Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature

The news is full of bad things.  Wars, murders and accidents sell papers and keep us glued to our screens.  So, it's natural to think that disastrous events are growing more common as they become better reported.  I call this the headline fallacy.  That's our inclination to generalise from the latest gory headlines and so miss the big picture.  Behavioural psychologists have bigger words for this propensity: the "heuristic of availability".  Many experiments have shown that we tend to answer broad questions from the specific instances at the front of our minds.

The headline fallacy badly distorts the way we see the world.  Most people in the UK think crime is rising.  In fact, it has fallen precipitously since the 1990s.  Environmentalists tell us that global warming has increased the likelihood of big storms like recent typhoon in the Philippines.  With Haiyan hogging the headlines, that seems highly plausible but it just isn't true.  On the smaller scale of individual tragedy, a recent cluster of cycling deaths in London has led to claims that riding a bike has become more dangerous.  But, statistically, it hasn't.

In his recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker takes the long view and asks whether violence has declined over the course of human history.  And, if so, why has it?  Let's get one thing out of the way first.  This is a long book containing a large number of errors.  Here are just some examples I jotted down from the first few chapters: the iron maiden and pear of anguish are modern hoaxes, not authentic torture implements (the latter is a misidentified surgical tool); Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake but not for believing the earth goes around the sun; watermills, horse collars and horse shoes are not late medieval - they were all widespread by 1066; and public executions were outlawed in England in 1868, not in 1783.  Pinker appears to believe that Henry VIII was a protestant, that Thomas Hobbes opposed executing witches and that Barbara Tuchman is a scholarly source on medieval history.  I could go on, but you get the drift.  Just in case you don't, here and here are a couple of longer articles by fellow clerk Humphrey on Pinker's historical illiteracy.

All these mistakes are unfortunate.  Really, if you are going to argue for a controversial thesis then you need to get your facts right.  Nonetheless, Pinker's central point is surely correct: violence of all kinds has declined massively since prehistory and very considerably over the last half a century.  There are fewer wars, fewer murders, and less violence against women and children.  Even animals are subjected to lower levels of suffering.  Our instinct to believe otherwise is a symptom of the headline fallacy.  Campaigning groups, having won many battles, are loath to admit their success in case the funding dries up.  But Pinker provides reams of statistics covering all sorts of unpleasantness that brook little argument notwithstanding that his anecdotes, as I noted above, can go badly awry.

He deserves congratulations for demonstrating some good news in a world of pessimism.  That said, this is a deeply flawed book.  While he devotes 23 pages to animal suffering, Pinker's short section on the violence of abortion is grossly inadequate.  And it is pretty clear why: Pinker is a liberal secularist who just doesn't have a problem with the industrial slaughter of foetuses.  He concedes that abortion rates are slowly declining but appears to consider this less a cause for celebration than the better living conditions now enjoyed by laboratory rats.

And this book has wider problems than just not recognising that abortion is violence even though it has received a liberal imprimatur.  Pinker's explanations of why violence has declined sound like the musings of an undergraduate who has digested too much nineteenth-century Whiggish history.  His thesis, in summary, is that violence is caused by religion and conservatives.  It has declined because reason and blue-state values are conquering the world.  I simplify, but not by all that much.  The first chapter of Better Angels seems calculated to alienate Christians and they receive random jabs in the ribs throughout the book.  Moreover, Pinker goes to enormous lengths to avoid giving Christianity any credit at all for social progress (except for the occasional nod towards Quakers).  The trouble is, contrary to Pinker, the abolition of the slave trade was a victory for evangelical Protestants whose zeal and organisation culminated in the successful campaign in England decades before the American Civil War.  And religion was an essential part of the process by which civilisation got going in the first place.  Pinker admits the formation of stable societies, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, was an essential first step in reducing levels of violence.  However, he clearly has no idea how this process of state formation got going because he cannot admit that it was religion that first bound these new entities together.

Maybe Pinker has come down with a touch of Russell's Syndrome: the condition that gives so many intelligent atheists a case of the stupids when they start talking about religion. Or perhaps Pinker is only interested in convincing his fellow east- and west-coast academics.  Admittedly, this is likely to be hard enough for him.  He finds that much of the recent reduction in violence had its roots in the rise of individualism and the erosion of community values.  Trade, free markets and capitalism have done more for peace 'n' love than socialism ever did.  It is classical liberal values (sometimes called libertarianism) rather than left-liberalism that Pinker finds most conducive to amity and concord.

Pinker is always engaging and I am a huge fan of The Blank Slate.  Unfortunately, with Better Angels, his inability to give credit to any factor associated with faith or conservatism means he has to accept some implausible alternatives.  Postulating that the Enlightenment was caused by the spread of novels and the decline of murder by improved table manners seems a stretch.  His remarks on how the Flynn effect (whereby the results of IQ tests have risen over time) represent a rise in moral intelligence are especially unconvincing.  That's not to say that these explanations are wrong.  It is just that in a book of 1,026 pages, much of what Pinker says seems seriously undercooked.  Better Angels would have been superior if it were shorter and more focused.  Nonetheless, Pinker has done us a service by showing that the decline of violence is real.  That's very good news.  Arguing over the causes is of secondary importance.

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Bad Pinker and Good Pinker

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of Steven Pinker, especially his book The Blank Slate. He has generally steered clear of the new atheist controversy, preferring positive advocacy of his own ideas rather than attacking others. Of course, there has never been any doubt about where he stood on the question of religion, but he has tended to keep his language temperate. More importantly, he has played ideas and not the man. Sadly, all that changed last week, as fellow clerk Humphrey of St Andrews has noted over in the discussion forum. Pinker launched an unprovoked and, to my mind, unacceptable attack on the geneticist Francis Collins. As well as being a renowned scientist, Collins is an evangelical Christian and author of the book The Language of God (which probably did much better in the US than it has done over here in Britain). It's this public advocacy of Christianity that Pinker seems to find so offensive. But demanding that people should keep their religious beliefs, political views (Pinker and Collins are both outspoken Democrats) or even their sexual orientation in the closet amounts to discrimination. Furthermore, Pinker's use of the usual new atheist boo-words (superstitious, iron age and medieval dogmas) demeans him and lowers him to the level of Dawkins and Grayling. That is not where I want to see one of the world's most important scientific thinkers.

As if to cheer me up, Good Pinker was also in evidence this week. We've known from some time that his next book would be on violence. He probably knew that the chapter on this subject in the Blank Slate was one of the weakest (together with his treatment of art). So it is great to see that he has revisited it for a book length treatment. On the basis of this teaser article in a magazine called Greater Good (spotted by Daniel Finkelstein) the new book should be an interesting read. The central fact that Pinker identifies about violence is that it has been declining throughout history. The twentieth century, even allowing for both world wars, was far less violent than those that proceeding it. There are inevitable upticks from time to time, but the trend is clear. The question is what has caused it? Read Pinker's article for some clues. Finkelstein highlights one aspect of modern life that might make us less violent – television. Because this brings the world into our living room, it makes the alien seem familiar. This makes it less frightening and so might reduce the chances of our reacting violently when we come across it in real life.

Let's hope that Bad Pinker is put back in his box so we can enjoy the work of Good Pinker uninhibited.

Steven Pinker on Religion

I’ve been waiting a while to see if Pinker would say something about religion, rather in trepidation because I feared it would damage my regard for him. Sadly, my worst fears have been realised in his feeble response to the Templeton Foundation’s question "Has Science made Belief in God Obsolete?"

