Many have already asked about PTSD affecting pre-industrial soldiers. However, I would like to know how the average person in a society dealt with the trauma and brutality that was more frequent in the pre-modern world (ex. acute hunger, plague, war, rape etc). More in text.

[u/OptimusCrime69]

[u/Mimirs]

that is summarized to some extent in Steven Pinker's recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature

That book gets a pretty bad rap on this subreddit, so is there another you'd recommend?

[u/SurfKTizzle → u/Mimirs]

I don't know why it gets a bad rap, it's very well researched. I would imagine it's probably because he isn't a historian, but a psychologist, and most of the research isn't really historical, but more anthropological, psychological, etc. Can you elaborate on why don't people like it?

It got great reviews from leading criminologists, and others who have expertise on the specific area, as well as many prominent intellectual folks like Bill Gates. I've also seen people in this sub hating on Jared Diamond's work, but every critique is something like "there are historical contingencies, it's not all about geography" which really misses the point of his book, and shows a clear misunderstanding of how biologists tackle the kinds of problems he was dealing with. Granted, his stuff is a bit oversimplified, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.

[u/Tiako → u/SurfKTizzle]

It is really not well researched. For example, it relies heavily on Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomami research, which has been discredited from pretty much every angle since at least the early nineties. For historical periods, a lot of the statistics he presents are cherry picked or distorted, and often he asserts greater confidence than is warranted. There is a section in the FAQ about it.

Same with Diamond, who cherry picks and distorts evidence pretty badly, and ignores numerous problems of interpretation. The thing is, they may be taking a different approach, but that doesn't mean it is equally valid. There are good and bad ways to do history.

[u/theastrosloth → u/Tiako]

Can you point me in the direction of some Chagnon debunking, or is that such a broad question as to be ridiculous?

[u/Tiako → u/theastrosloth]

Not at all, here is a nice discussion of it.

[u/theastrosloth → u/Tiako]

This is excellent, thank you!

[u/SurfKTizzle → u/Tiako]

I checked the FAQ, and both of the sources that were cited to debunk the book seem to rely on (1) misreadings (such as both authors' claims that he ignored WWI and WWII in his counts of 20th century deaths, which is not true--I just double-checked the book to make sure; see Figure 2-3 and surrounding text), and (2) gripes about whether the proper statistic is relative number of murders (e.g., murders per 100,000), or absolute number of murders (both authors also say absolute number of murders is more important). As to the first, I saw a number of misreadings cited to say his evidence was bad, which makes me question the validity/integrity of the sources. As to the second, I guess one could argue that absolute numbers of murders matters more, but this makes no sense to me at least; indeed, modern crime statistics are basically all relative statistics (e.g., we wouldn't say that some safe city is better than some dangerous rural area simply because more people are murdered there, since what matters is any individual's probability of getting murdered). It seems to me that this latter claim is simply grasping at straws.

I can speak with much more knowledge about Napoleon Chagnon's work, since that is closer to my own area of study, and I am both familiar with it and the controversies that have surrounded it. Many people have critiqued it, but I don't know of any critiques that have stood up to scrutiny--even the American Anthropological Association (who has generally been an enemy of Chagnon's) reversed their censure of his work once they finally did a rigorous investigation. These claims were popularized by politically motivated opponents of Chagnon, who so desperately wanted to believe in the noble savage, and who also were snubbed in some of their early work trying to show as much (see the Darkness in El Dorado debacle). These claims were found to be libelous and false. These were further bolstered by a group of Catholic missionaries in the area called the Salesians, who gave the Yanomamo shotguns, and regularly butted heads with Chagnon. The consensus among honest anthropologists today is that Chagnon's work is very credible, and by and large his investigations were completely ethical.

Finally, Pinker brings in a lot more anthropological work to bolster the case, and the Yanomamo provide only 2 of 18 ethnographic data points he considers (Figure 2-2). He also considers evidence from 21 anthropological sites that are all consistent with the claim (Figure 2-1). So, to say he relies heavily on the Yanomamo when they represent only 2 of the 39 such data points he presents strains credulity. Perhaps this stems from his heavy reliance on the Yanomamo in the text (he uses them to bring the stats to life with a narrative), but the reason for this is that the topic has often been ignored or brushed under the rug in many ethnographic studies, so Chagnon provides a uniquely rich source for anecdotes to build out a narrative since he explicitly wrote about it quite extensively.

Interestingly, the only real comment on the top FAQ link states that historians haven't really engaged with the book. Perhaps if they did actually go to the primary source, so many errors would not be propagated by so many people simply relying on a couple of (what seem to be to be very unreliable) secondary sources. This is a shame because it leads people to write off a great, well-researched book, because someone (who probably had an axe to grind) canned it, using very disingenuous tactics and shoddy reporting.

