A History Of Violence

Following an argument with Tom over the use of violence at school, Jack runs away, only to be captured and held hostage by Carl. Carl confronts Tom and demands his return to Philadelphia in exchange for his son's release. After Jack is freed, Tom manages to kill Carl's henchmen until Carl shoots him. A wounded Tom drops his façade and manifests his former self, but Jack shoots and kills Carl with a shotgun before he can fight back. At the hospital, a furious Edie confronts Tom, who admits to being Joey Cusack, revealing that he started a new life to escape his past. Tom becomes further isolated from the rest of his family and the community.

A History of Violence

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Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 87% based on 215 critics' reviews, with an average rating of 7.90/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "A History of Violence raises compelling and thoughtful questions about the nature of violence, while representing a return to form for director David Cronenberg in one of his more uncharacteristic pieces."[18] On Metacritic, the film has an average score of 81 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[19] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.[20]

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film a "mindblower", and noted Cronenberg's "refusal to let us indulge in movie violence without paying a price".[23] Roger Ebert also gave the film a positive review, observing, "A History of Violence seems deceptively straightforward, coming from a director with Cronenberg's quirky complexity, but think again. This is not a movie about plot, but about character." He gave it three and a half out of four stars.[14]

Is Canadian director David Cronenberg the most unsung maverick artist in movies? Bet on it ... Cronenberg knows violence is wired into our DNA. His film showed how we secretly crave what we publicly condemn. This is potent poison for a thriller, and unadulterated, unforgettable Cronenberg.[28]

I am going to speak about what may the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Violence has declined by dramatic degrees all over the world in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals.

In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature". In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts: Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelation.

I'm going to present six major historical declines of violence; in each case, cite their immediate causes in terms of what historians have told us are the likely historical antecedents in that era; and then speculate on their ultimate causes, in terms of general historical forces acting on human nature.

The first major decline of violence I call the "Pacification Process." Until about five thousand years ago, humans lived in anarchy without central government. What was life like in this state of nature? This is a question that thinkers have speculated on for centuries, most prominently Hobbs, who famously said that in a state of nature "the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." A century later he was countered by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who says, "Nothing could be more gentle than man in his primitive state."

In reality, both of these gentlemen were talking through their hats: They had no idea what life was like in a state of nature. But today we can do better, because there are two sources of evidence of what rates of violence were like in pre-state societies.

The other method of measuring violence in pre-state societies is ethnographic vital statistics. What is the rate of death by violence in people who have recently lived outside of state control, namely hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists, and other tribal groups?

The third historical decline of violence pertains to the fact that those first states, though they did bring down rates of feuding and vendetta and blood revenge, were rather nasty contraptions, which kept people in a state of awe with techniques such as breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, sawing in half, impalement, and clawing. In a process that historians call the "Humanitarian Revolution", these forms of institutionalized violence were eventually abolished. The momentum for this movement was concentrated in the 18th century.

This graph shows the cumulative number of countries that abolished slavery. For the first time in history, slavery is illegal everywhere in the world. The last countries to abolish it were Saudi Arabia in 1962, and Mauritania in 1980.

Also, literacy gives rise to cosmopolitanism. It is plausible that the reading of history, journalism, and fiction puts people into the habit of inhabiting other peoples' minds, which could increase empathy and therefore make cruelty less appealing. This is a point I'll return to later in the talk.

The fourth historical decline of violence has been called the "Long Peace." It speaks to the widespread belief that the 20th century was the most violent in history, which would seem to go against everything that I've said so far. Peculiarly, one never sees, in any of the claims that the 20th century was the most violent in history, any numbers from any century other than the 20th.

There's no question that there was a lot of violence in the 20th century. But take, for comparison, the so-called peaceful 19th century. That "peaceful" century had the Napoleonic wars, with four million deaths, one of the worst in history; the Taiping Rebellion in China, by far the worst civil war in history, with 20 million deaths; the worst war in American history, the Civil War; the reign of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa, resulting in one to two million deaths; the war of the Triple Alliance, which is probably the most destructive interstate war in history in terms of percentage of the population killed, namely 60 percent of Paraguay; the African slave raiding wars (no one has any idea what the death toll was); and of course, imperial wars in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that the Second World War was the deadliest event in human history in terms of number of lives lost. But it's not so clear that it was the deadliest event in terms of percentage of the world population. Here is a graph that I've adapted from a forthcoming book by Matthew White entitled The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities. White calls himself an "atrocitologist." He tries to fit numbers to wars, genocides, and manmade famines throughout history.

Here we see 2500 years of human history, with White's top 100 atrocities, which I have scaled by the estimated size of the world population at the time. As you can see, World War II just barely makes the top ten. There are many events more deadly than World War I. And events which killed from a tenth of one percent of the population of the world to ten percent were pretty much evenly sprinkled over 2500 years of history.

Historians who have tried to track genocide over the centuries are unanimous that the notion that the 20th was "a century of genocide" is a myth. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, their The History and Sociology of Genocide, write on page one, "Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history."

To give some examples: if Old Testament history were taken literally, there were genocides on almost every page; the Amalakites, Amarites, Canaanites, Hivites, Hitites, Jevasites, Midianites, Parazites and many other. Also, genocides were committed by the Athenians in Melos; by the Romans in Carthage; and during the Mongol invasions, the Crusades, the European wars of religion, and the colonization of the Americas, Africa and Australia.

The final historical development I call the Rights Revolutions. This is the reduction of systemic violence at smaller scales against vulnerable populations such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals.

The women's rights movement has seen an 80 percent reduction in rape since the early '70s when it was put on the agenda as a feminist issue. There has also been a two-thirds decline in domestic violence, spousal abuse, or wife beating, and a 50 percent decline in husband beating. In the most extreme form of domestic violence, namely uxoricide and matricide, there's been a decline both in the number of wives that are murdered by their husband's and the number of husbands that have been murdered by their wives. In fact, the decrease is much more dramatic for husbands. Feminism has been very good to men, who are now much more likely to survive a marriage without getting murdered by their wives.

The children's rights movement has seen a decline in the United States of the number of states that permit corporal punishment in schools, such as "paddling" and "hiding." In much of Europe, it's been abolished outright. But even in the United States, it's been in decline. The approval of spanking and the implementation of spanking have been in decline in every country in which they have been measured. Here are data from the United States, New Zealand and Sweden. In fact, spanking, even by parents, is illegal in many European countries now. Child abuse, too, has been in decline since statistics were recorded in the early 1990s. And violence in schools, such as fighting and bullying, has been in decline. 041b061a72