After reading most of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature (will finish the last hundred pages at some point), my views on this topic are softened.
Pinker depicts humanity as primitively highly inclined to violence, with norms and culture throughout our lives working to suppress our tendency to violence, civilize us, and bring us to internalize that violence is inappropriate.
While the correct, mature view for civilization could eventually be to have violent punishments as part of the tools in order, having norms of violence may strip us of our cultivated abhorrence of violence which stops us from living like cavemen.
When being good or bad is binary, perfect rational citizens unless crime suits them, consistent visceral punishment makes more sense.
When you have a constant mob for a civilization, with the occasional rioter, making violence explicitly legitimate might be a bad idea.
The point isn’t the rioters—the point is how the mob acts
After reading most of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature (will finish the last hundred pages at some point), my views on this topic are softened.
Pinker depicts humanity as primitively highly inclined to violence, with norms and culture throughout our lives working to suppress our tendency to violence, civilize us, and bring us to internalize that violence is inappropriate.
While the correct, mature view for civilization could eventually be to have violent punishments as part of the tools in order, having norms of violence may strip us of our cultivated abhorrence of violence which stops us from living like cavemen.
When being good or bad is binary, perfect rational citizens unless crime suits them, consistent visceral punishment makes more sense.
When you have a constant mob for a civilization, with the occasional rioter, making violence explicitly legitimate might be a bad idea.
The point isn’t the rioters—the point is how the mob acts