (FRG 16) Aithiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thrakians have gods with grey eyes and red hair. (FRG 15) But if oxen [and horses] and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.”
Every once in a while, you do find an ancient figure who might qualify as a non-theist. Notably, the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras of Abdera (lived c. 490 – c. 420 BC) is recorded to have written a treatise On the Gods. The treatise has, unfortunately, not survived to the present day, but its opening sentence is preserved through quotation by the third-century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios in his biography of Protagoras in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Here are Protagoras’s own words in Ancient Greek:
“περὶ μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰδέναι, οὔθ’ ὡς εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὡς οὐκ εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὁποῖοί τινες ἰδέαν· πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ κωλύοντά με εἰδέναι, ἥ τε ἀδηλότης καὶ βραχὺς ὢν ὁ βίος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου.”
Here is my own translation of the passage into English:
“Concerning deities, I cannot know whether they exist or not, nor can I know of what sort they may be; for indeed, many things prevent me from knowing, namely the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”
This is as straightforward a statement of agnosticism as there ever was.
ABOVE: Democritus and Protagoras, painted between 1663 and 1664 by the Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa
Although full-on feminism as we know it didn’t exist in the ancient world, we do see some ancient texts that do express strikingly modern sympathy for the plight of women. In the tragedy Medeia, which was written by the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (whom I mentioned earlier in this article) and first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 431 BC, the protagonist Medeia delivers the following monologue, as translated by Rachel Kitzinger:
“Of all creatures that live and understand,
we women suffer the most. In the first place
we must, for a vast sum, buy a husband;
what’s worse, with him our bodies get a master.
And here’s what’s most at sake: Did we get
a man who’s good or bad? For women have
no seemly escape; we can’t deny our husbands.
We’ve come to a household with new habits, new rules,
and must divine how best to manage our bedmates
using skills we never learned at home.
If we do it right, our husband lives with us
and doesn’t fight the yoke. Then life
is enviable. If we don’t, it’s better to die.
A man, when he is vexed by those at home,
goes out to ease the disquiet in in his heart.
But we have only one person to look to.
And they say of us that we’re never at risk,
sheltered at home, while they fight with spears.
How wrong they are: I’d rather three times over
stand behind a shield than give birth once.”
The ancient world also gives us a few anti-imperialists. Indeed, perhaps most vehement condemnation of imperialism ever written comes from the pen of the ancient Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (lived c. 56 – c. 120 AD), who puts the following words about the Romans into the mouth of the Caledonian chieftain Galgacus in his Life of Agricola 30, as translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb:
“Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.”
It is highly probable, judging from Tacitus’s more-or-less consistently negative portrayal of Roman imperialism, that this passage reflects his personal opinion—at least to some extent.
ABOVE: Steel engraving dating to c. 1859 depicting Galgacus’s speech from Tacitus’s Agricola
Although there was never an organized movement in antiquity to abolish slavery, there were some people in antiquity who, at the very least, were uncomfortable with the existence of slavery. As I discuss in this article I published in October 2019, the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BC) briefly mentions in his Politics 1.1253b that there were some people in his own time who believed that slavery was “contrary to nature.” (He immediately goes on to argue against such people, asserting that slavery is completely natural.)
Perhaps the earliest surviving full-on condemnation of slavery in the western tradition comes from the Christian Church Father Gregorios of Nyssa (lived c. 335 – c. 395 AD) in his Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes 336.6–337.13. He writes the following passage—which is translated by Stuart G. Hall and Rachel Moriarty—in response to the line “I got me slaves and slave-girls”:
“For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling the being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness (Gen 1,26). If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable (Rom 11,29). God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?”
“How too shall the ruler of the whole earth and all earthly things be put up for sale? For the property of the person sold is bound to be sold with him, too. So how much do we think the whole earth is worth? And how much all the things on the earth (Gen 1,26)? If they are priceless, what price is the one above them worth, tell me? Though you were to say the whole world, even so you have not found the price he is worth (Mat 16,26; Mk 8,36). He who knew the nature of mankind rightly said that the whole world was not worth giving in exchange for a human soul. Whenever a human being is for sale, therefore, nothing less than the owner of the earth is led into the sale-room. Presumably, then, the property belonging to him is up for auction too. That means the earth, the islands, the sea, and all that is in them. What will the buyer pay, and what will the vendor accept, considering how much property is entailed in the deal?”
“But has the scrap of paper, and the written contract, and the counting out of obols deceived you into thinking yourself the master of the image of God? What folly! If the contract were lost, if the writing were eaten away by worms, if a drop of water should somehow seep in and obliterate it, what guarantee have you of their slavery? what have you to sustain your title as owner? I see no superiority over the subordinate accruing to you from the title other than the mere title. What does this power contribute to you as a person? not longevity, nor beauty, nor good health, nor superiority in virtue.”
