Steven Pinker has always been a brilliant and insightful author, ably bridging the gap between behavioral science research and the audience of intelligent laypersons. The Better Angels of Our Nature, however, is by far his most ambitious and successful book---a book destined for greatness. Like most great books, the message is simple and clear, and the author spends most of his time and energy defending and elaborating on a few key points. Immensely knowledgeable in all the behavioral sciences, and possessing considerable statistical skills, Pinker ranges over a huge swath of modern research, virtually every page overflowing with factual information.
The last book that I read that I admired almost as much as this was Jared Diamond's Germs, Guns and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997). I loved Diamond's book even though I had some reservations concerning the validity of his explanation of the distribution of poverty and wealth in the modern world. I have even more reservations concerning Pinker's explanation of the dramatic decline of violence in modern society, but this does not diminish the value of his contributions in my eyes (and it certainly should not in yours, dear potential reader).
Pinker begins by tracing six major turning points in human history (he calls them, rather inaccurately, "trends"). First was the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary and agricultural living some 10,000 years ago (yes, it was that recently!). The second was the transition from feudalism to modern society in the Middle Ages, which initiated a five hundred year "Civilizing Process" (to use the words of the great sociologist Norbert Elias) leading to a ten to fifty-fold reduction in the amount of violence in society. The third was the European Enlightenment and the Age of Reason that this unleashed, leading to the virtual elimination of socially sanction forms of violence (e.g., torture, public hangings, dueling, witch burnings, cruelty to animals). The fourth transition was the end of international war among the great powers after World War II, and the fifth was the decline in civil wars, genocides, and repression by autocrats since the end of the Cold War. Pinker's final transition is the widespread expression of faith in human rights embodied in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Pinker ascribes the decline of violence to "four better angels," that form part of the psychological repertoire of Homo sapiens. These are empathy, self-control, a moral sense, and the faculty of reason. A fair fraction of the book is devoted to showing that we in fact have these "better angels," using modern behavioral game theory and experimental psychology and economics. The rather quaint notion, fashionable until just a couple of decades ago, that humans are basically selfish and uncaring except for close kin, and that humans have a natural and irrepressible instinct for aggression and mayhem, is eloquently and effectively contradicted by contemporary social science research.
The better angels of our human nature do not operate, however, in a social vacuum. Rather, Pinker asserts, there are five historical forces that have led to the triumph of empathy, self-control, a moral sense, and the faculty of reason over the equally powerful human thirst to exploit and dominate other groups, and to take revenge against those who have offended us with no sense of self-control, temperance, or forgiveness. The first of these historical forces he calls "Leviathan" (following Hobbes)---the rise of the state and judiciary that enforces a monopoly of coercion, and funnels disputes between individuals and groups through the judicial apparatus. The second is commerce, the globalization of which starting in the sixteen century, which changes international relations into a positive sum game that is crippled by war. The third historical force is feminization, through which the interests and values of women are increasing respected and generalized to both sexes. The fourth is cosmopolitanism, including literacy, mobility, and mass media, which lead people increasingly to understand the mind-sets and desires of others unlike themselves, and to expand their circle of sympathy to larger and larger groupings of individuals. The fifth, says Pinker, is the "escalator of reason," through which people can learn from the past the futility of acting out their primitive urges, and rather turn to peaceful solutions to their problems.
Perhaps the most surprising, and welcome, aspect of Pinker's new work is that it is implicitly a devastating nail-in-the-coffin critique of the brand of evolutionary psychology with which Pinker has identified for many years. The brand of evolutionary psychology initiated by Lida Cosmides and John Tooby began with with a high-precision and effective attack on mainstream psychology and sociology, which they called the Standard Social Sciences Model (SSSM). According to the SSSM, the human mind is a blank slate at birth (nota bene: the title of one of Pinker's books was The Blank Slate), and individual psychological characteristics are determined purely by the dominant culture in which the individual is raised. "Human nature," as Karl Marx proclaimed in the Theses on Feuerbach, "is the sum of social relations" (Marxism and mainstream social theory agreed on this central tenet). Thus, in a culture that approves of violence there will be lots of violence, which in a culture that approves of pacific relations, there will be peace. In a society that recognizes differences between the sexes, there will be exhibited exactly those differences so recognized. And so on.
The SSSM would be a mixed blessing if it were true. On the one hand, we could engineer culture to produces people who are kind, considerate, and helpful to one another. On the other hand, a totalitarian state could produce people who willingly follow the dictates of Big Brother, inevitably rat on the deviations of their friends and family members from the Socially Desirable Behavior, and live on hay and cider while their masters dined on caviar and Champagne (Yves Montand one sang "Il faut une chasuble d'or pour chanter Beni Createur. Nous en tissons, grands de l'Eglise, et nous, pauvres canuts, n'ont pas de chemises.")
