And today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.He's using anarchy to mean lack of a powerful state in a particular geographic area, but also using it to mean chaos, violence, etc. I don't know what frontier regions he might be talking about so I can't quibble with that, but it occurs to me that many of today's "failed states and collapsed empires are failed and collapsed" because of the states that did or continue to exercise power in the area. Examples? duh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc. As for "mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband," what is the distinction between those entities and State governments? Scale?
So needless to say, I don't buy this logic:
These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence. States can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation.But if you take out the "disinterested" part I think there might actually be an important idea here. If the State is the only actor who can legitimately use violence, and the state is controlled by the interests of an elite few, that in and of itself could reduce violence. Rather than dozens or hundreds of little mafias, you just have a few big mafias. If nobody else gets to use violence, seems like that could indeed reduce overall violence.
So those are my hastily thrown-together thoughts on the matter. Comments?
3 comments:
Interesting Adam---I find Pinker's choices of words intriguing: that the goal of the state is to have a monopoly on violence. So that the state is "authorized" to wield violence to prevent violence. Obviously I agree with you that the potential for misuse here is gigantic (inevitable?) and would further add that the misuse of violence by the state can be of such magnitude that comparison of it with potential violence prevented is ludicrous (i.e. US's illegal invasion of Iraq, the German-state sponsored Holocaust, etc. . .).
well he didn't say that the "goal" of the state is to monopolize violence, he simply suggested that trends toward decreasing violence over the years might be due to states monopolizing violence. also, this may be an obvious point but i'll make it anyway: states don't have goals; the people who control states do.
anyway, pinker hypothesizes that all the small-scale violence suppressed by the state would add up to more total violence than all the violence caused by the state, despite the state's violence occurring in episodes that are more shocking because of their scale. i don't know that i agree with the hypothesis, but i think it is a reasonable one to put forward and try to examine. this is the sense in which he compares small and large scale violence, and i don't think there's anything ludicrous about such a comparison.
For Pinker's proposition to work, the "lesser evil" has to be both quantitatively and qualitatively less evil than the alternatives. You quite right that imperialism's miserable outcomes don't count as alternatives. To date, the anarchic alternatives have never achieved any size or gained the time in which to fulfill their promise. Although, intriguingly, there are regions and organizations that have made the state more a servant and less a master: Emilia-Romagna and the Mondragon Cooperative. And we do know that the state's institutions and opportunities for violence can be circumscribed. For a while, anyway.
Based on that, I'd say there's better argument for pursuit of a thoughtful disestablishment than for a legitimized accommodation (Pinker's) that's narrowly utilitarian.
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