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    The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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    The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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    The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
    Ebook1,631 pages22 hours

    The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

    By Steven Pinker

    4/5

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    “If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this—the most inspiring book I've ever read."
    —Bill Gates (May, 2017)

    Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year

    The author of Rationality and Enlightenment Now offers a provocative and surprising history of violence.

    Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millenia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesom punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

    This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the esesnce of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives--the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away--and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Group
    Release dateOct 4, 2011
    ISBN9781101544648
    Author

    Steven Pinker

    One of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today," Steven Pinker is the author of seven books, including How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate—both Pulitzer Prize finalists and winners of the William James Book Award. He is an award-winning researcher and teacher, and a frequent contributor to Time and the New York Times.

    Read more from Steven Pinker

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    • 5/5
      This is a fascinating book, and many people will be surprised by what Pinker has to say. We routinely tell ourselves that we live in a violent world, that for all the comforts of civilization wars are more common, more terrible, and more fatal to non-combatants. Anyone who follows the news can cite examples of terrible atrocities that are the basis of our certainty that the human race is demonstrating a destructiveness and depravity towards other human beings unknown in the simpler, gentler past when knights and armsmen fought other knights and armsmen, leaving the civilians largely undisturbed.

      Stephen Pinker explains, with examples, details, and cites to original sources and current research, that we have it all wrong, and the past was a far more violent place than we typically imagine, or than we experience day to day in all but the most violent places on Earth now. And those "most violent places" aren't our modern cities in developed countries.

      He examines the levels of violence and the rates of violent death in primitive human hunter-gatherer communities, mediaeval Europe, and modern hunter-gatherer societies. He mines information from physical anthropology, historical records, recorded causes of death, death rates and causes of death in modern hunter-gatherer communities, and the trend is both clear and quite different from what our reflexive biases often tell us. Hunter-gatherer cultures generally have startlingly, even shockingly, high rates of death by violence. This stems from raids and conflicts with neighboring groups, the need to have a reputation for being too strong to attack and/or likely to take revenge if attacked, and other conflicts that, in the absence of a functioning government, individuals have to prevent or resolve for themselves.

      He traces the significantly lower but still high rates of violence in early agricultural settlements, as government begins to evolve but is still, itself, pretty violent, and then the evolution of things that start to resemble the modern state. We are introduced to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and how their theories both described and influenced the growth of government, Hobbes' "Leviathan," and the concomitant increase in self-control and decrease in private violence. He describes in enough detail to make the point the behavior that resulted from the expectation that mediaeval armies would feed and pay themselves by "living off the land," i.e., raiding villagers, and damage the enemy's wealth by burning the fields and killing the villagers. Torture was also used routinely, openly--and often as a form of public entertainment.

      Fewer mediaeval Europeans were likely to die by violence than hunter-gatherers, but it was still a shockingly violent time by modern standards.

      Pinker marshals evidence from the fields of sociology and psychology as we move closer to our own time, as well as crime statistics, war records, causes of death, etc. He does not shirk examining the effects of the two World Wars in the past century, as well as civil wars, the Rwanda genocide, and other painful modern episodes.

      He also looks at less obvious declines in violence, such as hookless fly fishing and the elimination of many kinds of "entertainment" that used to be taken for granted. The banning of dodgeball by some schools and summer camps, and speech codes at universities are discussed as ridiculous extremes that are nevertheless simple overshoots of what are generally beneficial trends.

      Stephen Pinker has a track record of excellent books using psychology and sociology to examine major aspects of modern life in an interesting, informative, and enlightening way. He's done it again, and in this volume lays out a powerful case that the growth of effective government, the development of political forms that placed a premium on self-control, the growth of modern literature (and, eventually, movies, tv, and the internet), democracy, open societies, and international trade have all contributed to dramatically lowering rates of violence and creating a startlingly safe and peaceful world--for now. He makes no claim that we've changed human nature, or that the trends that have produced our current peacefulness could not be reversed.

      This a compelling, enlightening, and highly readable book.

      Highly recommended.

