Cassandra had a point.

Posted by on Dec 12, 2011 in Disputes between Scholars

I’ve reflected on this problem and whether I should post this article or not for quite a while. I’ve decided that I should post it. Not only because it might spark a thought or two out there, but because some things shouldn’t go uncontested.

Now, I have been guilty of ranting against Steven Pinker in the past (“A Crisis of Consciousness”-Series). One could even say that I have made this blog the spectacle of Steven Pinker’s descent into unfathomable depths of my contempt when in 2007 his article series in the TIMES ended up being less about consciousness, and more about politics of consciousness, less about finding new sources for human ethos, but more about abolishing Christianity.

Pinker is back in the general eye of the reader with a new book: The Better Angels of Our Nature. While I don’t wish to enter any kind of debate on the book itself – even though I am always wary of argumentation that starts out stating that we’re nearing our Golden Age – I would urge anyone to read the synthesized version and application of considerations taken from the book and applied to the here and now: the author’s article in The Guardian “If it bleeds, it misleads: on violence and misery the Cassandras are wrong” (1st of November 2011).

There are quite a few things wrong with this article. Not so much on what Pinker’s saying, but how he is saying it and a much more fundamental argumentative way. It seems that the brilliant writer that he used to be, the unsung hero of so many well constructed reasonings has swapped his gift for some rather badly thought up interpretations and has lost his way with words.

My main problem with his article is the complete lack of distinction between the feeling of insecurity of a group versus the factual decrease in the number of deaths in wars. The fact that fewer people die in wars is balanced against the general feeling of insecurity of ‘the people’ (which I personally read as ‘the civilised western societies from the northern hemisphere’).  If our everyday society of the western world feels more insecure today than they did 10 years ago, then there really isn’t any proper way to dispute that. Feelings are subjective and they can’t be altered with reason or facts. People feel less secure today than 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Through that alone this situation becomes a fact. The statistical number of less deaths in wars, less wars, less conflicts etc. cannot alter that for the simple reason that both facts have not much to do with one another. It’s like watching someone fit a square into a round hole. Painful.

I would even argue that the wars far off, raise the feeling of cohesion of a societial group rather than threaten it. To come to a proper balance or argument, you would have to set the general criminal rates in a country, a suburn, a city, a region etc. against the general feeling of insecurity of that area and see if it matches.

Enter: the big bad, dulling and manipulative mainstream media. For Pinker, they are at the source of the non-sequitur that the changes in our societies (approaching the null-line of ‘free’ and ‘secure’) should make us all feel better about our societies and much more secure, are none other than the mass media. While I am not unreceptive to the idea of a general media manipulation, this argument does nothing to help balance what Pinker’s already unbalanced. The important thing here is not the wars or open conflicts, but how immediate they are to us. The individual. The building unit of a group.
Through the media these conflicts become more and more immediate. The social network habitus is doing its part in this, as we were all able to witness with the Arab Spring.Going back and applying this reflection onto the past, anybody realises that a lot of conflicts, even battles from the big wars weren’t reported back home immediately, but rather weeks after having taken place. This is also part of the reason why WWI has been such a traumatic event. Battles were stalemates and would drag on. It was the first time where people could get the feeling of being at home, while on the Western front children were killing themselves in the muds of the Somme. Or, who from the greater public in 1870 knew anything about knew anything about the battle of Sedan and Napoleon III subsequent capture until days after it had happened? Today we are taken as witnesses of Muhammar al-Gadaffi’s last moments in the public limelight before the mob exhibits his dead body for everyone (and I mean everyone) to see.
As always, judging from what can be remembered, because it was written down, then moving on to use that as a basis to reconstruc what  actually has happened, is a method that will never give a proper picture of the past.

But, Steven Pinker has learnt from past mistakes. There is no mention of terrorism as a reality. And that is the main flaw of this article. Wouldn’t that be absolutely fundamental to any kind of argumentation involving aspects of feeling insecure in our modern society? It would be. This feeling of insecurity that ‘the people’ are feeling is in fact a direct result of the terrorism of the last 10 to 20 years and any textbook on the matter would tell you so. Again, Pinker is incapable of moving past his Amero-centric view on the world and the slightest possibility of seeing the part-victory global terrorism has already gained on us and particularly our civil liberties. Even if it was the only way to limit its validity. Even if it was the only way for our modern society to find a way our of the insecurity. (Btw, when will a sociologue declare that what the rating agencies are doing is nothing more than economical terrorism?)

The fundamental misuse of the Cassandra myth in the title is a sad symbol of Pinker’s errors in setting up his reasoning.

Cassandra was right in what she saw. She could forsee the future. That was Apollo’s blessing. Her curse for refusing him was that nobody would ever believe her.

Oh, the irony.

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