THE BEST OF TIMES

By the lights of the Whig theory of history, the world is becoming more and more peaceful, less and less cruel. Humanity is improving. But when we look beneath the Whig, we find shoddy scholarship and formidable errors in reasoning.

PART ONE OF THREE

In the early years of the fifth century AD, a Spanish priest named Paulus Orosius had occasion to publish a work entitled Orosii Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII— Seven Books of History against the Pagans. Orosius was a disciple of Saint Augustine. It was the purpose of the seven books to provide a defense of Christianity against the common pagan charge that Christianity accelerated, if it did not cause, the decline of the Roman Empire. Orosius met this dubious challenge by reversing its polarity. If things were in the fifth century bad, he argued, once they were worse. His book is a tedious account of the violence, brutality, and stupidity of the pagan past.^[2]Paulus Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, trans. A. T. Fear (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).

Saint Augustine, who had initially welcomed Orosius as a collaborator, in short order rejected him as a schnook.

The twentieth century began in August of 1914.^[3]See “The First World War,” in the Cosmopolitan Globalist. If the twentieth century seems short, the nineteenth century seems long. David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford … Continue reading It has not been a century that has enhanced the dignity of the human race. Only five years after it began, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova asked whether it was worse than any of the others.^[4]Anna Akhmatova, Plantain, quoted in Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 793.

It was much worse.

Two hundred and thirty-one million men, women, and children died violently in the twentieth century, shot over open pits, murdered in secret police cellars, asphyxiated in Nazi gas ovens, worked to death in Arctic mines or timber camps, the victims of deliberately contrived famines or lunatic industrial experiments, whole populations ravaged by alien armies, bombed to smithereens, or sent to wander in their exiled millions across all the violated borders of Europe and Asia.^[5]Milton Leitenberg, Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the 20th Century, 3rd ed., Cornell University Peace Study Program, Occasional Paper No. 29. The Holocaust and the Gulag have become symbols of the twentieth century, but if they are prominent as symbols, they are not unique as abominations. The Chinese Civil War took place from 1927 to 1936 and, after an interregnum in which those belligerents who had previously fought one another found reason to fight the Japanese, resumed with undiminished industry in 1945; it caused millions of deaths, no party to the conflict much burdened by the blood that had been shed. John King Fairbank’s China: A New History offers no death tolls, an omission that would be unthinkable in the case of the Holocaust.^[6]John Fairbank, China: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). See Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell … Continue reading

If it is difficult to look at the twentieth century with a steady eye, so terrible are its crimes, the temptation is great to allow one’s eye to wander. Steven Pinker is, in this regard, one step away from clinical strabismus.

A generation of scholars has made the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s—the Holodomor—if not well known, then, at least, known well, but the earlier Soviet famine of 1921 has slipped out of the stream of memory, and the Soviet famine of 1947, in which at least one million Soviet citizens starved to death, is neither well known nor known well.^[7]See Michael Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 Revisited,” Europe-Asia Studies 59, no. 4 (2007): 663–93, together with Ellman, “The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement … Continue reading The Federal Republic of Germany has been willing to acknowledge the crimes of its predecessor; but in East Prussia, the Red Army, in its revenge, destroyed a society fully as old and as rooted in the European experience as the Jewish society of eastern Europe. Thereafter between twelve and fifteen million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes, properties, and the lives they had known, and over the course of the two years between 1945 and 1947, sent into exile in the withered German state in which they had never lived and to which they were bound only by the decayed tie of the German language.^[8]See R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) or Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic … Continue reading Yet the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from eastern and central Europe bears comparison to the partition of India and dwarfs completely all population expulsions in the Middle East.^[9]The twentieth century was marked by a depraved indifference to human life on almost every scale. The Turkish devastation of Smyrna in 1922 is an example. Eric Ambler offers a fine description in A … Continue reading

At the end of The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, A. J. P. Taylor remarked of the period between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the outbreak of the First World War that “Europe had never known such peace and tranquility since the age of the Antonines.”^[10]Alan Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848 –1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 255. One would not have imagined in the nineteenth century that the world could spare so much blood or that it would have conceived the desire to shed it.^[11]The destruction of German and European culture—how does that figure in an assessment of twentieth-century violence and according to what metric? See Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern (Leck: … Continue reading

Robert Southey was a poet, a dreamer, and a dunce. Born in 1774, he died in 1843. Like Wordsworth, he had been a supporter of the French revolution; and, like Wordsworth, he had been disappointed by the revolution that he had supported. He was determined not to be disappointed again. In 1824, Southey published Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society. Profoundly attached to the English countryside, and especially the Lake District, Southey used his Colloquies to express a fastidious objection to the degradation of rural life.