Pinker’s answer is yes, although he admits that all modern rationality is required to do the job to debunking God. The trouble is that his argument is pitiful. It is in three parts. The first says that because science has successfully rendered the Book of Genesis obsolete as a scientific text, religion has lost one of its major purposes. This is a standard atheist trope but it wholly ill-informed about what religion is about. A tiny part of the Bible and other sacred texts deal with quasi-scientific explanations. Furthermore, although many have seen God in His Creation, the design argument is such is a modern invention that only really appears in the eighteenth century. When religious people saw God in the workings of nature, they never thought this was some sort of proof he existed, but rather something to praise him for. The idea that religion primarily provided an exposition on the natural world is a throw back to the nineteenth century for which we have now realised there is almost no evidence.

In short, religion got going without the design argument and it will happily keep going without it as well. That said, I do find some mileage in both the fine tuning and the cosmological arguments. Pinker dismisses both of these with the old saw “who made God?” Fifty years ago, almost all atheists thought the universe was eternal and dismissed as nonsense the idea it had a beginning. It is odd that they won’t extend the same courtesy to God.

In the second part of his argument, Pinker moves to morality. I praised his recent article on the evolution of morals while pointing out its limitations. Pinker admits you can’t get ethics from science but insists you can’t get them from religion either. The argument he uses, Euthyphro’s Dilemma, is 2,500 years old and so I assume does not form part of modern science. The trouble is, Plato’s argument cannot be applied to a transcendent deity. It is quite possible (actually it is true) that morality is not to be derived from natural causes. But we cannot say from this that an external God who created nature cannot impose rules upon her that nature herself is unable to produce. Nor can we say that those external rules, like the truths of mathematics that Godel showed can’t be reduced to axioms, should not be objectively true.

Thirdly, Pinker claims that the Golden Rule is a rational ethical system in itself. It is good to see that Pinker has cracked all the ethical problems that have kept philosophers up at night for centuries, but I fear you cannot reduce morality to such a single rule. Nor can Pinker escape the fact that he is rationalising a system he has inherited from Christianity. Given the state of today’s world, I think it would be foolish to assume that all moral difficulties have been solved.

I’ve mentioned Russell’s Syndrome in the past. This is a medical condition whereby highly intelligent people start talking nonsense as soon as they turn their minds to religion. It is sad to find that Pinker is a sufferer. Would anyone like to hazard a guess from whom he caught it?

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Steven Pinker's Medieval Murder Rates

In a highly problematic passage from Steven Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ the professor highlights the fact that homicide rates have plummeted across Europe since the 13th century. He does this with reference to the work of sociologists and historians such as Ted Robert Gurr and Carl I Hammer which show that murder rates dropped sharply across the centuries – 14th century England was about 95% more violent than the present era. What conclusions does Pinker draw from this? He seems to be pushing some theory by Norbert Elias which states that a civilizing process occurred. Medieval people were boorish, animalistic and lacking in habits of refinement. According to Pinker:

‘over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions.’

By contrast according to Pinker

‘The people of the Middle Ages were, in a word, gross. A number of the advisories in the etiquette books deal with eliminating bodily effluvia: Don’t foul the staircases, corridors, closets, or wall hangings with urine or other filth. • Don’t relieve yourself in front of ladies, or before doors or windows of court chambers. • Don’t slide back and forth on your chair as if you’re trying to pass gas. • Don’t touch your private parts under your clothes with your bare hands. • Don’t greet someone while they are urinating or defecating. • Don’t make noise when you pass gas. • Don’t undo your clothes in front of other people in preparation for defecating, or do them up afterwards…..In the European Middle Ages, sexual activity too was less discreet. People were publicly naked more often, and couples took only perfunctory measures to keep their coitus private. Prostitutes offered their services openly; in many English towns, the red-light district was called Gropecunt Lane. Men would discuss their sexual exploits with their children, and a man’s illegitimate offspring would mix with his legitimate ones’

Now at this point once again I have to jump to the defence of the poor benighted medievals. Unlike Steven Pinker I am a regular watcher of the ‘Maury Povich’ show in the United States (for UK readers the immediate point of reference is the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’) and I have been on numerous pub crawls in UK city centres. All of the gross practices highlighted by Pinker are in evidence – one might say omnipresent - in modern society so it makes little sense to rat on our ancestors for displaying them. Perhaps Pinker needs to spend less like in the urbane, sophisticated environment of Cambridge Massachusetts and more time somewhere like Calton Glasgow. Then he might not have as much confidence in the voodoo like properties of Peter Singer's ‘empathy circle’.

So what to make of Pinker’s historical data? Well, from the start I would expect to see a drop in homicide rates across the centuries for four reasons. Firstly societies have gradually increased centralised power in the state and established a monopoly on violence. Secondly courts of law have become more effective as venues for settling disputes, thereby making the use of violence unnecessary. Thirdly schooling and education have introduced a greater civility – perhaps this counts as a ‘civilising process’? Fourthly, it is now much harder to kill people due to modern medicine and the emergency services. Wounds which would previously have been fatal and resulted in homicide now result in grievous bodily harm*. A Saturday night in Newcastle which in previous centuries might have resulted in a bloodbath now simply results in the A&E being clogged with aggressive drunks. It would therefore not be surprising if homicide rates were higher before these variables developed – what would be surprising is if they were lower.

Before looking at Pinker’s figures I should point out how homicide rates are calculated, as n per 100,000 of population per annum. Basically you take the number of murders and divide it by the population size (of say Medieval Norwich). You then multiply this by 100,000 to give you the murder rate. Pinker has some figures from Gurr which show the murder rate in Medieval London as having homicide rates from of around 50 per 100,000 during the 14th and 15th centuries (the present figure is more like 1.8 per 100,000). He quotes a figure from Carl Hammer showing that the murder rate in 14th century Oxford was 110 per 100,000 which is astonishingly high given how sleepy and civilised the place is today (this murder rate - calculated based on 36 cases of homicide between 1342 and 1348 - is akin to that of cartel ridden Ciudad Juarez in Mexico).

Are the figures accurate? Here we run into a number of problems. You might have noticed that the homicide rates are highly dependent on the population statistics. Michael Prestwich discusses this in Plantagenet England 1225-1360 (p507-508). One estimate he quotes is that London in the first half of the fourteenth century had a homicide rate of between 5.2 and 3,6 cases per 10,000 (equivalent to 52 per 100,000 and 36 per 100,000 meaning London was as violent as present day New Orleans). However this estimate was based on the population of London being 35,000 to 50,000. It’s become increasingly clear that these estimates are wrong. For example it’s clear that building densities around Cheapside were extensive by the end of the 14th century – at levels not reached again until 1600 when the population was 100,000-200,000 including suburbs. According to Prestwich estimates of the city's population now reach as high as 107,900 to 176,000. At a population of 100,000 the murder rate would be 1.8 per 10,000 (18 per 100,000). This would make London’s murder rate equivalent to present day Atlanta or Pittsburgh. A slightly higher population estimate would make the murder rate equivalent to present day Boston across the Charles river from Stephen Pinker’s office – which seems unlikely. If that were correct then the question we would have to ask is why our present day cities are more dangerous than their equivalents in an age of comparative lawlessness** ?

What of the Mexican murder rate for Oxford? Prestwich says that the high figure may be explained by the fact Hammer used coroners records to come up with his statistics. Unlike the present day these report the circumstances of a mortality and do not distinguish between murder, manslaughter or accidental death – hence you end up with an extremely wide range of possible rates***. Given the paucity of data – Pinker seems to have gone for the highest one in order to massage his thesis. Furthermore such records only cover a period of a few years and might reflect a one off crime wave ****.

Any conclusions based on what little statistics we have must therefore be provisional and potentially unsafe. For example, according to Prestwich, the records show that there were ‘only three larcenies in Norwich in 1313, as against 703 in Bedford, Indiana (a town of similar size), in 1975’. It would be ill-advisable to read that statistic and go on to write a book called ‘The terrible daemons of our nature’ showing the slide into criminality of Western Culture – especially since 14th century crime reporting probably less quite a lot to be desired.