      I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
    • 3/5
      I abandoned this book when it got way too deep into the statistical weeks for my comfort, but the author explores an interesting thesis. He posits that mankind and our cultures have become less violent rather than more violent. While media coverage focuses our attention on both individual incidents and on terrorist attacks, mass murder, and outright warfare and their resulting carnage, violence is less likely to directly touch our lives that at any time in the past.This might seem counterintuitive, given that the first half of the 20th Century saw the two most destructive wars in human history. He suggests that this needs to be put in perspective by considering the world's continually growing perspective. He provides hard data to support his thesis. More interestingly, he explores reasons for the gentling of our natures. Much of it traces back to the Great Enlightenment and our growing awareness that other individuals share the same emotions as we do.Still, too much detail for me.
    • 3/5
      On the whole, I think this is a good book, but an incomplete one. While I don't think, or feel, that violence has declined, he does have data on his side. However, it is easier to push a button, or sit in the comfort of a War room, than actually lead troops to battle!He does cover aspects like domestic violence, rape, child killings, and this is good. As he also does the topic of genocide. The analysis is, in general, good. However, I feel that the book is incomplete on account of a few things"One: it is a Western book. The data covers Europe and the US. You cannot extrapolate to Latin America, Asia, Australia and Africa! This is a sad fact of the book, Two: I don't think he explores causality. Some aver that the rise of Muslim terrorism, and Hindu fundamentalism is because of the actions of the British, in India, between 1858 and 1947, wherein they systematically tried to drive a wedge between the two communities. True? Some sort of analysis on causality would be goodAnother example: the West has had a different growth trajectory, demographic situation, culture than the rest of the world. the forces that drive violence is different. He has not gone into this at allA good book, but incomplete.
    • 4/5
      I have read enough history to agree with Steven Pinker's thesis in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that the trend of human existence has been toward less violence, less cruelty and more tolerance. Yet most people, aware of ongoing wars, global terrorism, mass shootings, the soaring murder rate in Chicago and the violent protests on certain college campuses whenever conservatives try to express an opinion might believe otherwise.Pinker takes nearly 700 pages to make his case, and though he often strays from science into opinion, it is a sound one. War, if still commonplace, is not as common as it once was. Nor is the mistreatment of animals, the owning of slaves, the burning of witches, the torture of criminals, the spanking of children, the beating of wives or the persecution of minorities and, despite what has been taking place at those college campuses, those who hold unpopular points of view.The reasons are many. For one thing, people everywhere seem to be getting smarter. IQs keep rising. Smart people are more likely to realize that violence may not be the smartest way to solve a problem. (Again those college protestors stand as a notable exception.)Before the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, human rights were not something most people even thought about. Now, in much of the world at least, everyone thinks of and speaks of rights. You can't walk into a doctor's office without being told of your right of privacy. All those groups of people who once had few rights now have them written into law. Recognizing the rights of others has led to less violence. (And once again those college protestors are an exception to the rule.)Stronger central government, a government with a license to put down violence with violence when necessary, has been vital to the pacification of the populace. When someone damages your car, you call the cops; you don't try to resolve the matter yourself with your fists or a gun.Trade and international organizations, says Pinker, have made countries less inclined to go to war. Why invade a neighboring country when you are already getting what you want from it through trade?Pinker develops these ideas, and others, in great detail, complete with graphs and illustrations. Much of what he says will surprise you, much will probably anger you. Whether or not he is correct on all points, I think he is right on the central one: Human beings are less prone to violence than we once were.
    • 4/5
      The feelgood book of the year.
    • 3/5
      I first became interested in this book through a TED talk Pinker gave on the same subject. It was a fascinating idea (that violence that greatly decreased over time) and one that struck me as true fairly quickly. Picking up the book, I was shocked by the many instances of barbarism of past centuries that modern persons would never even consider. Some may find the length of the book and Pinker's many examples for each point excessive, but I greatly enjoyed the thorough exploration of the myriad strange forms human violence has taken. Pinker's comparison of cultures separated by time and space was well done and backed up by a lot of statistical evidence. (He was also careful analyze the possible limitations of the statistics he cited.)

      However, where the book fell apart for me was in Pinker's reliance on evolutionary psychology, particularly in relation to differences between genders and between races. Evo-psych is not a discipline I have a lot of respect for (most of its claims are unfalsifiable and supported by little to no evidence) but I pride myself on being openminded and was willing to hear out Pinker's evidence that this differences are primarily the product of evolution, not society. The only problem was he never presented any.

