Human Nature Quotes

“It would seem that on hearing Abélard’s lecture, Anselm of Laon became “wildly jealous,” circumstances that Abélard assigned to every conceivable cause except the one that he had set in motion. “Since the beginning of the human race,” Abélard observed with some asperity in his autobiography, Historia Calamitatum (A History of My Misfortunes), women have “brought the noblest men to ruin.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“Proponents of strong AI, such as Marvin Minsky, have long thought that consciousness could exist on a silicon platform. Like Ray Kurzweil, he may well be encouraged to download his consciousness to a computer chip no larger than the head of a pin—a perfect fit, as his phrenologist would say.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“In the face of its crimes, what can one say about the twentieth century beyond what Elias Canetti said: “It is a mark of fundamental human decency to feel ashamed of living in the twentieth century.”78 What one is not prepared to say, and still less to encounter, largely because it is, at once, absurd and obscene, is the view that the great crimes of the twentieth century were, all things considered, not so bad. This is the view that Pinker defends: the crimes of the twentieth century were not among the greatest of crimes because other crimes were greater.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“Violence in the twentieth century has had a lurid, but characteristic, shape. Located in the heart of Europe, Germany and Switzerland share a border. From 1941 to 1945, extreme state violence was common in Germany, but not in Switzerland. Is there a measure adequate to both countries? To have assigned to Switzerland Germany’s rate would have afforded the Swiss an unrealistic sense of their danger, and to have assigned to Germany Switzerland’s rate would have afforded the Germans an unrealistic sense of their safety. To have assigned to both Germany and Switzerland an average of their rates would have astonished the Germans while alarming the Swiss.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“Steven Pinker does not, of course, deny the magnitude of these crimes; he scruples at their relative importance. “If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era,” he asks, “what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?”73 The question provides its own answer. There is safety in numbers. Is there? Is there really? An individual x selected at random is a commonplace in the theory of probability, where x is who he is and S is the population in which he is embedded. In the twentieth century, just what risk was he running to—or fleeing from? It was, Pinker affirms, the risk of being “a victim of violence.” This comes close to cant. If the victims of violence are left undefined, they tend to multiply uncontrollably, the more so if violence is treated as a sinister, but shapeless, force. The Holocaust, the Nuremburg court affirmed, was a crime against humanity. The judgment was morally correct because morally unavoidable, but if the entire human race has, for this reason, been a victim of violence, there are no statistical distinctions left to draw.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“Medieval homicide rates are very sensitive to population estimates. Of course they are. In his study, Plantagenet England, Michael Prestwich found reason to revise previous population estimates for medieval London; and with previous population estimates, previous homicide rates.51 One estimate of London’s population in the mid-fourteenth century puts the figure between thirty-five and fifty thousand: H/P ≈ 44 per 100,000. The true population of London, Prestwich argued, was somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and seventy-six thousand inhabitants: H/P ≈ 18 per 100,000.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“In time freed from public fornication, the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were occupied in killing one another in tavern brawls or over tavern wenches; at the dinner table, lacking access to the fork, they used their knives to settle slights as well as scores.33”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“For anyone wishing to argue that once things were worse than they are now, the Middle Ages are ideal. It is widely supposed that having gotten out of them was one of the accomplishments of modern civilization. No contemporary scholar, one might think, would make such a mistake in judgment. A one-man multitude, Pinker champions the case to the contrary. “The people of the middle ages were, in a word, gross.”31”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“Violence appears analytically as a state or emotional condition, but also as an act or disposition to action. It may simmer, boil, erupt, explode, seethe or subside; or seep, ooze, infect, derange, madden, escalate or intensify; it may be confined, regulated, distributed, sealed off; or liberate, intoxicate and purge; it may be insensate, demented, irrational, careless or incidental; or muted, indirect, verbal, or hidden; and as these constructions might indicate, there is nothing obvious or isolated that by itself answers to the name of violence. Like greed, generosity, love, cupidity, cunning, or artfulness, violence is a part of a dense matrix in which everything is held in suspension by the reciprocating pistons of human nature.21”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“If a violent act is violent only in virtue of some antecedent violent intention, it is equally true that an intention to do violence is revealed only when someone acts violently.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“Violence is neither exhausted nor expressed very precisely by any obvious measure. If the idea is allowed to encompass a stellar explosion as well as an animal attack, then it is too broad profitably to allow historians to draw the distinction between a violent battle and a violent crime, and, if not, then too narrow to describe them both. An act may be violent in degrees; or it may be violent in effect; violence may be obvious or disguised; systematic or haphazard and even incidental; it may be overt or subtle; there are violent states and violent societies, and whether violence is a matter of action or the disposition to action, violence by itself is not obviously an ordinary cause leading to an ordinary effect. A man may simmer with violence for years without acting, and another may act violently for years without simmering. 20”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“The years between the end of the Second World War and 2010 or 2011, Pinker designates the long peace.19 It is a peace that encompassed the Chinese Communist revolution, the partition of India, the Great Leap Forward, the ignominious Cultural Revolution, the suppression of Tibet, the Korean War, the French and American wars of Indochinese succession, the Egypt-Yemen war, the Franco-Algerian war, the Israeli-Arab wars, the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the grotesque and sterile Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, the farcical Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and various massacres, sub-continental famines, squalid civil insurrections, blood-lettings, throat-slittings, death squads, theological infamies, and suicide bombings taking place from Latin America to East Timor. Alone, broken, incompetent, and unloved, the Soviet Union lumbered into oblivion in 1989. The twentieth century had come to an end.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“A caricature of this result,” Butterfield adds, “is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority—a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion.”14”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“The Federal Republic of Germany has been willing to acknowledge the crimes of its predecessor; but in east Prussia, the Red Army, in its revenge, destroyed a society fully as old and as rooted in the European experience as the Jewish society of eastern Europe. Thereafter between twelve and fifteen million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes, properties, and the lives they had known, and over the course of the two years between 1945 and 1947, sent into exile in the withered German state in which they had never lived and to which they were bound only by the decayed tie of the German language.8 Yet the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from eastern and central Europe bears comparison to the partition of India and dwarfs completely all population expulsions in the Middle East.9”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“The twentieth century began in August of 1914.3 It has not been a century that has enhanced the dignity of the human race. Only five years after it began, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova asked whether it was worse than any of the others.4 It was much worse. Two hundred and thirty-one million men, women, and children died violently in the twentieth century, shot over open pits, murdered in secret police cellars, asphyxiated in Nazi gas ovens, worked to death in Arctic mines or timber camps, the victims of deliberately contrived famines or lunatic industrial experiments, whole populations ravaged by alien armies, bombed to smithereens, or sent to wander in their exiled millions across all the violated borders of Europe and Asia.5 The Holocaust and the Gulag have become symbols of the twentieth century, but if they are prominent as symbols, they are not unique as abominations.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature

“Orosius was a disciple of Saint Augustine. It was the purpose of the seven books to provide a defense of Christianity against the common pagan charge that Christianity accelerated, if it did not cause, the decline of the Roman Empire. Orosius met this dubious challenge by reversing its polarity. If things were in the fifth century bad, he argued, once they were worse.”
― David Berlinski, Human Nature