*This is perhaps the most important point. For example Randolph Roth author of American Homicide argues that given modern medicine—emergency response, trauma surgery, antibiotics, and wound care—three out of every four people murdered before 1850 would probably survive today.

**The issue of how violent Medieval society was is seriously hampered by lack of evidence. Alternative interpretations exist such as Phillipa Maddern’s ‘Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422-1442’ which argued that the allegedly violent landscape of East Anglia (then the most urbanised area of England) was in fact, remarkably free of criminal violence and that this model could be applied to the rest of the country.

***As an example of the difficulties with this approach the only surviving run of coroners’ records for England’s 2nd largest city Norwich are from 1263 to 1268. These document 36 cases, 14 seem to be accidental death or theft. In 5 the conclusion is more ambiguous – either the jury swore the death was accidental or the suspect was cleared by compurgation. That leaves 17 possible instances of murder over 5 years – a proportion of which could classed as manslaughter. If these were all murders the average rate per year given a population of 17,000 would have been 20 per 100,000 – a rate akin to Philadelphia in 2010. If half were murders the rate would be 10 which is slightly less than Boston.

****Oxford was undoubtedly a violent place in the Middle Ages. Of 29 coroners’ reports that have been preserved for the period 1297-1322, 13 are murders committed by scholars. Attacks on townspeople were sometimes countenanced and even led by officials of the university. For example in 1526 a Procter organised a riot in which many citizens were attacked and their houses looted. In 1355 in what became known as the ‘St Scholastic’s Day riot’ an argument in a tavern became a pub brawl which went on for the next 3 days. It began when a group of students at an inn near Carfax disapproved of the wine they were served. The inn-keeper having given them ‘stubborn and saucy language’ the clerks ‘threw the wine and vessel at his head’. The townspeople then seized the opportunity to arm themselves with bows and arrows and attack scholars. Gangs of academics and citizens clashed in the streets and academic halls were burned. Six students and scholars were killed.

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Steven Pinker and the An Lushan Revolt

Most people – I think – if asked to name the bloodiest century in human history would probably say the 20th. I hasten to add this isn't the kind of question you get on history exam papers nowadays – you are more likely to get quizzed on ‘Household Formation, Lineage and gender relations in the early modern Atlantic world’ or something less bloodthirsty.

In Steven Pinker’s new book, ‘The better angels of our nature’ the wild haired Harvard professor is having none of this. The preference for the 20th century is mere ‘historical myopia’. Instead when one roots around through the

history books for forgotten wars and scales for the world’s population at the time – you find a whole set of lesser known conflicts that dwarf the toll for the first and second world wars. Pinker then presents a table showing the Second World War as merely the 9th most destructive atrocity of all time – lagging behind the Atlantic Slave Trade, the annihilation of the American Indians, Tamerlane’s conquests, the fall of Rome, the fall of the Ming dynasty, the Mid-east slave trade, the Mongol conquests and – most terrible of all – the An Lushan Revolt (something the majority of westerners have never even heard of).

Now at this point one’s proverbial ‘Bullshit-o-meter’ should be sounding – anyone who claims that they have a reasonably accurate ‘death toll estimate’ for something like the Mongol Conquests is being ludicrously over-confident. Pinker’s table looks suspiciously like something that has been cut and pasted from Wikipedia. In fact the figures appear to have been lifted from a site called ‘Necromterics’ authored by Matthew White – a librarian and author whose somewhat macabre hobby appears to be calculating historic death tolls. His scholarly works include such essays as 'Which Has Killed More People? Christianity? or Gun Control' so it's a bit strange that Pinker would consider him the go-to man on the demography of Medieval China.

The An Lushan Revolt, according to Pinker and White, wiped out something like 36,000,000 Chinese over the course of 8 years – a toll equivalent to two thirds (66%) of the Tang Empire’s population. If you scale for the mid 20th century’s population you would end up with an equivalent toll of 429,000,000 people. That would indeed be an astonishing high death rate – by comparison the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia killed around 13% of Russia’s population - over half the population in the regions and countries of Europe where there is data of useful quality died in the Black Death (perhaps the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world). To justify this Pinker and White refer to the fact that at the peak of the medieval Tang dynasty, the census taken in the year 753 recorded a population of 52,880,488. After eleven years of civil war, the census of 764 gave a figure of 16,900,000. None of the figures cited on White’s site appear to come from Sinologists as far as I can see and no context is given for the low census figures*.

Accordingly I have worked through a number of works such as the ‘Cambridge History of China Vol 3’, Mark Edward Lewis’s ‘The Chinese Cosmopolitan Empire – the Tang Dynasty’ and David Andrew Graff’s ‘Medieval Chinese Warfare’ to see if they can shed greater light on what is now claimed to be the greatest holocaust in human history.

An Lushan was a garrison commanding general of mixed Sogdian and Turkish descent who rebelled against the Tang Dynasty in 755. This sparked a civil war across northern China for a period of eight years before the rebels were finally destroyed in 763. During this period of the two capitals of the Tang dynasty, the city of Chang’an was damaged and the city of Luoyang was burned. This suggests that the conflict was highly destructive but when assessing the impact there are a number of difficulties.

Firstly, up until the modern age, population counts were sporadic and incomplete. The first full censuses were not made until 1790 in the United States and 1801 in Britain. In the medieval Chinese era, the government counted households and some or all of the people constituting them, but did not attempt a complete registration until 1953. This was for the purpose of levying troops or more commonly allocating tax burdens. Only a few landmark censuses from the pre-Song era are taken to be reasonably reliable and the taxation records are frequently disrupted by war and administrative chaos. The figures for number of households are held to be far more reliable than those for actual head count

Secondly the census figures vary wildly depending on the contemporary level of government control. For example, in the reign of Taizong from 626 to 649, only 3,000,000 household were registered. Under the previous Sui dynasty (581-618) the figure had been 9,000,000 households. According to Richard Guisso in the Cambridge History of China this ‘sensational decline was not the result of catastrophic loss of life during the civil warfare of late Sui and early T'ang, but of simple failure by the local authorities to register the population in full. Even in the first years of Kao-tsung's reign only 3,800,000 households - certainly far less than half of the actual population – were registered. Considerably more than half of the population was thus unregistered and paying no taxes (p297 Cambridge History of China). This shows that in times of difficulty the highly centralised taxation system could break down – resulting in half the population or more being omitted from the census.

After the An Lushan revolt the situation reached crisis proportions and a new period of warlordism and regional autonomy emerged. The Tang had survived only by carrying out a general decentralisation of administrative power and dispersing power through a new tier of provincial governments. Despite the restoration of peace the empire remained in a state of chaos. China broke into many regions who collected their own taxes and remitted only a small portion to the central government. The Tang could no longer update it’s registers and chart landowning; local tax records were destroyed, scattered and rendered obselete. As Graff writes:

After the An Lushan rebellion, the Tang court lost the ability to enroll, enumerate, and impose taxes directly upon the majority of China’s peasant households. This development is dramatically illustrated by the decline of the registered population from approximately nine million households in 755 to less than two million in 760. (P240 – Medieval Chinese Warfare)

The post rebellion census figures cannot then be relied upon when estimating the impact on the empires population in the 8th century and there are no signs of a catastrophic two thirds population loss. Instead the indications are that China continued to have a large population base into the 9th century with which the dynasty was able to raise professional and conscripted armies to compete with the nomadic powers in dominating inner Asia.