However, the SSSM is surely not true, as we have learned from the work of Cosmides and Tooby, followed by a few decades of behavioral economic and psychology. Just a Marx's materialism is Hegel's idealism "stood on its head," so Cosmides and Tooby's evolutionary psychology is the SSSM stood on its head: genes are everything and culture is a palsied epiphenomenon, the instantaneous representation of the human gene pool.
However, Pinker's explanation of the remarkable decline in violence that hallmarks human prehistory and history has an explanation in which genes and culture interact in a rather balanced manner (this is called "gene-culture coevolution"). Humans have empathy and a moral sense not because these virtues are impressed upon us as blank slates, but because we evolved in such a manner that those with empathy and a moral sense had more offspring that the sociopaths, and they passed the genes that precondition empathy and morality on to their offspring. Culture is thus not an epiphenomenon that is completely subservient so social structure, but a driving force in the transformation of social structure.
The problem with Pinker's argument is that it leaves us with a sense of post hoc propter hoc. Humans became nicer in many different ways at once over the years (the Civilizing Process) and we really cannot say why it came out the way it did. I think Pinker's stress on the role of the state in reducing violence is undoubtedly correct, but why did the growth of state power not lead to the sort of totalitarian despotism that was so feared in the early twentieth century, and so hoped for by the Communists, Nazi, and Fascist states of the world? Why has cosmopolitanism led to the spread of liberating information technologies, rather than highly efficient despotic control of information by an authoritarian state?
One could answer that the human drive for freedom and dignity, a legacy from our hunter-gatherer past, accounts for the control of the means of coercion by the mass of citizens (note that in a fully efficient coercive state, there is no violence at all--although there might be some ineluctable "reeducation")? I think the answer probably lies in the nature technology.
The egalitarian nature of simple hunter-gatherer societies was predicated on the existence of lethal weapons, making it impossible, in an age before property, for an individual to control the group through force, because anyone can kill anyone else, catching him by surprise, at low persona cost. With the advent of sedentary and agricultural communities, private property permitted a ruling class to control the masses by force, and primitive egalitarianism was completely eclipsed in the human world. Only with the development of the handgun and bored rifle in the eighteenth and later centuries prevented the hegemony of a ruling class of mounted warriors. The age of democracy was at the same time the age of foot soldiers and the infantry-based army.
In thinking about Pinker's argument, I am led to think that he understates the role of information technology in the decline of violence. When my Jewish ancestors were murdered in Polish pogroms, their tormenters were told that Jews sacrificed Christians on their Holy Days, and their unleavened bread was an admixture of wheat and Christian blood. My mother-in-law recounted to me the following story. As a young bride, she took the bus every Saturday to visit her husband where he was stationed. After a couple of weeks, she became friendly with another young bride in the same situation, and thereafter they sat together passing the time talking during the trip. One day my mother-in-law mention that she was Jewish. Her friend, completely horrified, pushed her away in disgust, and asked her where her horns were, which her priest had assured her all Jewish women had under the kerchiefs. My point is that now you just can't get away with manipulating people into believing such falsehoods because there is no power so despotic as to be able to shields its people from the truth.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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About this item
“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 Enlightenment Now and The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial 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 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, programs, 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.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Top reviews from the United States
Herbert Gintis5.0 out of 5 stars
A Modern-day Classic
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2011
PATRICIA LAWSON5.0 out of 5 stars
Better off than we thought we were
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2014
In this book, Pinker stands conventional wisdom on its head, presenting the very welcome if counter-intuitive notion that the world is actually becoming a more peaceful place. Using statistics, he convinces us that, overall, violence is decreasing among mankind. If we're concerned about the Central African Republic and Mali, he reassures us that western Europe (and even the U.S) are at all-time lows in homicide rates. If we fear nuclear annihilation, he reassures us that the unique peace that broke out after WWII in Europe shows no signs of disintegrating. (Of course, the book came out before certain recent activities in the Crimea.) If we are perturbed by a constant diet of violence in TV shows, movies and video games, he shows us that, in the developed world, the imagination is where violence is increasingly sequestered.
He uses statistics to demonstrate that, at least compared to the bad old days, when the rate of deaths by homicide, primarily through raiding warfare, averaged around 15% across primitive hunter-gatherer societies, even the extreme mass murders of the 20th century only eliminated 1% of the (admittedly much larger) population. But he also shows us how violence has changed qualitatively from pre-Enlightment societies.
