As measured by Pinker, ‘violence’ is the probability of sudden death at the hands of others (and includes deaths on the battlefield). Now let me ask you a question: Which was more violent, the England of The Canterbury Tales and Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, or the England of The Waste Land and the two world wars?
Professor Pinker ran a survey. The typical respondent ‘guessed that twentieth-century England was about 14 per cent more violent than fourteenth-century England. In fact it was 95 per cent less violent.’
Violence has declined. Why and how? And what, you might ask, has this got to do with writing novels?
In his book Pinker presents what he takes to be the decisive influences.
1) The rise of the nation state, which in effect demands the monopoly of violence.*2 Pre-state societies were basically warlord societies, and they were up to ten times more violent than societies of the later phase. ‘Leviathan’ wields a police force, and the word politics (the art or science of governing) derives from police.
2) The rise of doux commerce – ‘soft’ commerce, grounded on cooperation and mutual advantage (and not on cheating, gouging, welching, and sueing).
3) The rise of a modestly generalised prosperity. What used to be called ‘a competence’ settled on more and more people, giving them more to lose from disruption and more to fear from it.
4) The rise of science and the rise of reason; this included the retreat of superstition and the retreat of that evergreen casus belli, religion.
5) The rise of literacy, which gradually burgeoned into a mass phenomenon – roughly 300 years after the invention of printing (1452).
6) The rise of women. Violence is almost exclusively a male preserve, and cultures that ‘respect the interests and values of women’ are destined to become not only much more peaceful but also much more prosperous.
7) The rise of the novel.
At first number 7 looks like an interloper, don’t you think? In terms of efficacy it is no doubt the last among equals; but the novel shouldn’t be shy to find itself in such grand geohistorical company. The novel has other reasons for embarrassment, true, but these are minor and comical, having to do with the messiness of its birth.
Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was hugely influential, but the totemic anglophone book, here, is unfortunately Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). I own the four-volume Everyman edition, and over time I have put in about a dozen hours with it. And it is terrible. Clarissa is terrible, and Richardson is terrible: fussy, prissy, finicky, and batted about the place by anxieties connected to religion, class, and above all sexual repression (pious Clarissa is finally drugged and raped by the brooding anti-hero Mr Lovelace, and dies of shame, all alone). It is in addition unforgivably long – the longest novel in the language.*3
But we have to note that early admirers of Clarissa, a vast company, felt themselves connected to the heroine with unprecedented intimacy and warmth; they identified, they sympathised, they shared and understood her feelings; a new and quite unexpected stage of the reader–writer relationship had been reached – one that pressed home the elementary lesson about doing to others as you would have them do to you…So we feel grateful to Richardson; and never mind, for now, that literary – or literate – England, in the late 1740s, found itself passionately rooting for a prig, and a prig dreamed up by a philistine.
Everything has to start somewhere. And, besides, this deep-sea wave of enlightenment has already rolled through villages (and now extends, as Pinker shows, to our treatment of sexual minorities, of children, and of animals)…It seems there was an evolutionary readiness to be more thoughtful, in both senses, thinking more, and thinking more considerately.
To return for a moment to the Pinker paradox. ‘In 1800,’ he writes (in a later book), ‘no country in the world had a life-expectancy above forty.’ And what is it now? ‘The answer for 2015 is 71.4 years’ – worldwide. If progress has been made, and it has, why do we persist in feeling it hasn’t?
Well, there’s the news media of course (‘if it bleeds, it leads’, etc.); there’s the inherent difficulty (as all novelists know) of writing memorably about well-being; and, perhaps most perniciously, there’s the intellectual glamour of gloom. The idea that sullen pessimism is a mark of high seriousness has helped to create an organic (perhaps by now a hereditary) resistance to the affirmative and a rivalrous attraction to its opposite – the snobbery of one-downmanship.
Optimists are quickly exasperated by pessimism (I know I am), by the habitual lassitude and disgust we associate with adolescence – early adolescence. So I tell you what: I’m going to leave all that for another fifty pages, and wait till I visit the world HQ of ennui, cafard, and nausée – yes, France.
So for now I’ll say au revoir to the counter-Enlightenment spirit, only pausing to glance at Goya’s famous etching of 1798. This shows a slumbrous philosophe against a background of bats and screech-owls. The Sleep of Reason, runs the title, Brings Forth Monsters.
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On July 21, as we’re all aware, that strictly non-combatant bruiser, that chicken-hawk, that valorised ignoramus, that titanic vulgarian (dishonest to the ends of his hair) will be anointed as the Republican contender for the 2016 presidential election.
But tomorrow the Amises fly to London, in good time for the Brexit referendum. Elena has dual nationality, so that’ll be two sure votes for Remain…And take my word for it, this won’t be a close-run thing. As with Scotland and breakaway ‘independence’ – once you get in that booth, you stop fancying a leap in the dark. No: the Brits are going to stick with the devil they know.
As for the USA…In Crippled America Trump says that he faced much discouragement along the way – until, that is, ‘the American people spoke’. By the American people he means, of course, registered Republicans.
