Review » The Better Angels Of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Full Title: The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Author: Steven Pinker
Year: 2011
Genre: Science, History, Violence, Psychology
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3
Wikipedia page
Author’s Wikipedia page

Summary

Bill Gates called this book “one of the most important books... not just this year, but ever” and “the best book I’d read in a decade” (only to be eclipsed six years later by another Pinker book). A member of the distinguished National Academy of Sciences, author Steven Pinker is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals — and he brings that weight to bear in this 700-page book.

Taking its title from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, The Better Angels Of Our Nature attempts to discover (as the subtitle says) why violence is declining in the world. Before getting there, Pinker must first convince his reader that violence is actually declining — which takes up a massive early chunk of the book. Surveys consistently show that most people think the world is more violent and/or dangerous now than it’s ever been. (I was raised in churches where preachers regularly referred to the increasing chaos in the world as a sign of the End Times. No one attempted to correct them.) Pinker amasses an impressive army of statistics on a great many types of violence — including war, homicide, genocide, capital punishment, just to name a few — and shows that each has been steadily declining throughout modern history.

“Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times, especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.”
— pg. xxii

Once the reader is thoroughly convinced that the world is actually more peaceful today than it once was, Pinker turns to explanation. First he explores why we were violent in the first place and why some of us still tend to violence; then he begins to explain the titular “angels” — the characteristics of humanity that are pushing us toward a more peaceful world.

So the book covers six trends, the overlapping transitions from violence to non-violence throughout human existence:

the pacification process
the civilizing process
the humanitarian revolution
the Long Peace
the New Peace
the rights revolutions

The five inner demons (causes of violence) — each differing in their environmental triggers, internal logic, neurological basis, and social distribution — are:

predatory/instrumental violence
dominance
revenge
sadism
ideology

The four better angels — the forces acting on individuals and collective humanity to reduce violence — are:

empathy
self-control
moral sense
reason

What I Liked Least About It

There is very little to dislike about this book. Once or twice, I felt Pinker was mildly dismissive, such as when he laughs off dodgeball bans as “overshoooting” the target of reducing violence against children (pg. 379-381). Dismissing it as “political correctness”, because he enjoyed dodgeball as a child, Pinker ignores that the game was used to bully and injure weaker children for generations, all while encouraging the violence of the stronger, bigger children.

In the same chapter, Pinker worries that anti-violence advocates are “propelled by an escalating sensitivity to new forms of harm” so that “they erase their own tracks and leave us amnesic about their successes.” This looks like he wants to focus more on past successes than on current problems, which an activist cannot do. Obviously, an activist must talk about the problems that still remain. For Pinker’s purposes, it makes sense to remember that today’s violence is less than history’s violence. But I don’t think he made a convincing case for leaving the lesser problems alone. To me, it seems rather obvious that once the most egregious errors are corrected it’s time to focus on smaller ones — whether you’re editing a term paper or convincing humans to kill fewer of each other.

What I Liked Most About It

I loved almost all of this book. The sheer mass of statistics would bore almost anyone if simply presented as lists of numbers, dates, and names of studies — but Pinker weaves them into the narrative skillfully, using charts when helpful and often explaining at length why certain numbers are more helpful than others. He tells us where the numbers came from and how the charts were derived. He quotes extensively from very old documents to give the reader a taste for what was considered acceptable violence many years ago, and then quickly moves forward through today.

The sheer mass of information here is awe-inspiring, but it doesn’t read like a textbook. It moves swiftly for the most part.

Another thing to love about The Better Angels Of Our Nature is the sheer dependence on data — evidence. This is not just an intellectual performing thought experiments and then trying to convince us of his conclusions. In each case where he presents data, he presents the opposing side, data that casts doubt, and attempts to falsify (prove wrong) the hypothesis. This is the mark of a careful, skeptical scientist who is more interested in getting to the truth than in selling books.