Even in the societies we consider to constitute the roots of our civilization, ancient Greece and Israel, violence was endemic. He points out the bloodymindedness of the Old Testament:
"With a designated list of other enemies (Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites), the genocide has to be total: `Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them . . . as the Lord thy God has commanded thee."15
Ranging over the hunter-gatherer past, through the Middle Ages and approaching fairly modern times, mutilation of the enemy, murder of enemy infants, routine rape, routine torture of prisoners, as well as such cruel and unusual punishments as drawing and quartering, flogging and chopping off of hands were the norm across many societies. Public executions for the amusement and instruction of the populace were also common. The list of man's inhumanity to man and the visceral pleasure he took in it is revolting to read. Fortunately we seem to have become much more squeamish. These practices have been outlawed in the western world today. Not only that, in the West, at least, we seem to be approaching zero tolerance for violence. Consider war deaths. Hannibal left more than 50,000 Roman dead on the battlefield of Cannae, and in the Civil War nearly 8,000 were killed in the Battle of Gettysburg alone. But in the early part of the 21st century, the fact that 4,486 American soldiers lost their lives in Iraq over a period of years became a cause celebre.
The first changes to our brutality seem to have come with Christianity's revolutionary concept of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. (A simple little rule that it is still extremely hard to practice on a daily basis.) Pinker points out, however, that the religion centers on a bizarre cult of sacrifice and crucifixion, as well as that millions have died in the name of Christianity, most notably in the Crusades, the Inquisition and the European Religious Wars of the 17th century. The development of feudal polities into states, which were able to monopolize violence and apply it judiciously, was another critical development. But a key change was the invention of the printing press in the late 15th century, which enabled the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment, with their sense of the basic equality of all human beings. Pinker points out that the consequent rise of literature and its ability to put one in the mind of another individual has done a tremendous amount to free us from parochial, prejudicial values. Pinker also gives major credit to commerce and its ability to foster win-win transactions among individuals, groups and states.
Evolutionary biology, psychology, neuro-physiology, you name it. Pinker leaves no stone unturned in the discussion of our taming. But for the recent new consciousness of the unacceptability of aggression, he gives credit to the rights' revolutions of the past few decades: civil rights, womens' rights, gay rights and animals rights. Although he comes down hard on the sixties as an era of violence (and, indeed, crime rates soared then) he does not seem to acknowledge that the very loosening of the stranglehold of authoritarian and conservative religion on society characteristic of that era was what allowed individual rights to come to the fore.
Perhaps paramount among these developments was women's rights. Pinker points out that it is only with the increasing participation of women in the public realm that the peace and other rights' movements came into their own. After all, the theme that violence is primarily a male phenomenon recurs throughout the pages of the book. Pinker also attributes our civilizing to the spread of abstract reasoning, a newfound ability to be more dispassionate, which is a function of widespread education. Pinker touches on the paradox of human morality, which can lead us to condemn the values of the "other", but can also cause us to stand up and insist on their right to vote, not to be enslaved, and to equal opportunity.
I, for one, am relieved to be disabused of the notion of the noble savage. Not that contemporary existence is by any means the last word in lifestyles. There are skills, lore, and herbal practices from tribes embedded in their natural environments (as well as other past societies) that can be useful to us today. Indeed, many of today's benign child-raising practices seem to have come from both the European colonialists and contemporary anthropologists' observation of the extended nurturing (holding, carrying, and long periods of breast-feeding) and minimal discipline of children in primitive societies.
And although Pinker touts the obvious advantages of modern existence, with its lower rates of death in childbirth, its miraculous medical practice, its lengthening of the human lifespan, as well as modern agriculture and its saving of brute human labor, he does not address any of the downsides--the abuse of pharmaceuticals, which leach into our environment, the geometric explosion of population as a consequence of modern agriculture and modern medicine (with its accompany squandering of resources), let alone the potential devastation of climate change. Now that we are empowered to make rational decisions to minimize killing each other, isn't it time to take that rational faculty and use it to curb and shape our society for the long-term survival of the entire human race?
That being said, I wouldn't have missed this book for the world. It's vastly reassuring on the subject of the perfectibility of human nature. It's also a gold-mine for the intellectually curious, providing a considered review of the literature on violence in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, evolutionary biology and brain science. In spite of its length, it was a book I did not want to end, and I was grateful to the author that he addressed so many questions in such a thorough and satisfying manner. Thank you, Steven Pinker.