The estimates given by the great Harvard sinologist John King Fairbank in 'the New History of China' (2006) are that ‘the empire’s population may have totalled 60 million in AD 80, 80 million in 875, 110 million in 1190’ (p106). These are of course estimates but they show that the general impression from historians of the period is not one of catastrophic population decline followed by recovery – but of a slow and steady late medieval population boom coupled with a shift in population from north to south. Mark Edward Lewis remarks that that:

‘Between 742 and 1080 (two years for which comprehensive census records have survived), the population in the north increased by only 26 percent, while that in the south increased by 328 percent’

C A Peterson in the Cambridge history of China notes that in the wake of the rebellion:

Large scale shifts of population took place. Many of the war affected areas in Ho-pei and Ho-nan were partially depopulated, and many people migrated to the Huai and Yangtze valleys and to the south (P496)

There are therefore plenty of reasons to be sceptical of Pinker’s claim that An Lushan’s revolt ranks as the most destructive war of all time. In fact he doesn’t appear to have done even the most basic research of research into the credibility of his figures; which is a shame because ‘The Better Angels of our Natures’ is a very good read and presents some interesting questions.

*In his recent book 'The great big book of horrible things' Matthew White goes with a 'more conservative' figure for the An Lushan revolt of 13 million dead - though he obviously didn't tell Pinker.

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Steven Pinker of the Evolution of Morality

In an excellent recent article for the New York Times, Steven Pinker outlined current research into the evolutionary origin of morality. He explains how researchers have shown that morality can been categorised into five universal headings: fairness, purity, authority, harm and community. Translated into language that we all understand, these five categories mean: do unto others as you would have done to you; do not commit adultery; honour your father and mother; do no murder; and do not covet your neighbour’s ox. Although there are huge variations in morals in different societies, Pinker is convincing that all fit into these categories. When the moral order changes, as it did, for instance, over slavery, the priority attached to the relevant categories is rebalanced. In the case of slavery, fairness trumped authority although most of the arguments in favour before the American Civil War were based on preserving the southern way of life (that is, community).

Pinker’s article covers a lot more ground, but two points stand out. The first is that conservatives seem to value all five kinds of morality in roughly equal measure. Liberals (which means the left in this context), on the other hand, tend to privilege fairness and community. You can see many aspects of the culture wars in a new light by slotting the arguments on both sides into the relevant moral categories. Pornography? Conservatives object on the grounds of purity, liberals get stuck in for fairness’s sake. Animal rights? Wrong, say conservatives protecting their (human) community. Right, say liberals avoiding harm to others. The only point where I am a bit lost is figuring out which moral category applies to people who are pro-choice on abortion. The antis are obviously saying do no harm. I suppose those in favour could cite community much as conservatives do for animal rights.

Ultimately, the categories you use to play this game don’t matter so much as the fact that they are innate. The moral imperative is part of our basic human nature. As such, we can be pretty sure that it has evolved. The advantage, I suppose, of the five categories mentioned above is that it is quite easy to come up with some just-so stories about exactly how we evolved them.

I won’t bother with that but want, instead, to move onto my second point. For many people, the idea that morality evolved leaves them a bit disconcerted. But they should not be. Christian theologians have been almost unanimous in finding that natural law is a part of the natural world. It is a universal property of healthy humans regardless of their religion or culture. But it is only machinery. The software of specific morality and ethics requires something more. The evolutionary explanation for morality does not actually explain why slavery and abortion are wrong, it only explains how we became creatures who are capable of having the argument in the first place.

We are forced back to the position that almost all the specific morality of our society is a product of our Christian heritage, not our genes. Towards the end of his article, Pinker speculates on some of the ways that morality might be ‘objective’ in a universe without God. But he doesn’t get very far with it. Almost any discussion of where our ethics came from must acknowledge that a major part of the answer is Christianity.

By the way, one of the commentators on this blog recommended Larry Arnhart's Darwinian Conservatism blog. It covers similar ground to Pinker at a more adavanced level. Well worth a look.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Blackburn on Pinker

Looking at Simon Blackburn’s webpage linked to by Humphrey in his post below, I came across this review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Regular readers will know that I am a fan of this book and it regularly gets me into trouble. I am pleased to report that Simon Blackburn doesn’t like it at all.

In the review, Blackburn attacks Pinker from several directions. The first is to accuse him of rhetorical trickery. There is no doubt that Pinker’s prose is quite punchy but he also provides plenty of evidence for what he says. The evidence must be the basis of any assault on his ideas. Blackburn also complains that Pinker’s three targets in the book (dualism, the noble savage and the blank slate) are mutually incompatible. This may be true but it is no reason not to attack all three. Besides, holding mutually incompatible ideas in our heads is a typical human trait that Blackburn himself excels at.

But it is with his attacks on behavioural genetics that Blackburn goes well off the rails. He simply doesn’t seem to understand the subject. We get the usual explanation of exactly what heritability means (which you can copy and paste of thousands of internet sites). Yes, having two legs is 100% inherited and 0% heritable, but that is not the traits that we are talking about. Heritability is only meaningful for traits that vary across populations and to point out it is useless in other cases is simply point scoring. If intelligence is 50% heritable (which is almost certainly in the right ballpark), then that means 50% in the variation in intelligence is due to genes. No amount of muddying the waters is going to change this. The bizarre thing is that if Blackburn does not think human intelligence has a sizable heritable portion, then presumably, he also believes that it could not have evolved. If it did not evolve then it must be a miracle, which would make Simon Blackburn a creationist, together with several other stalwarts of the secular left like Johann Hari and David Aaronovitch.

Blackburn then goes on to prove he simply doesn’t understand behavioural genetics at all. In a discussion on the findings by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson that step-fathers are more likely to abuse their partner’s existing offspring than natural fathers are to abuse theirs, he makes a daft comment. Mothers, he says, don’t scowl at their children’s classmates because they are genetic rivals. Well no, because unless the classmates are living with the mother and are someone else’s child, they are not genetic rivals of her own children. And Blackburn makes the wholly irrelevant point that we might also not be so attached to our partner’s existing dogs and sofas. I think he is trying to say that Daly and Wilson’s result might not depend on genes but he provides no evidence for this at all. It’s just an assertion based on intuition which is all the counterarguments to behavioural genetics ever seem to amount to.

Overall, Blackburn’s review, dressed up in his typical too-smug-by-half prose, is a typical example of how wilful misunderstanding of behavioural genetics is an intellectually respectable position. But just because a scientific discovery conflicts with your politics or intuition (or religion for that matter) does not make it false. Blackburn’s distortions of Pinker’s conclusions bear more than a passing similarity to accusations of distortion he migth level at creationists.



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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

I've been reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate on and off for a while now but hope to finish it fairly soon. It is actually not a terribly good book as it deals with either the blindingly obvious or the totally unjustified with very little in between. Pinker usually gives the impression he is talking to the converted rather than bothering to refute serious counter arguments. He also never questions his assumptions which means you get utterly fed up if you don't share them.

The book is intended to debunk three 'myths' which Pinker calls 'the blank slate', 'the ghost in the machine' and 'the noble savage'. The first of these is the belief that we are all determined by nurture rather than nature. Since no Christian can deny sinful human nature, this is really a dig at the political left who apparently claim we are born as a 'blank slate' and everything is down to our upbringing. There has been some controversy over this, especially with respect to racism and sexism, and Pinker is mainly just speaking common sense when he says that we need to take account of human nature rather than just wish it away. 'The noble savage' is the romantic idea that we are all good at heart and that savages untouched by western decadence all behave like angels. This I have come across a lot and its latest guise is to blame Europeans for all the Third World's problems. Again, no Christian can believe we are untainted at root or the corollary that we can create heaven on earth through our own efforts. 'The ghost in the machine' is the soul. To Pinker, this is another myth. As far as he is concerned, consciousness is nothing but an epi-phenomenon resulting from material processes. He does say this with utter confidence but I couldn't spot where he actually deals with all the arguments against materialism. He just assures us that 'neuroscience' has killed the soul and leaves it at that. In fact, there is an important debate here but Pinker doesn't touch it.

