A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic with which to win arguments

Last updated on: December 27, 2011 at 7:28 pm by Dave Griffey

A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic with which to win arguments 2011-12-27T19:28:00-04:00 Dave Griffey

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On this, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, it’s a good thing to read Mike Flynn’s take on Steven Pinker’s book The Better Nature of Angels. This book is a new twist on the old message of post-religionism: religion bad, non-religion good. Now thinking people can’t help but ask a few questions about that, not the least question is how the 20th century fits into this equation. After all, we know that few of the major events of the century were guided by religious doctrine. Sure, some folks motivated by religion did things good and bad, but most things, such as the Russian Revolution, the World Wars, the nuclear arms race, the Cultural Revolution, had nothing at all to do with religion. Even the holocaust had only shades of pseudo-religious thought behind it, resting heavier on the latest, hippest scientific theories and social speculations about human-as-animal and its ramifications. Therefore, the 20th century, dominated by non-religious – and sometimes outright anti-religious – ideals, mixed with the largest body count of any singular century in history, poses some problems for our intrepid New Atheists who insist getting rid of religion will lead to peace, joy, and the eternal chanting of John Lennon songs.

Enter Steven Pinker. His basic hope is to convince us that if you look at the number of people butchered vs. the number of people actually living in the 20th century, that it really isn’t as bad as other times in history. He then goes on to site example after example of other horrible times in other places where the body bags were piling up at least as quickly, if not proportionally more so, than during the 20th.

There are troubles with this to be sure, and Mr. Flynn does a nice job unpacking the fly-over simplicity of much of Mr. Pinker’s grasp of history. He also brings out some of the usual problems with using statistics in order to win arguments (hint: if you are dead set on A being true, chances are you’re going to make sure the stats prove A is true).

Of course there is a danger in any rebuttal against Pinker’s thesis. For decades, post-Westerners and post-Christianists have used the terrors of the 20th century, particularly of the West, to prove how utterly unique was the dire result of this Christian based civilization. In answer to this mode of attack, many have labored for years to show that while the horrors of Nazi Germany, the World Wars, and the worst aspects of European Imperialism were bad, they were not the only horrors of the 20th, or any other, century. So we don’t want to dismiss the points Mr. Pinker offers outright. But we want to make sure that we remember the sad fact that the body count of the 20th century seems only to have been limited by the means necessary for killing that many people. It wasn’t for a lack of anything else but time and resources that the numbers killed were kept at that rate. That idea alone should give us pause before going any further toward accepting Pinker’s proportionally acceptable mass slaughter rates defense. Mr. Flynn’s rebuttal should do the rest.
　

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