Perhaps the best thing about the book is the sheer optimism that the reader can’t help but feel after the convincing mass of data shows that the world is better now than ever before. In case this feeling fades, Pinker is sure to remind the reader once in a while throughout the book of the types of violence that were once common but are now abhorred worldwide — they still occur in isolated (though often widely publicized) incidents, but are now notable for their rarity rather than their ubiquity. These include public executions, death penalties for minor offenses, infanticide, sanctioned torture over religious beliefs, vigilante “justice”, capture of slaves after military conquests, severe beatings of children as “instruction” or “discipline”, mass killing of civilians during war, and so on. Today, news media reports each time one of these occurs; in the past they were so common that few people thought twice about it.

And it’s trite, but I noticed that Pinker uses the Oxford comma, cutting against a modern trend to leave it out. Not every reader will be so petty, but I can enjoy a book more when the Oxford comma is used.

What He Missed

While discussing the causes and cures for violence, I think Pinker missed a few things. Perhaps in the midst of all his data, he couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

For example, when Pinker discusses the root causes of violence in humans — what he metaphorically calls our “inner demons” — I think he left out an important one. He lists psychological, physiological, and ideological roots of our violence, but in my experience many people who act violently were taught to do so — or the converse, no one ever taught them to not do it. Many humans who grow up to be violent came from violent households — adults who abuse their spouses often turn out to have been abused as children, or at least witnessed abuse as children. (To be fair, Pinker does mention education and instruction in other places in the book as to how they relate to violence; it just wasn’t listed as one of the causes, which felt like an oversight.)

When he turns to the solutions — the factors that have likely caused the decrease in violence, I think he missed a couple more things.

For one, instruction (again). Just as violent people tend to be taught it, it looks to me like non-violent people are taught — either by overt instruction or prominent examples — to be more peaceful. As a pacifist, I’m teaching my children to be pacifists as well — to search out solutions to personal problems that don’t involve hitting, kicking, or biting. Just as my parents taught me.

Another cause that came to mind is the desire for generational improvement. (If there’s a scientific or psychological term for this, I don’t know of it.) Each generation of parents, while often mentioning “It was harder in my day” to our children, regularly works to ensure that life is easier for the next generation. We aim for better outcomes in education, health, crime, wealth, and so on. Like almost all parents, I want my children to go further in school than I did, suffer less hardship than I did, be healthier than I was/am, eat better, do more good, etc. There has to be some cumulative effect when so many parents have had this same goal for so long.

Another cause I wondered about, when it comes to peace around the globe — and less crime on our streets: greed. I know that greed/profit motives are often listed as the opposite — a cause of violence — but military contractors and weapons manufacturers are only a thin slice of the world’s wealthiest corporations and individuals. Most captains of industry — the wealthiest people in the world — do not profit from war or other types of violence. They’re profiting from peace and progress. It is well-documented that many of the world’s wealthiest people lost enormous amounts of capital/wealth during the two world wars in the 20th Century; only a few profited from it. Since those very same people drive policy and have a vested interest in thousands of for-profit corporations around the globe, it stands to reason that many of them would regularly advocate for anything that decreases violence and instability. Even military contractors and weapons manufacturers profit from the sales of weapons, but not from the use of the weapons. But here I’m thinking of the vast majority of companies that aren’t involved in the making or sales of weapons. Restaurant chains like McDonald’s, retail stores like Target or Costco, online sales giants, auto makers, house builders, real estate corporations, home improvement stores like The Home Depot, soft drink makers, computer and smartphone companies, etc. All of these stand to gain from peace and prosperity — the products move off the shelves faster in countries at peace, where the economy is geared toward consumption rather than destruction. Also, if few or no nations are at war, there are more markets for these companies to infiltrate and expand. They also do better in cities and suburbs with low crime rates and high salaries (two stats which are often correlated).

Please note: it’s possible Pinker considered all of these and discarded them. Perhaps he couldn’t find evidence in the form of studies, surveys, or other data. Or perhaps he did find data and it showed no correlation so he passed on mentioning it. Here, I am not claiming to know more than Pinker or have a higher IQ; I doubt both very strongly. The causes he does mention are very well supported and very well fleshed out. I only mention the above because they came to mind as I read the book.