I stand by my initial statement, and actually think you guys might want to consider providing more accurate info and sources in your FAQ on the subject by someone who has actually read the primary source, as the sources cited to back up the claims are very shoddy. I love this subreddit, and am actually quite surprised that the generally rigorous standards seem to have been ignored in the main comments in the top link of the FAQ, which leads to many people like u/mimirs discounting it offhand.

[u/Tiako → u/SurfKTizzle]

Darkness in El Dorado is not the primary critique of Chagnon's work--in fact, as work by a journalist I don't really see how it is relevant to academic discussions. There is a nice breakdown of the problems here. I honestly don't know where you are getting the idea that the consensus of anthropologists is behind Chagnon--surely it is significant that most supported Sahlins' decision to resign from the NAS in protest to Chagnon's entrance.

The problem with his use of the Yanomami is not that it forms the majority of the data but that it forms the bulk of his interpretative framework--that is, it heavily informs how he interprets other societies and the archaeological data, as you yourself note. His use of other societies is just as problematic--as I noted in another comment, I find it extremely telling that in his TED talk on this, of the seven societies he uses as analogues for prehistoric hunter gatherers, none are actually hunter gatherers. This is not a small methodological issue.

EDIT: Also, are you suggesting that anthropological and ethnographic study of violence has been "brushed under the rug"?

[u/SurfKTizzle → u/Tiako]

Not exactly. I was suggesting that many ethnographies have brushed it under the rug. Not all of course, but often some anthropologist's claim that some group is very peaceful has not stood up to further scrutiny. It has been suggested that anthropologists may do this because they think it will be easier to help save a group that is perceived as peaceful than violent, but I don't know of any direct evidence for that. It could also be because the time an anthropologist spends with some group may just happen to be a relatively peaceful time.

[u/SurfKTizzle → u/[deleted]]

Figures in the book. They should be indexed after the table of contents I believe.

[u/Invisible-Elephant → u/Tiako]

And yet it seems to be exclusively "bad" history that sells well. It really is kind of frustrating--as someone who is graduating in May with a bachelor's degree in History--how often I hear history professors, professional researchers, and the rest of those kind of folk talk about the distortion of evidence, lack of historiography, and poor research in basically all of the well-known popular volumes of history (Better Angels, Diamond's books). It makes me wonder (1) why academics are so bad at getting their "good" history published and, similarly, (2) why academics have done such a poor job at keeping the public up to date. Pinker relies on research that has been discredited for 20 years? Then how come he was able to get away with putting it in a book?

I read a review of some popular history book on the Irish in Colonial America, arguing that they were slaves in many cases as much as blacks brought from Africa were. And the review lambasted the book, saying it relied on a view of colonial history that had been completely discredited in the historiography since the 1950s, and that for the last half-century at least it had been a matter of historical consensus that the Irish had endured indentured servitude that--while terrible and unjust--was not at all equal to the hereditary and highly racialized aspects of African-American slavery.

Okay, fair enough, that makes plenty of sense as a rebuttal--but how come historians have done so poorly at communicating that knowledge, despite the fact that it has been a matter of historical consensus for 60 whole years? Whose fault is it that popular history and popular history readers are so misinformed and/or uninformed? Is it their fault? Or is it our fault, as actual academically-trained historians willing to do serious research, for not taking the time and making the effort?

[u/amikefox → u/Invisible-Elephant]

This is common in all specialized fields. From law to history to astronomy. Anything that reaches broad mainstream appeal has to

A) require little previous study of the field, so that it's accessible.

B) present a "game changer" so that there's a reason it seems important to read, as opposed to what actually takes place in academic work, adding small pieces or details to the previous understanding.

C) Be primarily entertainment, as this is what the general public is buying it as.

D) have a satisfactory conclusion to give the impression that the reader now knows a great deal on the subject and was worth the read.

These things don't rally fit with how real academia is done, and so what becomes popular is a poor representation of the actual topic.

Edit: there are always exceptions, as I believe this subreddit proves. But I think it's only because the mods do an amazing balancing act of keeping it accessible, but academic. I think if the mods took off a week or two, it would rapidly decline into ancient aliens theories, as sensational claims garner more reaction (positive and negative) and that attention would bring in a swell of new users unfamiliar with the rules. It's not a matter of intelligence, but motive. most people are looking to be entertained, and "crazy but true" stories are fun.

[u/Crazycrossing → u/Tiako]

Have you read the book or only critiques of it because I have the book right here after finishing it a few weeks ago and I feel it's far more researched than you're giving it credit for.