To Thomas Babington Macaulay, Southey appeared a man at once out of place, out of touch, and, so far as he was concerned, out of time. Southey? Pooh-pooh. The man had been wrong about the past. How could he be right about the future?

It is not strange that, differing so widely from Mr. Southey as to the past progress of society, we should differ from him also as to its probable destiny. He thinks, that to all outward appearance, the country is hastening to destruction … [W]e rely on the natural tendency of the human intellect to truth, and of the natural tendency of society to improvement.^[12]Thomas Macaulay, “A Review of Southey’s Colloquies,” Edinburgh Review [1830], repr. in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: W. H. Norton & Company, 1962), 1:620–25.

Why the tendency is natural, Macaulay did not say, and that it exists, he did not demonstrate.

The response to Macaulay came late, but it fell heavily. In 1931, the historian Herbert Butterfield published a little tract entitled The Whig Interpretation of History. The book is an indictment of various Whig historians, but Butterfield managed the difficult trick of faulting them by reputation largely without mentioning them by name. Butterfield was sly and, beyond the criticisms that he made of the Whig interpretation of history, he managed to suggest that, like Southey, the Whig historians were in their own way sentimental provincials.

Where had they gone wrong? Southey had seen the early nineteenth century as part of a long historical decline. Things had gone badly and they were getting worse. The Whig historians reversed his error without cancelling its effect. They sought to

impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present—all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress. [emphasis added]^[13]Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931), p. 12.

It is a principle that has had a deforming effect on historical narrative. “A caricature of this result,” Butterfield adds, “is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority—a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion.”^[14]Ibid, p. 13. See Adrian Wilson and Timothy Ashplant, “Whig History and Present-Centered History,” The Historical Journal 31, no. 1 (1988): 1–16, and William Cronon, “Two Cheers for the Whig … Continue reading

Almost one hundred years later, this caricature of medieval history retains an unquenchable vitality.^[15]“According to widespread popular belief, the period of European history known as the Middle Ages or medieval period (roughly the years 450–1450) was a time of barbarism, ignorance, and … Continue reading

And so does the Whig interpretation of history.

If it is difficult to look at the twentieth century with a steady eye, so terrible are its crimes, the temptation is great to allow one’s eye to wander. Steven Pinker is, in this regard, one step away from clinical strabismus. Things are today not so bad, Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, and since they were once worse, they must have been getting better. “Believe it or not … violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence … it is an unmistakable development.”^[16]Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Penguin Books, 2011), xix. Pinker’s book contains a great many secondary theses about animal and women’s rights, child rearing, bullying, … Continue reading

This thesis, Pinker believes, has been widely overlooked, or as often denied, because historians, lacking access to the perspective vouchsafed Pinker, have failed to see the Big Picture, the one that emerges in the majestic sweep of centuries. The Better Angels of Our Nature has not been warmly embraced by historians, but neither has it been coldly rejected.^[17]Timothy Snyder is an example. A fine historian, Snyder suspects that something is wrong with Pinker’s thesis. He is unable to say what it is. Timothy Snyder, “War No More: Why the World has … Continue reading

Pinker maintains, of course, that his conclusions are scientific and quantitative.^[18]Pinker, The Better Angels, xx–xxi. Whether they are for this reason true is another question.

The years between the end of the Second World War and 2010 or 2011, Pinker designates the long peace.^[19]Ibid, pp. 228–347. It is a peace that encompassed the Chinese Communist revolution, the partition of India, the Great Leap Forward, the ignominious Cultural Revolution, the suppression of Tibet, the Korean War, the French and American wars of Indochinese succession, the Egypt-Yemen war, the Franco-Algerian war, the Israeli-Arab wars, the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the grotesque and sterile Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, the farcical Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and various massacres, subcontinental famines, squalid civil insurrections, bloodlettings, throat-slittings, death squads, theological infamies, and suicide bombings taking place from Latin America to East Timor. Alone, broken, incompetent, and unloved, the Soviet Union lumbered into oblivion in 1989. The twentieth century had come to an end.