      If I was being generous, I might say he provided some anecdotal evidence, but as far as hard, scientific evidence, crickets. It was actually quite jarring in contrast to heavily evidence-backed claims of the rest of the book. I hadn't been too familiar with Pinker's work before picking this up, but it turns out he has a bit of a reputation for this sort of thing.

      I still think there are many good ideas in the book but Pinker's embracing of some very morally and scientifically dubious ones calls the whole thing into question.
    • 5/5
      A very engaging book that combined history/science/politics/economics/psychology as it impacts violence, and (counter-intuitively) the decline in violence... It was very broad in scope and massive in length...but well worth reading. Pinker reminds us that we can often gain insights by carefully and thoroughly looking at empirical evidence. Data is king!
    • 5/5
      Another brilliant read from a wise old professor.
    • 3/5
      I feel as though I've been stuck in this book for weeks. It's undoubtedly interesting and, in many ways, reassuring, but I really wish it hadn't been quite so long. The chapter on war, particularly went on and on - and got way too bogged down in statistical niceties for my taste. And the editing wasn't particularly good either, in the ebook version I was reading.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed his arguments and his collection of data from different historical surveys and textual study, but I found the overall structure of the book longwinded and incoherent. Pinker jumped around throughout history, when the obvious structure of the book would follow time, as violence has decreased through time. Also, many of his causal explanations were lacking.
    • 4/5
      In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Mr. Pinker makes an exhaustively credible case for why violence has declined throughout recorded history. Accounting for natural human biases, his optimistic and scientific view of the available data shows that people, from one generation to the next, are learning to be better people. It's a common misconception that rates of violence have increased given what we see on the 24-hour news cycle, but in reality the opposite is true. So true in fact that the period since World War II has been dubbed "The Long Peace."The examples and specific statistics given are fascinating and often suprising, but this is a long book. I can't help but wonder if Mr. Pinker could have made his point in half as many pages because his overall message is important, and certainly some brevity would have made Better Angles a more accessible read.
    • 4/5
      Society is not broken, and the world is less scarred by violence than at any time in history. It's not a jungle out there. In fact, we're all getting nicer and nicer, except perhaps in a few marginal places, far from Harvard. Yes, Dr Pangloss is in the house, as the amiable Steven Pinker offers some perspective on our contemporary world. His thesis is fair enough, and indeed quickly stated - that law, government and rationalism have reduced much of the brutishness that previous generations suffered under. But he spins it out over such garrulous length that one is pretty much obliged to skim the book. It's always enjoyable to read despite the author's excesses of style, but in the end too Eurocentric, and has no special insight for predicting what will come next. Will we perhaps all go veggy or tolerate currently taboo sexual relations? No, no, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (or in the current rendering: "Everything is awesome, ...").
    • 4/5
      Steven Pinker has written a very ambitious book exploring the decline of violence over human history and the possible reasons for that decline. Some of his data sets seem to me too small for the weight he puts upon them, like the incidence of spanking to discipline children, but the evidence that violence is declining is very strong, and Pinker''s book is bringing that evidence to a broad public. I was more interested and more excited by his discussion of possible mechanisms for the decline in violence. This book is a long read, but well worth the time spent on it.
    • 5/5
      Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.
    • 5/5
      This is a mighty book about a very interesting and surprising piece of information - the decline of violence in almost all forms across most societies in the world.Pinker piles up the data from an amazing range of sources until even the most sceptical reader must be convinced - levels of violence really have fallen, and to a quite amazing degree.Then Pinker tries to go through causes and contributory factors. And there are many. The first is the role of an effective state in its "monopoly of violence". As Locke stressed in the Leviathan, man not living in an organised state lives in a state of war. Then there are many others to follow - a general "civilising process"; the enlightenment, the growth in empathy that flowed from the widespread consumption of fiction made possible by the printing process and the growth in literacy levels are key factors.I think there is a shorter book in here, but that is not Pinker's style. And with such a great story to tell, it is hard to criticise.Read October 2014.
    • 5/5
      Required reading for anyone who cares about the State and its relation to violence. The charts and graphs detailing the decline of violence are convincing. The proffered explanations less so, but Pinker isn't trying to be authoritative. They are intriguing and well developed, and give much to think about. A lot of neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, and game theory.4.5 stars on completion (oc)After a few months: I find myself frequently using arguments from this book, to great effect. It remains a 4.5 star book.
    • 3/5
      Better Angels of Our Nature is a very ambitious book. I admire the goal and premise of the book. Attempting to prove a premise like this is probably impossible at this time. The required additional models needed as proof are themselves on weak ground, so in order to reach the conclusions Pinker seeks, we must accept many other premises and conclusions. This is a common issue that confronts us on social and cultural challenges. The question seems straightforward: is there less violent death in the present century than in previous centuries. But this question depends on many other questions. Can we trust the demographic records at the present time and from previous times? Which deaths are considered violent deaths? Likely, more people die from disease in each war, than from stabbing or shooting. The populations have changed, so how do we adjust for numbers of dead? So while I applaud the intent of the book, I believe the weight of evidence depends less on charts, graphs and numbers and more on clearly defining models under which a valid answer can be obtained. Probably a good reason to read this book would be to see how this type of question can be approached and to encourage other people to take on these types of questions.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant book combining psychology, history, sociology, cognitive science, and economics illustrating in a stunning fashion that the world of the past was violent and atrocious, and we are now living in the best of times. Long, fascinating and important book.
