In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that, despite the violence saturating our media, we are actually living in a time of unprecedented peace for humanity. We have inner motives towards violence, he explains, but also towards peacefulness, and society has been arranging itself in ways that allow the latter to prevail more and more often. The book has been one of this fall’s biggest, and its surprising argument has led it to be reviewed and debated widely.
Judging by the FAQ posted to Pinker’s website, a common concern among people engaging with The Better Angels of Our Nature is Pinker’s definition of violence. His explanation:
I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.
Another refrain among readers: what about more abstract forms of violence, like economic or environmental? Pinker responds:
The fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”
To which we say: fair enough. And yet some of the critique of Pinker’s book has put us in mind of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book we published earlier this year. Nixon’s book is driven by his conviction that we need to politically, imaginatively, and theoretically “rethink” what he calls “slow violence,” a class of violence that doesn’t align with what Pinker refers to as the “standard sense.” From Nixon’s book:
By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.
Pinker’s violence is one dependent on intention to do harm, and one may argue that an absence of intention distinguishes Nixon’s slow violence from Pinker’s more traditionally understood forms. But Nixon begins his book by quoting from a confidential World Bank memo written in 1991 by Larry Summers that indicates that we’d be mistaken to assume that these slower forms of violence are free from malevolence:
I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?
Nixon explains the challenge of understanding this form of intentional but slow violence:
Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions—from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects.
Nixon’s book focuses on the environmentalism of the poor, whom he notes are the principal casualties of slow violence, especially across the “global south.” As he explains, while the neoliberal era has intensified assaults on resources and on people, it has also intensified resistance. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is also a study of the writer-activists helping the world to meet the representational challenge of slow violence by making this violence visible and apprehensible. Nixon writes of Wangari Maathai, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, Jamaica Kincaid, June Jordan, Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer, and others whose work presents what he calls “the versatile possibilities of politically engaged nonfiction.”
As Nixon also notes, slow violence can operate as a major threat multiplier in that it can “fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.” In this respect there seems less reason to draw clear lines between Nixon’s slow violence and Pinker’s standard. And, in fact, the philosopher Peter Singer makes a similar point in his otherwise admiring review of The Better Angels of Our Nature. After noting Pinker’s guarded optimism that these trends towards nonviolence will continue even in the face of a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, the pall of nuclear terrorism, and the threats of climate change, Singer ends with reference to a study published in Nature this August:
Solomon Hsiang and colleagues at Columbia University used data from the past half-century to show that in tropical regions, the risk of a new civil conflict doubles during El Niño years (when temperatures are hotter than usual and there is less rainfall). If that finding is correct, then a warming world could mean the end of the relatively peaceful era in which we are now living.
And, with that, a transition from a slow violence that challenges representation, to the all-too-familiar violence of conflict. So, despite the trouble we face in comprehending the slow violence of which Nixon writes, or the challenge of including it in a coherent narrative with homicide, genocide, and their ilk, a peaceful future would seem to require recognition of the fact that these forms of slow violence exist on a continuum with Pinker’s.