Violence is not an uncontested idea. The dictionary, which defines violence as “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone,” is of no help. Behavior is no necessary part of violence since laws, institutions, attitudes and judgments may all be violent, and physical force is no sufficient condition for violence, since the threat of violence is often as effective in compelling behavior as its administration. Violence is neither exhausted nor expressed very precisely by any obvious measure. If the idea is allowed to encompass a stellar explosion as well as an animal attack, then it is too broad profitably to allow historians to draw the distinction between a violent battle and a violent crime, and, if not, then too narrow to describe them both. An act may be violent in degrees; or it may be violent in effect; violence may be obvious or disguised; systematic or haphazard and even incidental; it may be overt or subtle; there are violent states and violent societies, and whether violence is a matter of action or the disposition to action, violence by itself is not obviously an ordinary cause leading to an ordinary effect. A man may simmer with violence for years without acting, and another may act violently for years without simmering.^[20]Both Guy de Maupassant and Leonardo Sciascia are uncommonly adept at depicting an atmosphere of suggested or implicit violence. Maupassant’s short story “Histoire Corse” is a brilliant example; … Continue reading Some men may be disposed to violence. Cross them at your peril. But if, preceded by their reputation, these men are never crossed, what remains to be assessed? If a violent act is violent only in virtue of some antecedent violent intention, it is equally true that an intention to do violence is revealed only when someone acts violently. How else would we know? Violence appears analytically as a state or emotional condition, but also as an act or disposition to action. It may simmer, boil, erupt, explode, seethe or subside; or seep, ooze, infect, derange, madden, escalate or intensify; it may be confined, regulated, distributed, sealed off; or liberate, intoxicate and purge; it may be insensate, demented, irrational, careless or incidental; or muted, indirect, verbal, or hidden; and as these constructions might indicate, there is nothing obvious or isolated that by itself answers to the name of violence. Like greed, generosity, love, cupidity, cunning, or artfulness, violence is a part of a dense matrix in which everything is held in suspension by the reciprocating pistons of human nature.^[21]In “Without Respite,” The Nation, November 25, 2013, Vivian Gornick remarks of the Nazis, What they never reduced their interest in, however, was the application of what [Primo] Levi called … Continue reading

These are circumstances to which sociologists believe that they are adequate. “For the last few years,” Gerd Schwerhoff observed, “the homicide rate has been regarded as a quantifiable indicator of the degree of violence in a particular period.”^[22]Gerd Schwerhoff, “Criminalized Violence and the Process of Civilization: A Reappraisal,” in Crime, History & Societies 6, no. 2 (2002): pp. 103–126. Is it? A society in which homicide rates are very high is a violent society, but the reverse is not obviously true, and in the twentieth century, societies of almost incomprehensible violence were often in a position to observe that if their concentration camps were full, their streets were safe. German homicide rates fell to their lowest level since 1882 in 1939; they have remained relatively stable for more than 70 years.^[23]See the website of Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt. Great pains have been taken to make it comprehensive, user-friendly, entirely unthreatening, and consequently faintly comical. Homicide rates began … Continue reading

In 1937, Stalin reduced the Soviet Union to a state of gibbering terror.^[24]Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (New York: Macmillan, 1968). The story told by the Soviet archives is grim, but it does not support the account initially offered by Conquest. As Father Leo Naptha … Continue reading In his account of the Great Terror, Moscow 1937, Karl Schlögel argued that some 1.5 million men and women were shot or died in miserable captivity in the Gulag.^[25]Karl Schlögel, Moscow 1937 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012). This fascinating book answers every question about the Great Terror except why it occurred. However correct their assessment of … Continue reading To paralyze a large and complex society by fear is itself an achievement in violence, for those paralyzed are afraid of violent death. Violence is not simply a matter of what is done but what might be done. No account of twentieth-century violence that does not encompass this distinction can be judged very sophisticated. Soviet homicide statistics for 1937, when execution cellars in the Lubyanka prison were crowded and fields outside of Moscow began bubbling with decomposing corpses, are notoriously unreliable, but given the Stalinist regime’s determination to re-describe even public urination as counter-revolutionary hooliganism, purely apolitical homicides, if they were recorded at all, must have been low, the occasional ax-murderer much appreciated for his willingness to balance the books.^[26]David Shearer, “Crime and Social Disorder in Stalin’s Russia: A Reassessment of the Great Retreat and the Origins of Mass Repression,” Cahiers du Monde Russe: Russie, Empire Russe, Union … Continue reading

Homicide rates are expressed as the ratio H/P of the number of homicides H to the population P of a city, region, state, county, country, or even the world. The rate is most commonly given per annum, and the ensuing ratio normalized: H/P x 100,000. In the ratio H/P, H designates a reference attribute, and P, a reference class. Both are necessary. To say that there are, or were, five dead men without providing a reference class would be like saying there are, or were, three fat women.^[27]For a collection of essays, some of them interesting, few of them penetrating, see Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, La Violence dans la longue durée 5, no. 2 (2001).