    • 4/5
      Intense and convincing.
    • 4/5
      This is a very dense book, but it is excellently written. It presents a theory that violence has declined from historical times through to the present, and presents a clear hypothesis for why this has happened. After reading this book, I am beyond grateful that I was born in the latter half of 20th century, rather than at any earlier point, after reading this book!
    • 5/5
      The Better Angels of Our Nature falls into a category of book that I've come to think of as happy realization non-fiction. In these books, the author argues that despite what one may think due to exposure to regular media and conventional wisdom, matters in the world as they are now aren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be, and in fact are greatly improved from how they once were. Other examples, just off the top of my head, include some of Gregg Easterbrook's work, like the Progress Paradox or A Moment on This Earth. I like reading books like this as an antidote to much of the other non-fiction I read, which tends to argue that things are getting worse all the time, with the point usually being that it is now urgent to stand and fight or donate money for their cause, or change your life right away, or sometimes just realize that everything's already gone to hell in a handbasket and there's nothing further to be done.Pinker's specific argument is that, in contrast to what's usually reported, the world has grown less violent over time, and that the current age we live in is the most peaceful and safest ever. As Pinker himself admits at the beginning of the book, this is not a concept that most people cotton to particularly quickly, what with all the reported violence and the idea of the 20th century being the bloodiest ever, etc. Pretty much everyone who saw me reading the book and stopped to talk about it with me found it a bit odd.To convince us, then, Pinker marshals hundreds of pages of documentation showing that statistically, rates of violent death from large-scale wars on down through homicides, have been decreasing for a long while, over the course of centuries and then with further focus on decreases after World War II. He identifies four different periods over which the decline occurred, with different exogenous factors given for this change, such as the rise of the state, the emulation of courtly manners by the lower classes, the pacifying nature of commerce, the rising importance of the individual, etc. To me, the presentation of the statistics, and then the ideas behind them, are quite convincing. He also draws attention to how bad it really used to be, the casual cruelty and violence that used to occur regularly that we've lexified, but have forgotten what it means that torture and war were so commonplace that the terms made it in.After this attempt to convince us of the rightness of his central claim, Pinker turns to an examination of what leads to violence, presenting studies of the neurological bases for different types of violence (e.g. predatory, sadistic, etc.) and psychological studies looking at what can cause people to work along those lines. He then looks at the titular better angels (e.g. empathy, self-control) in the same fashion, and describes where each of these are set within the brain, how they're expressed in psychological studies, and how, to some degree, they may have come to have the upper hand over violence.Pinker is careful not to make any predictions about the continued lack of war between great powers, or the continuing fall of homicide, rape, and other violent crimes; he points out that only one leader who wants violence is necessary for such a war to occur, and when great power wars occur, they can often be incredibly costly. However, if our tendency towards violence has come to be more muted due to better self-control, to better abilities to take the perspective of others, to rises in symbolic intelligence, and I don't see these reversing course in the near future. That said, yeah, I wouldn't want to stake my reputation on it, either.The writing style of the book is pretty lucid for the amount of statistics and argumentation in it, and he returns to themes regularly enough for you to know which of the points he's trying to make he wants you to go home with. There was, of course, a lot of violence, and graphic descriptions thereof, but there were also some lighter, more humorous moments in there to alleviate the dark pressure.It's an interesting book, and I definitely enjoyed reading it. I tend to like his linguistics books more, but this is a worthy addition to his bibliography. If you need convincing about the way violence has been heading, give it a try. There may well be a happy realization waiting for you.
    • 4/5
      I was fully prepared to hate this, and didn't hate it.Pinker is controversial, if not an outright figure-of-fun*, but the case he builds here is not wrong on its face. I was leery of some of his sources (there's no excuse for giving citation juice to a hate website) , and some of his graphs are simply Crimes Against Tufte, but the case he makes is certainly well-supported. The thesis - which he's pretty coy about, and only reveals after about 650 pages - is that life is better today because people are smarter. Uh, OK: Pinker is a psychologist, and thinks that the grand sweep of historical progress is due to psychological factors. That's not wrong on its face, but I'd think he's slighting the material conditions that support the luxury of viewing competing human claims as equivalent. Hungry, desperate people are funny about seeing the validity of other's claims to resources. * (E.g.: In the course of the month I spent reading this, I ran a cross a review by one of the editors of the LRB, a review of three books about Google that had absolutely NOTHING TO DO with Pinker. And in the Oct 6th LRB, - out of a clear blue sky - there was an offhand observation made about the importance of citation-ranking on reputation:"Rankings based on citations aren't necessarily a measure of excellence - if they were, we wouldn't hear so much about Steven Pinker - but they do reflect where humans have decided that authority lies."Pinker is now a standing example of someone whose reputation is overrated.)
    • 3/5
      Pinker attempts to study trends of violence throughout human history. He sees a decline in violence of all kinds, on all scales of time and magnitude. The first seven chapters document the historical decline of violence, including hate crimes, murders, domestic violence, animal cruelty, war, and genocide. The remainder of the book traces probable causes of the decline, drawing on a huge range of fact sources, from histories to atrocologists to evolutionary psychologists.