He uses statistics to demonstrate that, at least compared to the bad old days, when the rate of deaths by homicide, primarily through raiding warfare, averaged around 15% across primitive hunter-gatherer societies, even the extreme mass murders of the 20th century only eliminated 1% of the (admittedly much larger) population. But he also shows us how violence has changed qualitatively from pre-Enlightment societies.
Even in the societies we consider to constitute the roots of our civilization, ancient Greece and Israel, violence was endemic. He points out the bloodymindedness of the Old Testament:
"With a designated list of other enemies (Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites), the genocide has to be total: `Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them . . . as the Lord thy God has commanded thee."15
Ranging over the hunter-gatherer past, through the Middle Ages and approaching fairly modern times, mutilation of the enemy, murder of enemy infants, routine rape, routine torture of prisoners, as well as such cruel and unusual punishments as drawing and quartering, flogging and chopping off of hands were the norm across many societies. Public executions for the amusement and instruction of the populace were also common. The list of man's inhumanity to man and the visceral pleasure he took in it is revolting to read. Fortunately we seem to have become much more squeamish. These practices have been outlawed in the western world today. Not only that, in the West, at least, we seem to be approaching zero tolerance for violence. Consider war deaths. Hannibal left more than 50,000 Roman dead on the battlefield of Cannae, and in the Civil War nearly 8,000 were killed in the Battle of Gettysburg alone. But in the early part of the 21st century, the fact that 4,486 American soldiers lost their lives in Iraq over a period of years became a cause celebre.
The first changes to our brutality seem to have come with Christianity's revolutionary concept of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. (A simple little rule that it is still extremely hard to practice on a daily basis.) Pinker points out, however, that the religion centers on a bizarre cult of sacrifice and crucifixion, as well as that millions have died in the name of Christianity, most notably in the Crusades, the Inquisition and the European Religious Wars of the 17th century. The development of feudal polities into states, which were able to monopolize violence and apply it judiciously, was another critical development. But a key change was the invention of the printing press in the late 15th century, which enabled the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment, with their sense of the basic equality of all human beings. Pinker points out that the consequent rise of literature and its ability to put one in the mind of another individual has done a tremendous amount to free us from parochial, prejudicial values. Pinker also gives major credit to commerce and its ability to foster win-win transactions among individuals, groups and states.
Evolutionary biology, psychology, neuro-physiology, you name it. Pinker leaves no stone unturned in the discussion of our taming. But for the recent new consciousness of the unacceptability of aggression, he gives credit to the rights' revolutions of the past few decades: civil rights, womens' rights, gay rights and animals rights. Although he comes down hard on the sixties as an era of violence (and, indeed, crime rates soared then) he does not seem to acknowledge that the very loosening of the stranglehold of authoritarian and conservative religion on society characteristic of that era was what allowed individual rights to come to the fore.
Perhaps paramount among these developments was women's rights. Pinker points out that it is only with the increasing participation of women in the public realm that the peace and other rights' movements came into their own. After all, the theme that violence is primarily a male phenomenon recurs throughout the pages of the book. Pinker also attributes our civilizing to the spread of abstract reasoning, a newfound ability to be more dispassionate, which is a function of widespread education. Pinker touches on the paradox of human morality, which can lead us to condemn the values of the "other", but can also cause us to stand up and insist on their right to vote, not to be enslaved, and to equal opportunity.
I, for one, am relieved to be disabused of the notion of the noble savage. Not that contemporary existence is by any means the last word in lifestyles. There are skills, lore, and herbal practices from tribes embedded in their natural environments (as well as other past societies) that can be useful to us today. Indeed, many of today's benign child-raising practices seem to have come from both the European colonialists and contemporary anthropologists' observation of the extended nurturing (holding, carrying, and long periods of breast-feeding) and minimal discipline of children in primitive societies.
And although Pinker touts the obvious advantages of modern existence, with its lower rates of death in childbirth, its miraculous medical practice, its lengthening of the human lifespan, as well as modern agriculture and its saving of brute human labor, he does not address any of the downsides--the abuse of pharmaceuticals, which leach into our environment, the geometric explosion of population as a consequence of modern agriculture and modern medicine (with its accompany squandering of resources), let alone the potential devastation of climate change. Now that we are empowered to make rational decisions to minimize killing each other, isn't it time to take that rational faculty and use it to curb and shape our society for the long-term survival of the entire human race?
That being said, I wouldn't have missed this book for the world. It's vastly reassuring on the subject of the perfectibility of human nature. It's also a gold-mine for the intellectually curious, providing a considered review of the literature on violence in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, evolutionary biology and brain science. In spite of its length, it was a book I did not want to end, and I was grateful to the author that he addressed so many questions in such a thorough and satisfying manner. Thank you, Steven Pinker.