The main body of the book is intended to assure us that science has made the world safe for libertarians. Throughout this section, his arguments are either blindingly obvious (that genetic predisposition does not mean we will automatically become psychos) or totally unjustified (that moral responsibility exists even if we lack freewill). His efforts to explain sin as an evolutionary mechanism are deeply embarrassing as he clearly has no idea what he is talking about.

I'll post it here if the rest of the book provides anything useful but right now I'd only recommend it to the followers of Ayn Rand. My real interest is in the relationship between neuroscience and the soul. This, as I said, he hardly touches. Luckily a good few other writers do.

'This is a bogus statistic'

A comment on one of my previous posts has alerted me to the fact that Steven Pinker has an FAQ up on his site concerning ‘Better Angels of our Nature’. None of the questions appear to take him to task for using made-up statistics. Some of the responses he gives are highly entertaining. For example when asked about ‘atheist regimes in the 20th century’ he says:

‘according to the most recent compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White's Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.

Fourth, many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe‘

Whether the Thirty Years War was more destructive than World War I and II is an interesting question; Germany and large parts of Central Europe undoubtedly suffered a demographic collapse in the 17th century (15-20% in the German States). However the overwhelming majority of deaths during the 30 Years’ War were caused by disease – specifically typhus, dysentery and bubonic plague. This situation was partially caused and exacerbated by the movement of the various armies through the German countryside – resulting in food shortages and the outbreak of epidemics. According to the detailed treatment given in Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H Wilson death records from towns appear to show few directly related to military violence and 30 years of warfare reaped around 450,000 military casualties.

It could be argued, in fact it should be argued that much of this mortality would not have happened were it not for the conflict - other areas of Europe suffered population declines in this period but not as precipitous as Germany’s – so there is a direct responsibility there and disease related deaths should be added to the tally. However if that is the case then you have to compare like with like. Close troop quarters and massive troop movements helped facilitate an influenza pandemic at the end of World War I – perhaps the greatest medical holocaust ever. Add these to the 15,000,000 slaughtered in World War and it becomes proportionally the deadliest conflict in world history.

In answer to another religion related question Pinker states:

‘Jesus deserves credit for stigmatizing revenge, one of the main motives for violence over the course of human history. But things started going downhill in 312 when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the historical facts are not consistent with the claim that Christianity since then has been a force for nonviolence:

The Crusaders perpetrated a century of genocides that murdered a million people, equivalent as a proportion of the world’s population at the time to the Nazi holocaust.

Shortly afterwards, the Cathars of southern France were exterminated in another Crusader genocide because they had embraced the Albigensian heresy.

The Inquisition, according to Rummel, killed 350,000 people.

Martin Luther’s rant against the Jews is barely distinguishable from the writings of Hitler.

The three founders of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII, had thousands of heretics were burned at the stake, as they and their followers took Jesus literally when he said, “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

Following the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Christians killed 60,000-100,000 accused witches in the European witchhunts.

The European Wars of Religion had death rates that were double that of World War I and that were in the range of World War II in Europe.

Christian conquistadors massacred and enslaved native Americans in vast numbers, and perhaps twenty million were killed in all (not counting unintentional epidemics) by the European settlement of the Americas.

World War I, as I recall, was a war fought mostly by Christians against Christians. As for World War II and its associated horrors, see my answer to the previous question.

I was pleased to see Pinker’s statistics on the witch hunts – 60,000 over 3 centuries - are reasonably accurate (on the internet you regularly see figures of 9 million waved about) One wouldn’t want to act as some kind of apologist for killing people for imaginary crimes, however the figures for the Inquisition are far too high – 10,000 over six centuries is a more credible estimate. As far as I can make out from a quick scout through ‘google books’ Henry VIII burned 81 heretics, Calvin burned 1 (Servetus) and Luther believed that burning heretics was against the will of the Holy Spirit, thus giving the softie a fat 0. Not a very impressive total for the 3 founders of Protestantism.

The most bogus figure of the lot is the (non-disease related) extermination of 20 million native Americans during the settlement of the Americas. Pinker appears to have got this number from White’s necrometrics – however as his discussion of it on his site shows he basically plucked the number out of thin air (he has taken the median of 4 clearly made up estimates). The conquest was often one of murderous oppression but the demographic collapse – 90% in some areas was as a result of epidemics. For example – the native population here in New England may well have been some 72,000 to 114,000 before colonisation. By 1670 that number had been reduced to only 8,600.

The decline was not the result of a genocide campaign, in fact, in the case of the Spanish the settlers were small in number and depended on native communities to build and sustain their colonies. As a result officials became concerned about the mortality that was occurring and passed edicts to protect natives from colonial excesses; they had become convinced by voices such as Las Casas who argued it was Spanish rule causing the disaster, not understanding the horrific role of disease. None of this probably sprang from any noble motive but it shows how tenuous the accusation of genocide is.

In answer to one question (I’ve read that at the beginning of the 20th century, ninety percent of deaths in warfare were suffered by soldiers, but at the end, ninety percent were suffered by civilians) Pinker writes:

‘This is a bogus statistic; see pp. 317–320

No – if you want to see a load of bogus statistics start at page 1 and keep reading till you get to page 832; then read the FAQ for good measure.

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How to Annoy Scientists

I’ve previously described myself as a conservative post-modernist. This means that I like to use the methods of post modern theory to expose the assumptions of the (usually quite left wing) people who espouse post modernism. As I like to say, all history is fiction, especially if it’s written by Marxists.

I think many of the insights of theory are extremely penetrating. When Michael Foucault’s History of Madness was eviscerated by Andrew Scull in the Times Literary Supplement the other week, I wasn’t sure the attack was entirely fair. Sure, the basis of Foucault’s work in the historical sources was rather shaky, but his ideas were brilliant. As long as we are careful ourselves about keeping the facts sacred, we can use his ideas in many different fields. When I explained last week why I thought that Dennett, Pinker and others were all supporters of a modular theory of the mind because of their loyalty to evolutionary theories and the limitations of their experiments, I was being quite the Foucault disciple.

Scientists dislike having their practices subjected to scrutiny even more than left-wing professors do. They seem to think that the unique methodology of science makes them immune to the subjective pressures that the rest of us suffer from. Not a chance. If anything, the belief of scientists that their discipline is not prone to subjectivity makes them even more prone to it.

A few years ago, a new academic subject was born - the sociology of scientific knowledge (or SSK for short). The SSK mob started saying that scientific theories are social constructs divorced from objective truth. Scientists got cross about this because they had always thought they believed their theories because they were true. Of course, both sides are wrong and both have a point. When I ask the question “why does Richard Dawkins believe that religion is an unwanted by-product of something useful rather than an evolutionary adaptation that benefits its carrier?” or “why does Steven Pinker think the mind is modular?” (see here and here for a discussion of these questions in case they don’t make immediate sense) I can see a menu of options. One of the options is that Pinker and Dawkins are actually right, that their opinion is one reached by a rational examination of the facts that has led them to a correct conclusion. But that is only one option. There are other possibilities, such as the fact that their ideas fit well with their preconceived opinions. Dawkins hates religion and so he cannot accept a theory that claims it must be good for humanity. Pinker loves evolution so adopts a hypothesis of mind conducive to his favourite theory.

So I think I am justified in imagining that scientists often adopt the scientific theories that they do for reasons that are largely subjective. However, much it might annoy them, I think we do need to look at the motivation and biases of scientists before we decide that we are going to believe them.