      To sum up, here are the factors that don't show a consistent relationship with violence: weaponry and disarmament (when people want to be violent, they'll do so regardless of available weaponry and rapidly develop more, whereas when they want to be peaceful, the weapons are not used), resources (wealth originates not just from natural resources but also the ingenuity, effort, and cooperation used on resources. A country rich in minerals could experience more war and civil unrest while everyone scrambles for it, or less because other actors rationally understand that peacefully trading will result in more money for everyone), affluence (wealth doesn't correlate with dips in violence, nor are richer countries less violent), or religion (ideologies can be used for violence or for peace). Factors that do show a consistent relationship with violence: a state that uses a monopoly on force to protect its citizens from one another, commerce, women's involvement in decision making and society's respect for the interests of women, the expansion of the circle of sympathy, and increased use of reason. I've stuck points that particularly struck me in the "status updates" section; go there for more specifics and quotes.

      I was overall impressed. The sheer number and breadth of sources Pinker draws upon is really impressive; even if you discount a number of the facts or his interpretation of them (for instance, I don't believe that a test showign differences in men and women's reaction to hypothetical cheating necessarily reveals an innate, biological difference between the sexes when it could just as easily be due to being socialized to react and think about sex differently), there still remain a mountain of evidence upon which his arguments can still rest. I also think this book suffers from an unfortunate tendency to focus on 19th and 20th century Western Europe and the USA; relatively modern western thought and social movements are given vastly more time and attention than any others, and although I understand that Pinker can draw upon those traditions most readily (and can count on his English-speaking audience to do the same), I still wish a global history of violence used more a more global lens. His data on violent crime, wars, and genocides is decidedly global, but his anecdotes, examples, and the philosophies he draws from are almost exclusively western. That said, his arguments convinced me. I think he demonstrates pretty conclusively that violence, both as a whole and as individual categories, has decreased over time, and his theories as to why made sense to me.
    • 5/5
      I picked up this book by chance in a bookstore, and did not know I was in for a reading adventure. With great sensitivity and a marvellous sense of humour, Pinker lays out the justification of his surprising thesis that violence in today's world is at its lowest level in human history. Along the way, he gives the reader lessons in the darker periods of world history, in the physiology of the human brain, and in the evolutionary reasons for why people act as they do.

