Candide

Predictions of perpetual peace are the highlight of any history of hubris. Chamberlain is classic and quotable. The various Paxes (from Austrialana in New Guinea to Romana in Europe) are inevitably followed by a decline and fall. Francis Fukuyama famously prophesized the end of history and the triumph of a pacific liberalism – only for his tower to topple with the return of ideological violence in the form of 9/11.

Steven Pinker, however, is clever than that. The Harvard professor – psycholinguist by training, public intellectual by trade – is careful to avoid playing the futurist. The Better Angels Of Our Nature finds it surprises in the past instead, with Pinker working hard to prove to us that violence has in fact declined, using some three score graphs and hundreds of pages of analysis. Marshalling together the datasets of obscure criminologists and military historians, he ably demonstrates that homicide rates, battle casualty rates, execution rates, abuse rates and hate crime rates have all fallen over the last millennium.

Pinker believes we have been conditioned to believe that these are indeed the worst of times – school history consists of little more than World War Two and the Holocaust; TV shows like Law & Order meet rapists and serial killers every week; and the news media obsesses over civil wars and psychopaths. But was the 20^th century really the most violent in history? The absolute figures speak of 50 million deaths in WW2, including six million victims of Nazi genocide. Nonetheless for Pinker – a secular Jew – this body count is too simplistic an analysis. The numbers may horrify but what do they really say about how violent the century was?

The thesis of the book depends on using proportions rather than plain figures. For instance, archaeology and anthropology have revealed that pre-state societies often kill up to 15% of their people in war, while the figure for the entire 20^th century is just 3%! The decline is very real: for homicide, we have up to 300 deaths per 100,000 in pastoral tribes, then 50 per 100,000 in medieval England, and 8 per 100,000 for the planet today, which to falls to just 1 per 100,000 in Europe. By using rates instead of absolute numbers we get a nice figure for how likely it is a particular person will die a violent death in a given society.

Yet from a God’s eye perspective six million deaths is clearly worse than six. It seems crass and offensive, for example, to suggest the Holocaust is a lesser tragedy than a raid in New Guinea. But compare six million murders in a population of one billion to six in a population of a hundred. From my perspective, I’m ten times as likely to die in the second society – I’d have a better chance of surviving the genocide than the raid!

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In gerontology, there seems to be an inverse correlation between how much sex you have and how long you live. Now, we know that the Japanese gene pool has more life-prolonging alleles in it [see Lane: 2010]. I wonder then if the fact a higher proportion of the Japanese population (as compared to, say, France) are predisposed to live longer means a higher proportion of Japanese people are also predisposed be less sexually active. I hazard a guess that this predisposition would only have a tangible effect when cultural demands to marry early and have many kids have been overturned by liberalization…

This, of course, is just speculation.

“Whether they’re too busy lining up for new Apple Inc. gadgets, reading questionable manga or watching videos of pop group AKB48, it seems Japan’s male youth is increasingly united on one thing – a lack of interest in real-life sex.

European Pressphoto AgencyRomantic, us? A young Japanese couple gazes at the sunrise in Chiba, Jan. 2011, but over a third of Japanese men were averse to sex, according to a study conducted Sept. 2010.

At least according to a study published Thursday by the Japan Family Planning Association, that is. In the latest survey of attitudes to sex conducted September 2010by the agency, part of the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, fully 36% of males aged 16 to 19 surveyed described themselves as “indifferent or averse” towards having sex. That’s a near 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

As if that weren’t enough of a red flag for a country plagued by a low birthrate and an ageing, shrinking population, women seem to be even more reluctant to consider having sex. While no one is suggesting people of that age group should automatically be procreating, a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

Still, perhaps the reported interest levels in the younger group should be taken with a grain of salt, and as something subject to radical change as younger generations grow up. The new survey also showed that the only group that seemed to feel a greater attraction to the idea of sex in the last two years was men aged 30 to 34, with just 5.8% of respondents disinterested, as opposed to 8.3% in 2008.

