Name: Has Violence Declined Through the Ages?
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Five experts weigh in on the complexities of measuring violence.

Violence is a complicated thing to measure.

Has Violence Declined Through the Ages?

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Five experts weigh in on the complexities of measuring violence.

Violence is a complicated thing to measure.

Body & Brain

Has Violence Declined Through the Ages?Published: December 13, 2019Onscreen: Has violence declined?Agustín Fuentes: To say we're living in a safer time and violence has declined is a, right, and b, wrong. It's a really complicated thing. It depends on what we're talking about by violence, and it depends on how you measure violence.Carolyn Roberts: To say that there is a decline per capita, it may be valid. But there’s a way that numbers themselves, as useful as they are, can also occlude as much as they reveal.Vincent Brown: Lethality isn't the only way to measure violence. Mass incarceration is a form of violence, not the kind of violence we count as the physical violence of immediate destruction of a human body, but the slow deterioration of the human will through incarceration.Tiffany Tung: Across the board, we're underestimating sub-lethal violence.Brown: There's a kind of psychological violence that is happening on a mass scale that doesn't get counted in those statistics.Steven Pinker: We're at the point at which discussions of violence are evolving. And that is real progress from when discussions of violence were centered on world wars and genocides.Roberts: I think that there is value in trying to give people a sense of hope. But I think that there is a fear that is well placed in trying to make the present too rosy a picture.Tung: I don't think there's anything wrong in recognizing that there's progress. We just want to be sure that patting ourselves on the back for that doesn't obscure what else still needs to be done.Pinker: To point out that things were worse in the past is not to say we should relax, our problems are all solved. Quite the contrary, we can be emboldened to try to drive them down even further.Roberts: Humans are a hot mess, and we have so much more to do.

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Has Violence Declined Through the Ages?

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Support Provided By

Explore More

The Violence Paradox

Are Babies Capable of Making Moral Judgements?

Taking Orders to Be Violent Might be Easier Than You Think