      His insights into the role of reading as an important contributor to the pacification of the world, and to the indispensability of human reason to the betterment of our species are profund and inspiring.

      This was a true tour de force, introducing me to dozens of insights that never would have occurred to me otherwise. The book at 840 pages is somewhat of a long slog, but it was a very good investment of my reading time.
    • 5/5
      Has the human condition gotten better over time? In this book, Steven Pinker argues that it has, mainly by showing how dreadful it was in the past. People still intentionally inflict unspeakable harm upon one another, but compared to the atrocities of the past, (some of which, such as animal cruelty, genocide, torture, and rape as a spoil of war, they did not even considered atrocities at the time) we have made considerable progress. In this lengthy book, Pinker provides details, data, and analysis demonstrating his point. At times, it seemed almost too much. Despite the almost painful level of detail, I found this a thoughtful and persuading mixture of history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. I highly recommend it as a much-needed counter for the mistaken idea that humanity has somehow digressed from an idyllic past.
    • 4/5
      Overwhelming argument that human society has become less violent over time. Nice to read some good news for a change. But proving it involves hundreds of pages about how awful people are to each other - fortunately less awful now than in the past.
    • 5/5
      VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ranging discussion of possible political and psychological causes for what's happened. This book is big, and it needs to be: it's built around a vast accumulation of raw evidence. Historical, statistical, sociological, neurobiological, and anecdotal – and I'm slightly confused by some of the negative reviews here, because although you might not like all of his conclusions, it's not easy to argue with the facts when they're laid out in this much detail. Not convinced? Wondering if village life in the 30s can really have been as bad as dodging rapists in today's inner cities? Well, prepare for approximately 8,266 graphs and charts proving you wrong in every direction. Leafing through them is at first daunting, then fascinating, then astonishing, and eventually wearying. But they keep coming! The decline in some forms of violence is so dramatic that the figures have had to be plotted on a logarithmic scale, so vertiginous is their descent. Hitting kids – gone from normal to unacceptable in barely a generation. Murder rates? Dropping like a knackered lift. Paedophiles and child abduction? Statistically speaking, if you wanted your child to have a better-than-average chance of being abducted and held overnight by a stranger, ‘you'd have to leave it outside unattended for 750,000 years’. Terrorism, surely? Nope; in fact ‘the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying’ – one study suggests that 1,500 more Americans died in the year after 9/11 because they started driving rather than flying. Okay then, what about WAR. ‘As of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.’ This is important, because inter-state warfare is much, much more deadly than the small-'n'-nasty invasions and civil wars that are more common today. And even they are becoming less frequent and less individually deadly. Don't get me wrong, this is not a happy-clappy book about mindless optimism, and he is assiduous in stressing that the situation could easily change. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them.Pinker takes a good, long look at several possibilities, and (to my mind at least) identifies three major factors behind the decline. The first is the growth of democracy, which strongly correlates with lower rates of violence across the board, and we get the figures to prove it. The second is the revolution in communications, firstly during the Enlightenment, and then more recently with the birth of the mass media age. Again, huge numbers of studies are adduced to make the point. The third factor is what he calls ‘feminization’: women are just less violent than men, and the more involved they are in a society the more peaceful it is. ‘We are all feminists now,’ he concludes, after a typically detailed examination of changing attitudes to, and rights of, women through history. (He is talking about the West here, but even elsewhere the trend is unmistakeable.) Studies suggest that this is not just a consequence of changing attitudes, but a cause of them, particularly given that ‘the one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.’ Pinker hones in on the obvious implications: Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because more women are in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge? The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes. When he's finished considering social movements and political changes, he pokes inside your brain. We have pages and pages of various neuro-sociological experiments where people were strapped to an MRI machine and told to slap a puffin in the face, or something, so that various lobes and cortexes could be identified and examined. The question is whether there are anatomical, or evolutionary-psychological, causes for violence, and if so how easily they can be overcome. We get a lot of impressive-looking diagrams like this (I may have remembered some of the details wrong). Pinker is very interesting on the Flynn Effect, which, if you're not aware of it, is the upward trend in general intelligence observed around the world in standardised testing since such things began. Many people that have written on this subject are skeptical that folk nowadays can really be smarter than anatomically-identical humans of a few generations ago, despite what the tests say – but Pinker, after a careful examination of how thought processes are influenced by changing social norms, is not afraid to draw his conclusions, at least in the ethical sphere:The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid.Obviously we are into speculative territory here, but I actually found it very heartening and thought-provoking to see someone prepared to follow the evidence that far. How's it written? His style is exact without being dense, although he is not averse to the odd cliché (‘capital punishment itself was on death row’), and from time to time his desire to cloak the science in colourful imagery leads him into some awkward prose:The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.Yikes. Also…and this may sound like a weird thing to pick up on, but once I noticed it I couldn't take my eyes off it…he is absolutely obsessed with telling the reader to ‘recall’ things he's already said. Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution…Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank…Recall that there were two counter-Enlightenments…Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness.…and recall that duelling was eventually laughed into extinction.Recall that the chance that two people in a room of fifty-seven will share a birthday is ninety-nine out of a hundred.England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies…Recall that for half a millennium the wealthy countries of Europe were constantly at each other's throats.Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations drop like flies over time…And recall the global Gallup survey that showed…Recall that narcissism can trigger violence…Recall that the insula lights up when people feel they have been shortchanged…Patients with orbital damage, recall, are impulsive…Recall from chapter 3 the theory of crime…Just how much stuff are you expecting me to remember, Pinker?! And surely someone who wrote three books on language has a fucking thesaurus handy? There are a couple of minor errors, too, that an editor should have caught. The Polish city of Wrocław is printed in my edition as ‘Wroctaw’; and he also refers to some statistics gathered in the ‘town of Kent’ (there are dozens of towns in Kent, which in the dataset concerned is a county).However, and despite my sometimes flippant tone in this review, the truth is that I thought this was a magnificent book – convincingly argued and truly multidisciplinary, so that I felt like I was getting a synthesis of the important studies carried out in half a dozen different fields. It's a big, serious argument that deserves proper consideration, and one that'll give you some ammo to argue back next time you're feeling cynical about the relentless news headlines. I think it's a clear 4.5.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book. But somewhat long. At times it seemed like he wanted to bludgeon us with more and more data to prove his point. By the end I was finding it a little redundant and looking forward to the end.