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Theories of the Mind

Dan Dennett, Steven Pinker and Judith Rich Harris are all promoters of the idea of the primacy of genetics in any scientific explanation of human behaviour. As I said on Monday, I’m with them on that. Whenever my wife or I hear some piece of pop psychology we subject it to the ‘Pinker test’. If it doesn’t give pride of place to genetics then it is probably worthless. This tends to invalidate almost everything you hear about what causes people to behave the way they do. Of course, I see Dennett and co. simply catching up with St Augustine’s work on the inheritability of personality and the impossibility of completely subjugating our desires. Augustine must qualify as one of the greatest psychologists in history and, unlike lost other people of whom it is said, was well ahead of his time (at least in this respect).

Evolutionary psychology is not the only thing that Dennett, Pinker and Rich Harris have in common. A few years back Dennett brought out a book called Consciousness Explained. More recently, Pinker’s How the Mind Works has been almost as influential. Rich Harris’s new book, No Two Alike, ploughs the same furrow.

Their theory is simply stated. The brain has a number of inter-dependent service modules that each do a particular job. The modules are independent enough that if you disable one, the rest of the brain can continue to work. It’ll try a hot fix around the disabled component so that sometimes the conscious mind won’t even notice that something is missing. The modular theory states that consciousness is an epiphenomenon that results from all these modules getting on with their jobs and talking to each other. The modules themselves are in no way controlled by the conscious self. In fact, the conscious self doesn’t do anything very much beyond getting fooled into thinking that it is in charge.

Needless to say, I find this theory rather implausible. But I am more intrigued as to why it enjoys support from the same sorts of people who are also sympathetic to evolutionary psychology. I think it is because the modular mind is highly amenable to an evolutionary explanation. Each module can be explained by a different evolutionary just-so story which keeps things nice and simple. For instance, the speech organ postulated by Noam Chomsky before he turned into a barking mad nut case, can be made the subject of a story that leads from the ability to grunt to the ability to recite Homer in a few easy steps.

There’s another reason why I think that the modular theory is popular and it has to do with how science works when it is successful. Science is usually reductionistic because we lack the tools to analyse complex systems without breaking them up. The brain is the most complex system of all, so splitting it up into manageable chunks would seem a sensible way to go about understanding it. Almost all experiments on the brain have involved prodding it with stimuli and seeing which bits light up. More radically, when particular parts of the brain stop working due to injury or disease, we can examine the effects this has on its overall function. In fact, there are almost no other useful kinds of experiment you can do on the brain. I’m not denying that all this has been fruitful. Just that it hasn’t taken us a single step towards understanding what consciousness is. But it is not surprising that the theories of mind we do have, while generally rather implausible, have been shaped by the experimental limitations of neuroscience and the success of evolutionary theory.

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Steven Pinker fails to boil blood

A correspondent kindly informed me that Steven Pinker, whose work I often find very interesting, has been trying to stoke up some controversy. He has suggested some questions that he thinks so controversial they will make people’s blood boil. Well, after reading through them, I reached for a thermometer and found my body temperature had not increased by a fraction of a degree. So, I thought I might try and answer his questions as well. But before I do so, I’d like to pose one of my own that Pinker did not feel it worth asking:

“In a hundred years time, will people look upon our attitudes towards abortion with the same horrified incomprehension that we feel about nineteenth century slavery?”

I’d be interested in Pinker’s answer. Now to his questions:

1: "Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?" A: Yes, obviously.

2: "Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?" A: No. Many of them are confirmed by other sources.

3: "Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?" A: Possibly. The fall of communism led to a big improvement.

4: "Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? A: If it is anything like as prevalent as we have been led to believe, then many people are able to make a full recovery.

5: "Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?" A: Yes, according to Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse (which I will review in a few weeks time when I’ve finished it).

6: "Do men have an innate tendency to rape?" A: Most don’t. Some do.

7: "Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?" A: Yes. But it was not a crime worth paying.

8: "Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?" A: Yes.

9: "Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?" A: I doubt it. Increasing supply tends to increase demand.

10: "Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?" A: No idea.

11: "Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?" A: Some elements of morality have evolutionary explanations. Others are much harder to explain in this way.

12: "Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?" A: No.

13: "Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?" A: Never heard of this one before.

14: "Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?" A: No.

15: "Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?" A: Obviously, yes.

16: "Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?" A: A trick question, I think. Nazism was only around for 15 years. At that tie it certainly killed more than religions.

17: "Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?" A: No. Torture is ineffective as the victim just tells the torturer what he thinks he wants to hear. Even the Inquisition realised this.

18: "Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?" A: Yes possibly. But the decision should be made by Africans, not western environmentalists or African dictators.

19: "Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?" A: It’s possible but I’ve only seen evidence that IQs are increasing.

20: "Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?" A: A well-regulated market might work and help reduce abortion. But it would be hard to avoid abuses.

21: "Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?" A: I’ve already argued in favour of this.

22: "Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?" A: I’m not convinced this would be beneficial.

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The Decline of Violence

My wife and I have just moved a delightful little village in the middle of Kent. While we were settling in, some of the neighbours came around to check us out. Surprisingly, none of them tried to kill us. They didn’t even form a posse to run us out of town.

In the context of human history, it is deeply strange that a new family could settle down with a different territory without fear of reprisals from the residents. You might think this is a triumph for private property, but it goes deeper than that. Even if we had moved into their back garden, they would have called the police rather than shot at us.

Given the carnage of the twentieth century, it is counter-intuitive but still true that the chances of being killed by violence have been falling, if irregularly and with upward blips, throughout history. In response to my recent post on mythical noble savages, a correspondent on my yahoo group recommended the book War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley. His description of all-out prehistoric war can be compared to the brutal but rule-bound prosecution of medieval warfare, as I discussed last month. Steven Pinker, in a recent essay, carries the story to the present day and notes that the casualty rate for the First and Second World Wars was nothing like as great as in earlier struggles even if the absolute figures were very high.

The question, if we accept the fact that human violence has decreased, is why did it? Pinker offers some thoughts in his article, correctly noting that we have not had time to evolve into more peaceful creatures. None of the three suggestions he makes quite add up, but the one with most mileage is, I think, Peter Singer’s. That is quite surprising given Singer is a pretty unpleasant piece of work in many respects, but he does seem to be groping towards a solution to the problem of the decline of violence.

Basically, he suggests that evolution gave us the ability to survive peacefully in small groups, the in-group. Many animals live in packs of a few families and defend their territory against all comers. Our closest relatives, the chimps, live in a pack, raid their neighbours, murder intruders and generally behave like real savages. Human beings, however, have figured out how to live in bigger groups and not resort to violence at the first instance. Somehow, we have accepted larger and larger in-groups who are to be initially trusted and treated as part of the tribe. This has had the inevitable effect that we use violence less often and the casualty figures drop.

The question neither Pinker nor Singer answer is why we have allowed our in-groups to increase in size. I suspect they would find the most likely solution disagreeable to their prejudices...

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Pinker tackles the Albigensian Crusade

In ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ Steven Pinker reels off example after example of ancient, medieval and early modern brutality in order to justify his thesis that the world is getting less violent. Pinker writes:

In the 13th century the Cathars of southern France embraced the Albigensian heresy, according to which there are two gods, one of good and one of evil. An infuriated papacy, in collusion with the king of France, sent waves of armies to the region, which killed around 200,000 of them. To give you a sense of the armies’ tactics, after capturing the city of Bram in 1210 they took a hundred of the defeated soldiers, cut off their noses and upper lips, gouged out the eyes of all but one, and had him lead the others to the city of Cabaret to terrorize its citizens into surrendering. The reason you have never met a Cathar is that the Albigensian Crusade exterminated them. Historians classify this episode as a clear instance of genocide*, **.

In this passage Pinker claims that the infamous Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) took the lives of 200,000 people, though in a footnote he approvingly cites White’s figure for the suppression of the Cathars – one million deaths.

