Our friend (and charter member of the CRN Global Task Force) David Brin recently posted an excellent three part series (read the whole thing!) on his blog about the correlation between advances in civilization and declines in violence.
Brin quotes extensively from an essay by Steven Pinker called "A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE," in which Pinker debunks the doctrine of the noble savage and asserts that civilization is in fact quite civilizing, producing a strong trend away from violence and toward peace. It's interesting to note the way Pinker's essay, posted at The Edge, is subtitled:
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
Here are some excerpts from Pinker:
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century. . .The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.
So, if you accept the evidence (which seems overwhelming) that through the influence of civilization, humankind is rapidly maturing into a nonviolent animal, is that not cause for rejoicing? Why then is CRN so concerned about a new era of arms building and devastating warfare triggered by the advent of molecular manufacturing?
It's been suggested by some observers that in a time of ubiquitous personal nanofactories, the resulting widespread wealth and release from subsistence needs might be a strong contributor to avoidance of conflict. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
I worry that although reduction of pressure to acquire more resources could decrease some reasons for conflict, another cause of war may simultaneously be dramatically increased.
As Jürgen Altmann writes (on page 149) in his new book Military Nanotechnology:
MNT would strongly destabilize the military situation [his emphasis] between potential opponents… With its potential for extremely fast increases in military production, MNT would represent the culmination in quantitative technological arms races… Early start could provide decisive advantages, up to — in theory — the capability of world domination… As a consequence, the military powers would be under extreme pressure to go forward as rapidly as possible when MNT drew close… Because of the potentially huge consequences, even political/military partners might not want to rely on the stability of their mutual relations.
Removal of need for conquest to gain wealth does not imply removal of fear of preemptive attacks, and if the only apparent protection against being attacked is to attack first, then devastating wars appear inevitable. If multiple parties/nations have access to MM, then some mechanism will have to be found for avoiding a new arms race that could rapidly spiral out of control.
Or am I wrong? Perhaps current trends will continue and the better angels of our nature will prevail. Perhaps, even in the absence of directed action to avert a buildup of nano arms and a cycle of deadly wars, peace and prosperity will ensue. That may well be the case. But as long as uncertainty lingers, I'm not sure I'm willing to risk it.
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
It's interesting that Pinker would write such a piece. He's always been a strong nature over nurture kind of guy. He has traced much of this trend back to the Enlightenment, a decidedly external, and thus nurture changing event.
Posted by: NanoEnthusiast | June 22, 2007 at 10:06 AM