“Your origin is from the same ancestors, your life is of the same kind, sufferings of soul and body prevail alike over you who own him and over the one who is subject to your ownership – pains and pleasures, merriment and distress, sorrows and delights, rages and terrors, sickness and death. Is there any difference in these things between the slave and his owner? Do they not draw in the same air as they breathe? Do they not see the sun in the same way? Do they not alike sustain their being by consuming food? Is not the arrangement of their guts the same? Are not the two one dust after death? Is there not one judgment for them? a common Kingdom, and a common Gehenna?”
Here Gregorios more-or-less says that no human being has a right to own another human being as a slave because all humans are made free and in the image of God. This argument would later be used by Christian abolitionists in the United States in the nineteenth century, but yet here it is already in a text from the fourth century AD.
ABOVE: Eleventh-century mosaic intended to represent the Christian Church Father Gregorios of Nyssa, who repeatedly condemned slavery in his homilies
Pinker’s deeply colonialist view of history
Pinker’s basic impression that the whole world was full of nothing but darkness, barbarism, and senseless violence until the Enlightenment came along and changed everything for the better is not only wrong, but it inadvertently feeds directly into a very dangerous, colonialist narrative.
The so-called “Enlightenment,” as Pinker portrays it, is something that at least started out strictly confined to western Europe and North America. He never mentions a single Enlightenment thinker from outside western Europe and North America and you won’t find anything in his book about enlightened ideas from people in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Australia, or the Pacific prior to the twentieth century.
Even the well-documented Eastern European Enlightenment is almost totally ignored; you won’t find any mention of Greek Enlightenment thinkers like Adamantios Koraïs or Rigas Feraios or Russian Enlightenment thinkers like Mikhail Shcherbatov or Alexander Radishchev. As far as Pinker is concerned, the Enlightenment is purely of western European and North American origin.
Here’s where things get really twisted, though: in line with his Hobbesian view of the world, Pinker portrays all native peoples are primitive savages who are constantly slaughtering each other and doing all sorts of other unspeakably violent and horrible things to each other.
You can probably all see the obvious place this is leading; if the “Enlightenment” is civilization, the “Enlightenment” comes from western Europe, and all native people are violent savages, then, clearly, it is good for western Europeans to introduce these violent savages to the light of civilization. Therefore, the inexorable conclusion of Pinker’s thesis seems to be that western colonialism is good.
Pinker does talk about the connection between colonialism and violence on a few occasions and he does not explicitly try to justify colonialism. Nonetheless, his book is so utterly redolent with colonialist ideology that it is really hard to read it in any way that doesn’t make colonialism seem justified.
You could object that, maybe, colonialism is still bad in Pinker’s worldview because it brings more violence to native people than good. Someone else who accepts Pinker’s worldview, however, could point out the nearly infinite future generations of native people who could be saved from lives of savagery simply by forcing their living ancestors to become civilized. Someone else could argue that some form of “peaceful colonialism” might be possible that would introduce natives to civilization without inflicting violence on them.
The only way to fully reject colonialism so that no one can argue that it is good and justified is by rejecting the view that western European culture is civilization and that indigenous peoples are savages in need of civilizing. As long as you maintain this narrative, someone will always be able to object that colonialism is good.
Alas, when it comes to indigenous people, Pinker’s book reflects a stuffy, outdated, nineteenth-century view of the world. It’s no wonder that Stephen Corry, a British indigenous rights activist, wrote a review of Pinker’s book for Open Democracy in June 2013 that warns, “Pinker is promoting a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward ‘Brutal Savage’, which pushes the debate back over a century and is still used to destroy tribes.”
ABOVE: Grotesquely racist political cartoon printed in Judge magazine on 1 April 1899 titled “The White Man’s Burden” depicting the personifications of Great Britain and the United States dutifully carrying the personifications of non-western nations, who are portrayed as ignorant, non-white savages, on their backs towards the lofty goal of “civilization”
The so-called “Long Peace”?
Pinker calls the era lasting from the end of World War II in 1945 to the present day (i.e. that we are currently living in) “the Long Peace,” declaring that it is an unprecedently long period of peace directly resulting from the spread of Enlightenment ideas. I have a few objections to this claim.
First of all, even if we really were living in a period of extraordinary global peace, there is nothing particularly “long” about it in any real sense. World War II is generally considered to have ended on 2 September 1945 with the formal surrender of Japan, the last of the Axis Powers to surrender. I am writing this article in July 2020. That means it has been nearly seventy-five years since the end of World War II. In terms of world history, seventy-five years means nothing. It’s not even a full lifetime.
Even the time from the beginning of the Enlightenment, which I will generously put at c. 1600, to the present is only an extremely tiny segment of recorded human history. The earliest evidence of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia dates to around 3,500 BC (i.e. around 5,500 years ago). Compared to 5,500 years, 420 years is nothing.
It’s strange how Pinker talks a lot about the importance of looking at broad historical trends, but yet he is unable to see that the trends he observes do not mean much in terms of the sheer vastness of recorded human history.
ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons of the Kish Tablet, a limestone tablet with primitive cuneiform on it dated to c. 3,500 BC
Moreover, Steven Pinker’s notion that there have been no major wars since the end of World War II further betrays his distinctly western vantage point. There have been lots of devastating wars since World War II, but they have nearly all been fought outside Europe and North America.
The Korean War, fought between 1950 and 1953, is estimated to have resulted in roughly 4.5 millions deaths. The Vietnam War, fought between 1955 and 1975, is estimated to have resulted in roughly 3.8 million deaths. The Second Congo War, fought in Central Africa between 1998 and 2003, is estimated to have resulted in roughly 5.4 million deaths and to have displaced roughly two million more people.
These are only a few of the many violent conflicts that happened between the end of World War II in 1945 and the publication of Pinker’s book in 2011. Pinker is, of course, well aware of all these conflicts, but he dismisses them as not being evidence of anything, since, he assures us, the relative rate of violence is declining. I’m sure these wars would all seem a lot more significant to him if he had lived in an area affected by them.
In the years since Pinker published his book, wars have continued to happen and they have continued to kill people. In March 2020, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that the Syrian Civil War, which is still ongoing, had killed somewhere between 380,636 and 585,000 people, including at least 116,086 Syrian civilians. I’m sure Pinker has plenty of handwaving to do about this.
“Relative decline”
One recurring problem I have with Pinker’s analysis is that he focuses on the supposed relative decline of violence rather than decline overall. Essentially, Pinker argues that, while there may be more people dying violent deaths today than in previous times, this is only because there are vastly more people alive today than there ever were at any other point in human history.
This approach, I believe, minimalizes the significance of individual suffering. By focusing on the rate of violence rather than the frequency, Pinker reduces human beings to statistics. I think that any individual person’s suffering matters, regardless of how many other people happen to be living on the planet at the same time.
The contemporary problems Pinker ignores
Finally, what I find most disturbing is that Pinker seems to largely ignore the major issues that still exist in the modern age. When it comes to contemporary violence, Pinker has a tendency to just wave his hand and insist that things aren’t as bad as they could be and that they are getting better; whereas I think that contemporary violence should be seen as a serious problem that probably isn’t going to go away on its own.
There are also many issues that exist today that did not exist in previous eras. In particular, Pinker has very little to say about the serious global existential threat that is climate change. Although Pinker mentions climate change, he ultimately seems only mildly concerned about it and confident that humans will work things out.
Even if everyone agreed that climate change is a serious threat to civilization as we know it, it would still be an extraordinarily massive challenge to address. The challenge is made even greater by the fact that most people in the United States are not even sure climate change is real. A poll conducted in 2019 by The Washington Post and the Kaisar Family Foundation found that only around 43% of Americans are “very certain” that climate change is happening and that it is caused by human activity.
Meanwhile, a poll conducted by Chapman University in 2018 found that around 58% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “places can be haunted by spirits” and around 57% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “ancient, advanced civilizations, such as Atlantis, once existed.” This seems to mean that Americans are significantly more likely to fully believe that ghosts and Atlantis are real than they are to be “very certain” that human-caused climate change is happening.
Even many of the people who do believe that climate change is real are not currently motivated to do much about it. With these kinds of numbers, I am not at all confident that we have the awareness and motivation to effectively combat climate change. And again, even if everyone believed in climate change, we still wouldn’t have a completely clear path to follow.
ABOVE: Composite satellite image of the earth in 2012. No one really knows how much longer this planet will even be inhabitable.
Conclusion
I actually agree with Pinker that, in general, over the course of recorded human history, many conventional forms of violence do seem to have grown less common overall. Pinker, however, paints an egregiously inaccurate picture of what life in the pre-modern world was like, exaggerates the importance of the so-called “Enlightenment,” and either dismisses or does not pay enough attention to the serious problems that still plague our world today.
I think that whatever global decline in violence we are actually seeing has been far more gradual and started out far earlier than what Pinker portrays. I also don’t think this trend has been consistent on a global or regional level and I think that it has far more complex origins than what Pinker supposes.
I think that there are probably many complex, independent reasons why violence has declined in some regions and the factors that have contributed to this decline in violence are probably different for different regions. It’s not a simple matter of the “Enlightenment” showing up and making everything better.
Finally, I don’t think that I share Pinker’s optimistic sentiments regarding the future. The future is dark, unpredictable, and capricious. The only thing that is certain about the future of human civilization is that, sooner or later, the human race will go extinct and there will be no more civilization to speak of. Maybe some good things will happen between now and then. Maybe they won’t. It’s impossible for anyone to say.
I am a historian mainly interested in ancient Greek cultural and social history. Some of my main historical interests include ancient religion and myth; gender and sexuality; ethnicity; and interactions between Greeks and foreign cultures. I hold a BA in history and classical studies (Ancient Greek and Latin languages and literature), with departmental honors in history, from Indiana University Bloomington (May 2022) and an MA in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies from Brandeis University (May 2024). View all posts by Spencer McDaniel