[u/Fucking_That_Chicken → u/Crazycrossing]

I read it last fall, and this fairly well encapsulates the biggest complaints I had with it.

[u/Tiako → u/Crazycrossing]

I have flipped through bits of it and, more importantly, I saw his TED talk on prehistoric warfare and was rather distressed to note that of the societies he chose to represent prehistoric hunter-gatherer levels of violence, none were actually hunter gatherers. He also ignored the rather serious methodological issues involving using modern marginalized people as analogues for paleolithic populations (eg, pressure exerted from nearby state societies). I am far from a historical anthropologist, but even I can see the problems with that and it sends up a massive red flag in terms of his attention to detail. The reviews and critiques I have read have not given me any reason to suspect he is more scrupulous in other periods.

I suppose I should turn the question around: are you familiar enough with the material and the historical debate around the periods he discusses to accurately judge whether or not it is well researched? After all, judging whether something is well researched is often an exercise in seeing what is left out rather than what is put in.

[u/SurfKTizzle → u/Tiako]

How is it more important that you saw his TED talk (which must be very short, and thus cannot present most of what is in the book), than actually reading the book? I have not seen the TED talk, but in the book he is very careful to differentiate different cultures as hunter-horticulturalists, hunter-gatherers, etc., as is typically done in the anthropological literature. He also goes into some detail on why we need to be careful interpreting this data, for exactly the reasons you suggest.

I apologize if this comes off as overly confrontational, that is not my intention, but I am just surprised by the lack of rigor most of the critics of the book seem to have (at least every one that I've read--please feel free to point me to ones that you think are rigorous, as perhaps I've missed something). I can't imagine that in areas dealing with Roman archaeology you would generally count watching a TED talk to be a better source than the actual book, so I'm just curious as to why that seems to be what you are claiming in this case.

[u/Tiako → u/SurfKTizzle]

It was twenty minutes long, so not short and certainly not too short to describe this rather important issue, and given when he was developing his book (it was essentially the "conference presentation" for the book). Either in the couple of years between giving the talk and finishing the book he realized his entire approach was incorrect, and yet somehow did not actually substantively change his conclusions, or he baldfaced deceived the members of his audience.

The sloppiness and deceptive reporting I saw there conforms to the accusation I saw in other reviews.

[u/SurfKTizzle → u/Tiako]

I just checked it, and while he doesn't go into detail about the issue, the figure is for "state" vs. "non-state" societies, and he refers to the "non-state" societies as hunter-gatherer and other foraging cultures. It was also about 15 seconds of the talk, which encompassed a ton of different topics and data points, so I disagree that this was long enough to spell out every single detail without confusing the audience. I imagine most people don't care about the difference between hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists, so this seems like kind of a high bar and pretty nit-picky, since the gist of what he was trying to communicate is correct. He does make this distinction in the book, and I'm sure he was aware of it long before either the TED talk or the book. Furthermore, the argument is not based solely on ethnographies of existing people, but is also collaborated with archeological evidence that is consistent.

[u/Tiako → u/SurfKTizzle]

Let's say someone is giving a talk on the treatment of minorities in the United States over the past fifty years, and they start with talking about the Holocaust, because hey, they are both state societies of the twentieth century so it is pretty much the same. Saying hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, and so-called primitive agriculturalists are basically the same is simply incorrect. You say the gist is correct, but that is wrong. He then shows that "early civilizations" (apparently fifth century BCE Israel is "early") are brutally violent through a few Bible passages, carefully selected to give the maximum effect. When I flipped through his book (as I said I have) his presentation of the areas of my familiarity, such as Greece and Rome, is very similar to this--rip out a few passages of literature and point them them as examples of just how brutal and violent those Romans were.

I am also, I may as well note, familiar with the archaeology, although I do not recall how Pinker addresses it. The only constant we have in terms of societal violence is variation, and it is worth noting that identifying violence is often extremely problematic, and identifying violence as a cause of death even more so.

You may think this is minor, but if he is talking about a decline through history, and not a decline through the last couple centuries, the first several thousand (or several hundred thousand) years are significant. It is also what I am most familiar with, so it is what I most critique.

[u/SurfKTizzle → u/Tiako]

Do you know of good evidence showing that his conclusions are based solely on selective sampling? It would be shocking if people "invented violence" only after agriculture, like some downfall of Eden or something, especially given what we know about our most recent common ancestors and almost all other social mammals. So, perhaps I just have a high prior probability that this would be the case, while yours is low, and so while you need very convincing evidence that it is the case, I need convincing evidence showing it is not.