The first step in determining whether these are credible estimates should be to estimate the population of the region and the scale of the conflict which erupted for 20 years. Estimates of the Langudoc’s population in the 13th century are few and far between. According to ‘Heresy Proceedings in Languedoc 1500-1560’, the population in the fourteenth century was about 1.5 million. So I think we can make an educated guess that the population at the time of the crusades (13th century) was a bit lower at 1 million (see also). This means in order for White’s figure of 1 million deaths to be credible, the Crusade needed to have been sufficiently large to slaughter pretty much every single person in the Languedoc (unless of course they bussed in a load of heretics from somewhere else).

In terms of the major cities in the region according to Costen, ‘The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade’. The city of Beziers possibly had a population no higher than 10,000. Toulouse had a population of 20,000, Montsegur at the time it was besieged had a population of 361, Carcassonne had a population of 6,000.

During the fighting itself, almost the entire population of Beziers was slaughtered on the 22nd of July 1209 according to the chroniclers. The legates recorded that ‘our men spared no-one, irrespective of rank, sex or age’ and put the toll for the massacre down as 20,000. In God’s War Christopher Tyerman states that ‘the true figure was almost certainly far less’ (p591). Costen points out that the cities population probably only numbered 10,000 (Tyerman thinks 8-9 thousand) so ‘this claim can be seen as in line with the normal inability of commentators at this period to deal with large numbers’ (p123). When Caracassonne fell, all the citizens were allowed to leave freely (though naked according to some accounts). When a new crusade was launched in 1211, Lavaur was attacked and 400 Cathar perfecti were burnt (New Cambridge Medieval History vol5 p167).

Following Beziers the social order of the region – always a ‘a patchwork of petty lords and nobles who spent most of their time and energy fighting each other’ - collapsed and it became a perpetual war zone. Massacres became a regular event – ‘from the inhabitants of the modest Castrum of Les Touelles to the 5,000 citizens dispatched at Marmande***’ (Tyerman 592). However as the war dragged on these horrors decreased, perhaps reflecting a lack of persecuting zeal or the chroniclers indifference.

Following the death of Simon De Montfort his son Amaury lost ground and retired to Paris. Another crusade led by Louis VIII was sent to the Langudoc upon which many southern cities voluntarily submitted to the king. Upon arrival the crusade was very small due to the departure of many of its original participants and the fact that many had die in an epidemic. In the event it was not attacked and the king died unexpectedly. When war next erupted in 1228 the count of Toulouse sued for peace due to financial considerations and agreed to enforce the heresy laws.

The inquisition’s activities were more restrained than their reputation suggests though they conducted an unprecedented level of investigation and interrogation. Bernard of Caux, inquisitor of Toulouse appears to have sentenced 207 offenders between 12th of May and 22nd of July 1246 (the height of the inquisition’s activity)– burning none, sentencing 23 to imprisonment and ordering the rest to wear crosses. Later in the century some 8 to 9 percent of those sentenced were burned to death.

The Albigensian Crusade must rank as one of the nastiest of medieval wars, resulting in massacres, atrocities, guerrilla warfare and the breakdown of social order. As Malcolm Barbour argues:

‘the Albigensian crusades went far beyond the normal conventions of early thirteenth-century warfare, in the scale of the slaughter, in the execution of high-status opponents, male and female, in the mutilation of prisoners, in the humiliation and shaming of the defeated, and in the quite overt use of terror as a method of achieving one's goals'.

Nethertheless, as Tyerman points out ‘the crusades did not destroy a region’ (p604), once the fighting ended, ‘prosperity returned’. With the exception of the massacre at Beziers the destruction waged in the region was comparatively modest in scale. Aside from de Montfort’s victory at Saint-Martin-Lalande and the Battle of Muret the Langudociens appear to have avoided field engagements and the massacres appear to number in the hundreds rather than thousands.

Coming up with any sort of figure for death tolls appear futile. 1,000,000 deaths is clearly ridiculous, 200,000 – a 20% death rate for the region seems too high. 100,000 might be closer to the truth but given the paucity of evidence any estimate is going to be pure speculative ‘finger waving’.

*Actually the Albigensian crusade hardly touched the Cathars. As Languedoc was restored to southern French rule after 1218 the Cathars resumed the public practice of their faith and were as strong as before. The crusade – always something of a cynical land grab - was a failure that petered out after its leader Simon De Montfort was killed at Toulouse in 1218. The reason the Cathars got their come-uppence was because the French monarchy acquired the Langedoc region of southern France through an advantageous marriage and the inquisitors were allowed to operate there.

**In his account of the capture of Bram Pierre Des Vaux claims that the mutilations were performed as a reaction to atrocities perpetrated by the defenders, reflecting tit for tat violence rather than tactical necessity. Hideous atrocities were perpetrated on both sides, including the reign of terror conducted in the Dordogne valley by Bernard of Cazenac and his wife Elise (the second jezebel) in which 150 men and women had their hands or feet amputated or their eyes put out in the Benedictine Abbey of Sarlat. Elise’s modus oper

andi was allegedly removing women’s thumbs and ordering the removal of the nipples of a poor peasant woman (Tyerman p592).

During the siege of Toulouse in 1217-18, captured crusaders could expect to have their eyes put out, their tongues removed, to be dragged behind horses, stoned, dropped from the ramparts, or drowned with mill-stones around their necks. According to Malcolm Barbour ‘In 1212, Roger Bernard, the count's son, captured some crusaders near Narbonne, took them back to Foix, where he and his men spent their time devising "new and original tortures" for them including suspension by their genitals’.

*Again the numbers seem high here given that the population in later centuries is estimated at numbering around 1,000 but there is little doubt a major massacre took place – the anonymous pro northern chronicler describes numerous assorted organs ‘torn out and tossed aside on the open ground as if they had rained down from the sky’.

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How bad were the Mongols ?

Separate piles of heads of men, women and children were built into pyramids; and even cats and dogs were killed in the streets.

Sayfi Heravi on the sacking of Naishapur

Exactly how nasty were the Mongols? Let’s be honest, they would probably be the last people in world history you would invite round for wine tasting and canapés. One famous anecdote concerning their rule for example claims that un-cooperative Russian nobles were assembled and forced to lie on the ground. A heavy wooden gate was then thrown on them and a table and chairs set up on the top side of the gate. Following this a victory banquet was thrown (which no doubt involved some stamping and enthusiastic dancing) and the unfortunate Russian princes were suffocated under the weight of the platform. Ironically, in doing so the Mongols were showing a certain degree of respect by not shedding noble blood; a similar principle was applied with the last Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad who was executed by being rolled in a carpet and kicked to death by horses.

In ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ Stephen Pinker (quoting White’s estimates again) claims that the hordes of Genghis Khan and his successors managed to wipe out 40,000,000 people. This puts them at second in the all-time ‘Possibly the worst things people have done to each other’ list with an adjusted death toll of 298,000,000 (mid-20th century equivalent). Pinker writes:

The Mongol invasions of Islamic lands in the 13th century resulted in the massacre of 1.3 million people in the city of Merv alone, and another 800,000 residents of Baghdad. As the historian of the Mongols J. J. Saunders remarks "There is something indescribably revolting in the cold savagery with which the Mongols carried out their massacres. The inhabitants of a doomed town were obliged to assemble in a plain outside the walls, and each Mongol trooper, armed with a battle-axe, was told to kill so many people, ten, twenty or fifty. As proof that orders had been properly obeyed, the killers were sometimes required to cut off an ear from each victim, collect the ears in sacks, and bring them to their officers to be counted. A few days after the massacre, troops were sent back into the ruined city to search for any poor wretches who might be hiding in holes or cellars; these were dragged out and slain". The Mongols’ first leader, Genghis Khan, offered this reflection on the pleasures of life: “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.”[1]

How credible are such estimates? It is certainly plausible if we take the contemporary chroniclers such as Ibn al-Athir and Al-Nasawi at face value. These state the Mongol Army (estimated at perhaps 130,000 men) massacred hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of people. 1,600,000 people were killed at the sack of Harat, and 1,747,000 at Nishapur (another source says 2,400,000). The Mongol leader Hulegu claimed in a letter to Louis IX of France that he killed two million people during the sack of Baghdad [2]. This would mean the Mongols were pulling off operations on the scale of the siege of Leningrad and the battle of Stalingrad regularly over the course of their conquests. According to Jack Weatherford in ‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World’ these figures are ‘preposterous’. David Morgan in ‘The Mongols’ is as sceptical, but less emphatic, regarding these estimates as not statistical information but instead ‘evidence of the state of mind created by the character of the Mongol invasion’.

