Context

It is easy to despair at the wave of violence erupting around the world, most immediately in Europe and the United States in recent days. One horror blurs into another. Politics, too, seems to be swirling toward chaos. Belligerence is on the rise in Istanbul, Damascus, Moscow and this week in Cleveland.

It is natural that we try to extract insight and discern meaning from a succession of events as terrible as these have been. Yet it is too easy to ball it all up and perhaps draw the wrong conclusions. We risk becoming fearful of the wrong things. We lose context.

Here is some: humans have never been more civil to one another than they are today. That may seem like a terrifying comment given the innocent lives lost in the last fortnight— yet it remains an important aspect of our development as a species. One, I think, we must cling to now. And understand.

This fact and the trend that has delivered us here illustrate clearly that we hurt each other less and wage war less than any other time in our history. It is not a straight line. We continue to have an immense capacity to inflict pain, sorrow and death upon each other, but it is, despite the evidence all around us these past weeks and months, in decline.

Steven Pinker, originally from Montreal, is an academic who teaches at Harvard. He has been compiling the evidence of civilization’s progress toward a more peaceful coexistence for decades. In his 2009 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker charts the decline of violence around the world. His findings contradict the sense the world has gone to hell in a handbasket.

Pinker notes that while the Syrian civil war has claimed an intolerable toll—lost lives, maiming and displacement—it is but a fraction of what humans faced just a few decades ago.

The rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by more than half in just a decade, according to Pinker. The rate of death in war fell by a factor of 100 over a span of 25 years.

It is important, too, as others have noted, to distinguish those driven by ideology from those propelled by madness. In Europe, the narrative suggests that the caliphate of the Islamic State is being crushed in Syria and Iraq. That, in its wake, waves of fighters are bringing the war to Europe. In the U.S. the story is that a well-armed nation is cleaving between privilege and poverty. Between a broken promise and the American dream. Between order and a growing segment of the population who feels the current order hasn’t served them well.

While it is certain some are motivated by such narratives to wreak havoc and incite fear, there is ample evidence to suggest many of the actors in the recent spate of violence are simply deranged, deluded and suicidal. For these folks, the headlines, the wall-to-wall coverage, provide a recipe for one final bit of relevance. And inspiration. Simply yelling Allahu Akbar amid the carnage before police comply with your suicide wish, ensures your troubled life will be explored and examined in full colour across the front pages and deep into social media. Too often, one terrible act spawns another.

This explanation offers not a whisper of solace to those affected by these crimes, but it ought to inform the rest of us. Not just to ease our fear— but to ensure our anxiety isn’t used against us.

Despots, strongmen and tyrants feed off fear. They need a fearful population in order to set aside parliament, constitutions and the rule of law. They use fear to consolidate their grip on a compliant people. It fuels their ambition.

One does not have to delve into history to cite the examples, their well-trampled trail of evil is evident around us in Syria, North Korea, Indonesia, Russia and increasingly, in Turkey.

Our neighbours, too, are currently flirting with a would-be tyrant. I expect they will ultimately reject Trump’s carnival act—but it is troubling nonetheless how close he has come to the most powerful office in the world. It is indicative, I think, of just how easy it is for an advanced civilization to slide backward out of fear.

Fearful folks tend to be shortsighted—seeing threats and danger around every corner. It is the job of journalists, writers and broadcasters to provide context. Not to soothe or placate, but to give an honest and accurate framework by which to understand events as they occur.

We can do a better job of this.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca