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How Close Are We to Self-Destruction?
While some claim we’re living in peaceful times, the Doomsday Clock ticks on. Two anthropologists get to the bottom of this contradiction.
EACH JANUARY, the science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveils an estimate of the likelihood that humanity will self-destruct. They do so by marking the time on a metaphorical “Doomsday Clock,” on which midnight represents the apocalypse. In 2017, the clock stood at a frightening two and a half minutes to midnight; this month could easily see the minute hand creep even closer to doom. Is panic warranted? And if so, can we unpack how and why humanity seems destined to cause its own annihilation?
At its start in 1947, the Doomsday Clock was set at seven minutes to midnight. Since then, its minute hand has ticked as far forward as two minutes to midnight in 1953 — in the wake of hydrogen bomb tests by both the United States and Soviet Union — and as far back as 17 minutes to the hour at the end of the Cold War in 1991. In January 2017, the Bulletin moved the clock forward by just 30 seconds — from three minutes, where it had rested for two years, to two and a half minutes to midnight. They made this unprecedented move of only a fraction of a minute, they explained, because “as this statement is issued, Donald Trump has been the U.S. President only a matter of days.”
The board consulted with a group of sponsors, 15 of whom are Nobel laureates, before resetting the clock in 2017 — but not everybody agreed with the Bulletin’s gloomy outlook. Less than four months after the clock’s readjustment, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates tweeted to recent college graduates that “this is the most peaceful time in human history,” citing psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2011 book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” as his source. Unsurprisingly, after Gates’ tweet, Pinker’s book zoomed to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list.
My colleague Charles Hildebolt and I wanted to understand how and why people have come to such fundamentally different conclusions. We began by reading Pinker’s book. As evolutionary anthropologists, we were particularly interested in his claim that our hunter-gatherer ancestors “started off nasty and … the artifices of civilization have moved us in a noble direction.” More specifically, Pinker argued that people who live in states (roughly defined as “so-called civilized societies”) are relatively peaceful compared to people from smaller, more traditional societies, like the communities from New Guinea that cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead famously studied. This, Pinker said, is because residents of states are more influenced by the “better angels” of reason, morality, empathy, and self-control.
https://undark.org/article/doomsday-clock-anthropology-violence/
EACH JANUARY, the science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveils an estimate of the likelihood that humanity will self-destruct. They do so by marking the time on a metaphorical “Doomsday Clock,” on which midnight represents the apocalypse. In 2017, the clock stood at a frightening two and a half minutes to midnight; this month could easily see the minute hand creep even closer to doom. Is panic warranted? And if so, can we unpack how and why humanity seems destined to cause its own annihilation?
At its start in 1947, the Doomsday Clock was set at seven minutes to midnight. Since then, its minute hand has ticked as far forward as two minutes to midnight in 1953 — in the wake of hydrogen bomb tests by both the United States and Soviet Union — and as far back as 17 minutes to the hour at the end of the Cold War in 1991. In January 2017, the Bulletin moved the clock forward by just 30 seconds — from three minutes, where it had rested for two years, to two and a half minutes to midnight. They made this unprecedented move of only a fraction of a minute, they explained, because “as this statement is issued, Donald Trump has been the U.S. President only a matter of days.”
The board consulted with a group of sponsors, 15 of whom are Nobel laureates, before resetting the clock in 2017 — but not everybody agreed with the Bulletin’s gloomy outlook. Less than four months after the clock’s readjustment, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates tweeted to recent college graduates that “this is the most peaceful time in human history,” citing psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2011 book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” as his source. Unsurprisingly, after Gates’ tweet, Pinker’s book zoomed to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list.
My colleague Charles Hildebolt and I wanted to understand how and why people have come to such fundamentally different conclusions. We began by reading Pinker’s book. As evolutionary anthropologists, we were particularly interested in his claim that our hunter-gatherer ancestors “started off nasty and … the artifices of civilization have moved us in a noble direction.” More specifically, Pinker argued that people who live in states (roughly defined as “so-called civilized societies”) are relatively peaceful compared to people from smaller, more traditional societies, like the communities from New Guinea that cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead famously studied. This, Pinker said, is because residents of states are more influenced by the “better angels” of reason, morality, empathy, and self-control.
https://undark.org/article/doomsday-clock-anthropology-violence/