Nonetheless, the speed of change between the 2008 and 2010 findings do give pause for thought. “A comparison of the 2008 and 2010 findings show that men indeed have become ‘herbivores,’” commented Mr. Kunio Kitamura, head of the Japan Family Planning Association. “Herbivore men” is a term that gained increasing currency in Japan in 2010, describing young men who are passive and less ambitious in their romantic relationships with women than previous generations. Speaking on NHK, Japan’s national public broadcasting organization, Mr. Kunio explained, “The findings seem to reflect the increasing shallowness of human relations in today’s busy society.”

The study, which surveyed 1,301 people aged 16 to 49, also provided a glimpse of sexual behavior amongst married couples. It found that approximately 40% of married respondents had not had sex in the past month, a 4% increase from the same survey conducted two years earlier and nearly 10% higher than in 2004. The 330 married respondents cited “vague reluctance after child birth,” “can’t be bothered,” and “fatigue from work” as the top three reasons for not being proactive about having sex.”

source: http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2011/01/13/no-sex-please-were-young-japanese-men/

The most profound insight modern psychology offers us is the impossibility of true equality of opportunity.

Imagine we take one thousand babies born today and we take them to a school-orphanage on an isolated island. We raise them all exactly alike, we give them all the same help and chances, we have them do all the same work, we have them supervised night and day to make sure everything is fair. We spend eighteen years giving them equality of opportunity.

Then on their eighteenth birthday we test them on everything they have all learnt. This is their first exam ever and we organize it such that they all sit the test in the same environment, at the same time, and with the same quality and quantity of preparation with their teachers. They come out of the exam nervous because today is the last time in their lives they will all be equal.

When the test results come out, to our chagrin, they are not all equal. But, we protest, the children were nurtured equally and identically! How can this be! In fact we are surprised to see that the test results plot a bell curve:

Most of the students get middling marks, a few fail miserably and a few pass with flying colours. We are astonished. Yet there seems to be little correlation between the babies’ race, or parental wealth, or parental religion, or parental occupation and their test scores. They all got educated and grew up in the same environment, we made sure of that, with equal opportunities. What then accounts for the variation?

We plot the students height on a graph too. It also makes a bell curve.

Yet we protest. They were all fed the same meals, given the same food, the same chances to do sport and work out, they all got the same opportunities. Yet most kids are of middling height, a few are short and a few are tall. Just like most test scores were middling, a few were crap and a few were Nobel-prize winning. Yet the kids were all equal. 

Then it hits us. There is natural variation in all populations, in height, in attractiveness, in intelligence. Even if we feed kids the same food and the same information, there will still be variation in their height and their test scores, because it is innate.

And then we mourn, for our experiment has failed. We tried to make the kids equal. We gave them equality of opportunity. And now as they send their test scores into UCAS, and some get into Oxbridge and others end up in McDonalds, we think, what was the point?

Twenty years down the line, these children have married and had their own kids. But these kids don’t have equal opportunities, some are the children of top lawyers and go to Eton; some care for their drink-addled parents and don’t even get to school.

The point of this story is that if we could take 1000 children and given them perfect equality of opportunity in their ‘nurture,’ we wouldn’t create equal children, we would simply allow the genetic variation and inequality of talents existent in all populations to assert itself without being obscured by any kind of social inequality in upbringing. Yet once these 1000 children attained adulthood and entered the real world, the cleverest and most beautiful children would go onto to become rich and successful. These cleverest children would go onto have children of their own who would inherit that cleverness, but who would also benefit from the advantageous upbringing allowed by a parent with a big salary. The least intelligent children would have below-average kids themselves, who would be disadvantaged and have fewer chances than the kids of the cleverer people. Inequality would widen, and keep on widening down the generations, in spite of the fact our experiment gave the original set of 1000 kids equality of opportunity.

In a free society, natural variation will inevitably lead social inequality. This can be assuaged by universal education and the welfare state. However the only way to truly eliminate social inequality is to take all babies at birth in every generation and turn the world into a massive version of our experiment. This way at least we would give everyone the equality of opportunity to exercise their natural talents, even those these themselves will vary and be unequal.

True equality is impossible unless we genetically engineer humans to be all exactly the same. True equality of opportunity is only available if we force every parent to give up their newborn babies to a giant version of our experiment. We can strive to give everyone the best chance to utilize their natural talents, however we can never get away from the fact that as happened in our story, natural variation is the ultimate cause of social inequality.