Weatherford states that ‘conservative scholars place the number of dead from Genghis Khan’s invasion of central Asia at 15 million within five years’, however ‘even this more modest total…would require that each Mongol kill more than a hundred people’. If we took the chroniclers estimates, according to Weatherford this would mean ‘a slaughter of 350 people by every Mongol soldier’ (this would trump even the 87 people killed by Arnold Schwarzenegger during the course of the movie Commando).

Even so, it is somewhat glib to say that the chroniclers exaggerate – though this is often the case in ancient and medieval history [3]. One approach to determine their authenticity is to try to quantify exactly what the population of Central Asia was at the time. According to David Morgan this is difficult due to the lack of comprehensive Islamic archaeology and the fact that mud brick buildings do not respond well to repair. In many places however, such as at Harat it is possible to see where the pre Mongol walls stood – according to Morgan none of the sites appear to have been big enough to accommodate the populations noted in the sources; even under a siege where the population would have been swelled by refugees [4]. Another problem is that if we accept the contemporary figures then this would indicate the Mongols were outnumbered by ratios of 50-1 and you would think they would have greater success at fighting off their assailants.

Bernard Lewis and David Morgan state that the Mongol devastation was not universal. Only Transoxania and Khurasan had to suffer Mongol wrath at its worst whereas South Asia was never submitted to a full scale assault. Parts of Russia were devastated but some areas escaped lightly or completely [5]. The campaign against the Chin Empire in China was destructive but that later undertaken against the Sung was less so in order to take over as intact a country as possible,

The only way in which the 40 million figure given in ‘Better Angels of our Nature could be rendered plausible is if the statistics given for China from Sung and Chin times to after the expulsion of the Mongols in 1382 are accurate. These show a drop in population from 100 million to 70 million in 1290s [6] and 60 million in 1393 – a drop of 40 million. How responsible are the Mongols for this apparent holocaust?

We have already seen the problems with attempting to rely on the Chinese censuses which all too often appear to reflect the effectiveness of the central administration rather than the actual population. According to Timothy Brook in ‘The Troubled Empire’ many Chinese in Mongol areas were simply not reported, having been en-serfed and thus disappeared from the records altogether. Additionally the 14th century in China saw extensive flooding of the Yellow river and the subsequent famine, outbreaks of disease in the 1330s and a major outbreak of what is thought to have been the Black Death from 1353-4.[7] China in the 14th century experienced below average temperatures, harsh winters and a shorter growing season. The Yellow river flooded 6,000 square miles and 17 walled cities causing severe epidemics. Military disruption would have caused refugees to move south into communities where they would have been treated as transients and therefore not counted in taxation censuses.

What conclusions can be made – if any - on the extent of Mongol destructiveness? Certainly the invasions were appalling and exacted a heavy toll on agriculture and towns. Some modern studies tend to take a revisionist stress the positive aspects of Mongol rule, however as Hugh Kennedy remarks in Mongols, Huns and Vikings:

‘Revisionist historians have questioned the extent of Mongol ferocity and destructiveness, suggesting that such accounts are largely rhetoric and hyperbole. However, the weight of contemporary evidence is very strong and it is backed up by the archaeology. Of the great cities sacked by the Mongols, only Bukhara and Urgench were rebuilt on the same site: Balkh, Otrar and Nishapur were ruined for ever and at Merv a new town was founded two centuries later well away from the remains of the old. Samarkand was rebuilt outside the old walls while the ancient city remained as it is today, a desolate .waste of mud-brick ruins’.

Nonetheless – while the Mongols themselves would have been absolutely delighted to have been credited with the annihilation of 40 million people in the 13th century (around 9% of the world’s population at the time) – the number seems pretty unlikely. It’s the same as the number of civilians killed in World War II with a vastly higher world population and more destructive forms of weaponry. 11-15 million doesn’t seem outside the realms of possibility – a staggering total but still some way short of the inflated total given by Pinker [8]. If that figure is correct then the Mongol Conquests killed 2.5% of the world's population (450 million) in over a hundred years - from the 1230s to the late 14th century. By contrast World War II managed to wipe out between 1.5 and 2% of the World's population in only six years.

[1]One of the less well known aspects of the Mongol conquests was their capacity for propaganda. Regarding the above quote Jack Weathersford writes in ‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World that:

‘Rather than finding such apocalyptic descriptions derogatory, Genghis Khan seemed to have encouraged them. With his penchant for finding a use for everything he encountered, he devised a powerful way to exploit the high literacy rate of the Muslim people, and turned his unsuspecting enemies into a potent weapon for shaping public opinion. Terror, he realized, was best spread not by the acts of warriors, but by the pens of scribes and scholars. In an era before newspapers, the letters of the intelligentsia played a primary role in shaping public opinion, and in the conquest of central Asia, they played their role quite well on Genghis Khan’s behalf. The Mongols operated a virtual propaganda machine that consistently inflated the number of people killed in battle and spread fear wherever its words carried.’

Similarly George Lane remarks that the Mongols ’deliberately exaggerated and encouraged the horror stories that circulated around them and preceded their arrival in order to ensure an unhesitating surrender of the cowed population’.

[2] In David Morgan’s ‘The Mongols’ he states this figure as 200,000 however he was misled by an editor’s translation and has corrected it to 2 million in later editions. Clearly this figure is ludicrously high (see the estimates for Baghdad’s Medieval population in footnote 4).

[3] Even such a towering figure as Julius Caesar in his ‘Gallic Wars’ claimed that in a single battle against two tribes he had defeated an enemy 430,000 strong without losing a single soldier.

[4] Estimates of Baghdad’s population range from 96 million (!?!) by an 11th century source Hilal al-Sabi to perhaps 200,000 to 500,000 inhabitants (Jacob Lassner Massignon and Baghdad) The most plausible range for the time is probably between 200,000 and 600,000, a very large city by Medieval standards but not sufficiently large to meet Hulugu or Pinker’s total. Estimates of the killed range from 80,000 to 1 million. The lower end seems far more credible.

[5] John Fennell argues that although some Russian cities were captured and presumably damaged or destroyed, many others were probably bypassed and escaped sack.

[6] The 1290 census did not include Yunnan and other areas and also did not enumerate several categories of people, claiming that ‘migrants living in the wilderness are not included in the total’. According to Peter C. Perdue in ‘Exhausting the Earth’ it is generally accepted that the 1393 census did not count the entire population

[7] The Mongols don’t get off the hook completely here as it was the creation of their empire that cleared the way for the advance of plague from Central Asia into China.

[8] Any estimate has to be taken with a considerable pinch of salt. John Man estimates that the Khwarezmian massacres claimed 1.2 million lives – 25-30% of 5 million. Hulagu’s conquests may have claimed roughly the same number and a slightly lower total can be assumed for the incursions into Eastern Europe and Rus. Clearly the Chinese census cannot be taken at face value in estimating population lost & most of the total must be due to plague. Assuming the real decline was 30 million (allowing for a significant undercount in the censue) and Mongol actions accounted for 25% of deaths gives 7.5 million. This would give a grand total of 11.5 million over the course of around a century.

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