      But overall, a book I learned a lot from.
    • 4/5
      Another excellent book from Steven Pinker. I love it when a book makes me say “Cool!” and “Wait, that can’t be right” at frequent intervals and one that angers both liberals and conservatives. Pinker starts by describing the bloodiness of the historical past, with chapters on Homeric Greece, the Bible (specifically the Old Testament – by one estimate there are around 20M violent deaths in the Old Testament; even if you don’t count The Flood there are over a million); the Roman Empire; medieval times; and early modern Europe. Pinker stresses both the body counts and the methods – the Roman Empire was the source of our government and is still used as a model of honor and probity – but nobody blinked an eye at death by crucifixion and the sale of 12 year old girls in the slave markets. The 20th century provides one of the “that can’t be right” moments – despite the WWI, the Ukrainian famine, WWII, the Holocaust, the Gulags, the Chinese “Great Leap Forward” famines, and the Cambodian killing fields it’s still the least violent century in history (Pinker has to clarify here; it’s not that there weren’t a lot of violent deaths, but that a randomly selected individual had a smaller chance of dying by violence than any time previously). The Middle Ages were particularly brutal; Pinker cites statistics for the European nobility (the only people you really can get statistics for) that gave a male member of a noble family about a 25% chance of premature death by violence. This is dramatically different from the popular view; people polled generally put the 20th century as the most violent, compared to the “Good Old Days”.
      After establishing this rather astonishing fact in the first couple chapters, Pinker spends the rest of the book proposing various major and minor explanations, with plenty of opportunity to offend people on both ends of the political spectrum. Major explanations are:
      * Leviathan – (Pinker consistently uses this term) – A government monopoly on violence, with the suppression of private feuds and punishment for private violence. Pinker also notes the concomitant reduction in the number of governments – Europe in the Middle Ages had hundreds of independent political units; it’s now in the 30s. Fewer people to fight against. Pinker also puts the decline of the “culture of honor” here, where every insult has to be bloodily avenged – you can often get the government to do it for you instead, and the government will come after you if you do it yourself. There is pretty strong criticism of the 1960s and 1970s, which Pinker describes as a “retreat of policing” with a corresponding increase in homicide. Pinker also puts the mellowing of religious ideologies. It’s no longer acceptable – well, for most religions anyway – to kill heretics or go to war for their conversion, and governments will no longer support it. (Pinker notes that Marxism is a religion in this sense).
      * Capitalism. (Now we get to the part that will annoy liberals). Pinker usually describes this as “trade” rather than “capitalism”, presumably to avoid giving his liberal readers fits, but it’s clear from the text that capitalism is what he means. It makes more sense to make money off somebody than kill them, and again Pinker has some pretty harsh words for Marxism here, notes that Marxism picked up some of the worst ideas of conventional religion – the idea that profit and charging interest are sins, the perfectibility of humankind, and the millennial prospect of a future Golden Age – and ran with them.
      * Sympathy. (Pinker prefers this to “empathy”). Here Pinker makes an interesting suggestion – the advent of literacy and the development of realistic fiction contributed to world and individual peace, because you could present someone else’s point of view. The general revolution in human rights fits in here as well; people began to treat those of different gender, race, or sexual preference as if they were human.
      Pinker also discusses what he calls “feminization: - a kind of unfortunate term but perhaps the best he can do. His idea here is that women no longer see prowess in violence as a desirable characteristic in a mate – in fact, usually the opposite. There’s some discussion – Pinker notes he covered the idea a little in The Blank Slate – that this once was true; on an evolutionary time scale if women had the chance to be involved in mate selection at all they picked a mate that could protect them and theirs, and if they didn’t have a choice they were just sexual prey to the most violent man. Pinker doesn’t go so far as to deploy an evolutionary argument about maximizing fitness here but it’s easy to read between the lines.
      After extensive explication and copious statistics, Pinker uses a variation of the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” he calls the “Pacifist’s Dilemma”; it works like this:
      There are two contending parties; either can be a pacifist or an aggressor. If both are pacifists, they both win a small reward – say $5 (Pinker stresses the numbers are arbitrary to illustrate the situation). If one is an aggressor and one a pacifist, the aggressor gets $10 and the pacifist loses $100. If both are aggressors they both lose $50. In this setup, it makes sense to be an aggressor – you minimize your expected loses. Pinker now adds the factors he suggests contribute to peace. If there’s a Leviathan involved than can assess appropriate penalties after the fact – say $15 against aggressors – it now becomes a no-win game for the aggressor; even if one party remains pacifist while the other aggresses, the aggressor still loses (although so does the pacifist). In a second matrix, Pinker adds the effect of trade; in this case there’s a bonus of $100 if both sides are pacifist. Now you can still win $10 by being an aggressor against a pacifist, but if you are both pacifists you win $105. Finally, Pinker shows a matrix with sympathy added; they aggressor gets a smaller reward and the pacifist doesn’t lose as much. (There’s also a matrix with “feminization” considered; that gives the pacifist “defeat without humiliation” – smaller loss – and the aggressor “victory without glory” – a smaller gain).
      Pinker, of course, can’t set up a matrix with real world rewards and punishments, so although his arguments are sensible they can’t actually be quantified (one thing he doesn’t mention, for example, is that the evolutionary argument for feminization can be turned backward; Palestinian suicide bombers can reap considerable financial rewards for their families. Since the local ethos often makes it difficult for young men to marry due to the huge financial expenditure involved, it makes evolutionary sense to blow yourself up so at least your sisters can afford dowries and thus pass on some of your genome). However, Pinker does say that a factor contributing to peace is people starting to think like economists. Pinker is very careful throughout to emphasize that when he mentions “liberal” values he means “classical liberal” (he seems to be a little afraid of the term “libertarian”) rather than “left liberal”, and is generally at least mildly derogatory when speaking about “left liberal” economics.
      An interesting and worthwhile book, almost guaranteed to get you into screaming arguments, but well researched and backed up with massive data. Extensively referenced; lots of charts and tables. Recommended; four stars I think.
    • 4/5
      Ever the optimist, psychologist Steven Pinker posits that the world is getting better, not worse in this very long (almost 900pages) book He is certainly correct in that we no longer burn witches at the stake, and the Catholic Church has abandoned The Inquisition. However, I would like to see him bring our a revised version to update our current society in the age of Trump & Brexit.