How television reduces violence

Ever since reading The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker's fine book on human nature, I eagerly hoover up anything he writes.

So I am grateful to Arts and Letters Daily for pointing me to a fascinating new piece by Pinker on an old theme of his - the way in which modernity has reduced violence:

now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

Pinker provides a number of reasons why this decline might have taken place, but I find the most convincing to be those that focus on the changing nature of reciprocity.

Humans co-operate with each other because they believe that if they do favours those favours will be reciprocated. In order to increase the chance that a person in receipt of a favour will be willing to return it, humans use a swift form of judgment. We co-operate with those who are most like us.

This explains why we try and fit in with groups, why we live in tribes and classes and professional institutions. Why we love our community, in other words.

But it also explains why we hate outsiders, those who aren't like us. We are in pure competition with them and wouldn't expect them to reciprocate if we did co-operate with them.

What does modern technology do? Let's take television.

We get to see other people's faces all the time. Strangers begin to seem more familiar, odd people less odd, outsiders more insidery. The more than we communicate with each other the more group violence is reduced.

Many people argue that television increases violence. There is every reason to believe that the opposite occurs.