Criticisms

(Added 2018.03.14)

I am aware of several high-profile criticisms of Better Angels. I don’t think any of them take away from the primary themes of Pinker’s book.

For example, British philosopher John Gray has taken issue with Pinker’s elevation of “Enlightenment values”: “these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed”. He backs this with quotations showing that several Enlightenment writers were devoutly racist. This approach ignores that Pinker easily acknowledges the flaws in past humans and it ignores that this is in fact the whole point of the book: that humans are better today than they used to be. Gray sets up other straw men and knocks them down, including the criticism that Pinker’s book relies heavily on statistics from western, industrialized nations — ignoring that Pinker acknowledged this and in fact explained it: there is simply more data available from these areas, and from longer periods of time. Gray accuses Pinker of focusing only on “deaths on the battlefield” and points to other types of violence that are arguably a “greater evil”. This makes me think Gray hasn’t actually read the book; there are hundreds of pages devoted to violence other than battlefield deaths. In this case, every single criticism leveled by Gray is easily refuted.

There is a twitter thread by someone named “Mango Jay”, who claims to be working on a PhD, that claims Pinker “misrepresents rape stats” and that this alone discredits the entire work. She takes issue with a line in “The Rights Revolutions” chapter: “rape is... often overreported”, pretending that the rest of the sentence doesn’t exist:

“The facts of rape are elusive, because rape is notoriously underreported, and at the same time often overreported (as in the highly publicized but ultimately disproven 2006 accusations against three Duke University lacrosse players).”

Jay goes on to make several notable points: that Pinker cites as a source two writers from a conservative think tank who take issue with standard definitions of rape and argue that a bunch of college rape victims “probably participated voluntarily” and only later regrets sex and decides to call it “rape”. Pinker could have done better on this point, in my opinion. However, I don’t think it diminishes in any way the point being made in this paragraph, which is that rape numbers are difficult to quantify scientifically, because the data itself is known to be flawed. Further, this criticism doesn’t diminish the overall point of the section in Better Angels, which is that we as a society tend to treat rape better than we used to. We now (finally) prosecute spousal rape, for example, and there are currently active movements in the U.S. and other countries advocating for (finally) banning the practice of allowing adult men to marry underage girls. And of course, none of Jay’s criticism here is relevant to the entire point of the book, which is that violence overall is declining, and why.

Skeptical writer Rebecca Watson writes on SkepChick that “Steven Pinker is wrong, again”, and cites a handful of writers who have quibbled with Pinker on a few statistical points, but the short blog entry goes nowhere toward actually showing that Pinker is wrong overall.

Each of these critics (and most of the others I could find) write with a tone that betrays an intense dislike of Pinker, as if they know him personally — and maybe they do; I really don’t know. But none of them actually mounts a coherent argument that disables any of Pinker’s primary points.

Conclusion

I debated with myself over whether to extensively quote from the book in this review; I dog-eared dozens of pages as I read, anticipating that I would. While several quotations would stand on their own, many would be weakened by removing the context, so I decided not to post a series of quotations.

The book is massive, a fact not lost on Pinker, who explains in the first sentence of the preface: “This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.” And the final sentence of the last chapter: “For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.”

Much of the book was surprising, especially the opening chapters that prove today’s world is less violent. Like most other consumers of news, I admit I have fallen prey to the “it’s worse now than ever before” mantra on occasion. I was happy to be proven wrong. One other thing that suprised me was to learn of empirical evidence that humans are getting smarter:

“In the early 1980s the philosopher James Flynn had a Eureka! moment when he noticed that the companies that sell IQ tests periodically renorm the scores... The average scores on the tests had been creepingup for decades... Later generations, given the same set of questions as earlier ones, got more of them correct... The implications are stunning. An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries... A typical person of 1910, if time-transported to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation.”

— pg. 650-651

I would recommend this to any adult reader.