The reference class in homicide statistics is inevitably an historical, social, or legal artifact. Homicide rates are, for this reason, arbitrary, a point evident in a number of examples. Suppose that an imaginary region or city C is partitioned into five smaller regions R1, R2, R3, R4, and R5. Homicide and population figures are as follows:^[28]Fahui Wang and Van O’Brien, “Constructing Geographic Areas for Analysis of Homicide in Small Populations: Testing Herding-Culture-of-Honor Proposition,” in Geographic Information Systems and … Continue reading

R1 = 200,000; H = 50.

R2 = 50,000; H = 0.

R3 = 50,000; H = 0.

R4 = 50,000; H = 0.

R5 = 50,000; H = 0.  

The homicide rate assigned to C is H/C = 12.5 per 100,000. What is unclear, because it is ambiguous, is the homicide rate assigned to R1. This is where the dead are stacked. Should H/R1 be 12.5 per 100,000? R1 is, after all, a part of C. This would seem a reduction in violence achieved by a sleight of hand. The dead are still the dead, and they have not been diminished. Since H/P → 0 as P → ∞, homicide rates may always be reduced by an expansion of their reference class.

Albert Reiss has, on the other hand, argued that so far as homicides go, what is required is “a measure of [the] population that is exposed to the events, or is at risk of being involved in events, such as offenders or victims.”^[29]Albert Reiss, quoted ibid. This might suggest that, far from being 12.5 per 100,000, the homicide rate assigned R1 should be the one that measures its victims: H/R1 = 25 per 100,000. This tactic, once encouraged, has a tendency to get out of hand as well. It is always possible, after all, to partition a reference class P into two classes P1 and P2, such that P=P1 ∪P2, P1=H, and P2 = {P–H}. It follows that H/P1 = 1, and H/P2 = 0. No statistic serves better than H to measure the “population that… is at risk of being involved in events,” and no statistic serves better than {P–H} to measure the reverse.

The arguments just given suggest that, so far as R1 is concerned, its homicide rate should be 25 or 12.5 per 100,000. It cannot be both; and no one, I presume, is tempted to say that it should be neither.

Homicide rates are compelling as a statistic because they convey risk as a probability. Selected at random from some reference class P, an individual may observe that his risk of death by homicide is H/P, which is another way of saying that he stands an H in P chance of being killed. The problem lies with the definition of the appropriate reference class. Without a reference class, there is no measure of risk; without a measure of risk, no way to persuade a man to watch his back. But to talk of risk, death, and chance in terms of H/P is already to assume that H/P has been assigned to P as its homicide rate. That is just the question: Has it?

And, if so, how?

These questions are an encouragement to what Hans Reichenbach called reference-class ambiguities. “If we are asked to find the probability holding for an individual future event,” Reichenbach wrote, “we must first incorporate the case in a suitable reference class. An individual thing or event may be incorporated in many reference classes, from which different probabilities will result.”^[30]Hans Reichenbach, The Theory of Probability (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), 374.

Many reference classes? Yes, certainly. One and the same man may be resident in Corleone, Sicily, Italy, Europe, and, beyond that, the world; in endeavoring to measure his chance of violent death, he finds himself confronted by an embarrassment of risks. It all depends. It depends on whether he is described as a citizen of the world, Europe, Italy, Sicily, or Corleone. Described as a citizen of Corleone, it then makes a considerable difference whether he is described as a mafioso or as a mortician. These dependencies suggest that homicide rates are unstable as statistics, and, if so, unreliable as indicators of violence.

In Part Two, I examine the claim that homicide rates have followed an eight-hundred-year decline from the Middle Ages.

In Part Three, I discuss the more general issue of violence in the twentieth-century and whether there is a statistic by which it can rationally be measured.

Read more by David Berlinski:

• THE FIRST WORLD WAR
• A PASSAGE FROM INDIA
• FRENCH TOAST

Interviews with the author:

• CRITICAL THEORY AND THE SLINGSHOT
• THE NARCISSISTIC MARK

David Berlinski is Claire Berlinski’s father. This is a revised version of an essay originally published in the volume Human Nature.