The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (edition 2011)

Steven Pinker’s book hides its evil message well. You have to read the second-to-last chapter in this huge book to drill down to Pinker’s key message: There is less violence because humans are more intelligent now. The world should be ruled by the best and the brightest (of Harvard), the philosopher kings, the Elois, the alphas, keeping the Morlocks, the great unwashed people from the levers of power. Karl Popper fought against this totalitarian worldview in his great work The Open Society and Its Enemies. Pinker effectively allies himself with the open society’s enemies, good servant of the plutocracy that he is as are so many of his colleagues at Harvard, always defending the privileges of the few against the demands of the poor, the sick and the tired.

As Pinker’s real message is as unpalatable as many other of Harvard’s claims, he has to repackage it, hide his ugly views by presenting the great Norbert Elias’ civilization process and amassing a huge amount of dubious statistics. Pinker is certainly right that the level of violence in the Western world has declined, although this statistic relies on the absence of Black Swan events. The huge killers of the 20th century that are the drivers behind Pinker’s downward trend were one of a kind events (WWI, WWII/Holocaust, Stalin, Mao). A nuclear bomb would obliterate Pinker’s trend.

Pinker is also wrong in attributing the decline in violence to the individual. He neglects the influence of Leviathan: Good government both protects the weak and offers non-violent means of conflict resolution. This also explains what Pinker cannot explain (apart a crude cultural origin honor and hidden in it racial explanation): Violence in the ghettoes is so much larger in the United States because their inhabitants do not have access to governmental conflict resolution mechanisms. Pinker also runs into the trouble of not being able to explain why the best nation of the world (“USA! USA! USA!”) is actually much more violent than the civilized world (Pinker doesn’t state it explicitly but the ideas of The Bell Curve are not very distant in his idea of dumb people creating more violence.).

Naturally, Pinker also ignores the harm caused by non-violent actions: The Johnstown Flood of 1889 was caused because the fat cats of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club failed to pay for the maintenance of the dam. Likewise, the poor of New Orleans suffered because the levies were not properly maintained. In Pinker’s view, these actions would not count (as long as they are not performed by Communists). Likewise, people dying in famines isn’t violence but force majeure. They could have chosen to be born to different parents (or, according to the Harvard educated philosopher Matthew Yglesias, they don’t value life as much).

"The better angels of our nature" is a piece of ideology rather than science. The origin of this book, in all likelihood, was Pinker's shock about the (on-going) American descent into the darkness of torture and murder. Pinker's belief in a steady progress of prosperity was shaken. In this book, he has assembled a large number of factoids to reassure his belief that this blip in violence is an aberration in the greater picture of diminishing violence. The montage results in much "truthiness" and will fool many (“mission accomplished”). Those with the stamina to read also the second to final chapter will see Pinker finally drop the masquerade: Violence is committed by stupid people. Education and genetic improvement will create a brave new world led by the best and the brightest. That exactly those people, many of them Harvard educated, have caused incredible misery and harm in the world escapes Pinker's perception. Then again, the book's purpose was re-assurance not truth. ( )

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. ( )

Do you know what hemoclysm is? Or, what the difference between genocide, democide and policide is? If you don’t, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the good news is that they are all on the decline. Violence is on the decline on the whole, actually.

It shouldn’t come as such a surprise because when you think of it we do live in a much more civilized time than ever before. Yet, it doesn’t feel that way every time we hear about an insane idiot killing schoolchildren or of other awful atrocities perpetrated somewhere in the world, so it’s nice to have it supported with numbers. Violence is on the decline across the board when numbers of crimes are calculated relative to the populations in which they occur.

Regardless of its uplifting thesis, it is a difficult book to read. It is oppressive from time to time with all the minute analysis of violence and its research overkill. I felt oppressed by the amount of violence described and by all the ways people have caused harm to other people. But, it’s a wonderfully argued book, and Pinker cannot be accused of not having given enough proof to support his theses. It’s that sometimes it just feels there is too much of it.

I loved the vindication of humanism, rationalism, democracy, feminism, human and animal rights, and old and boring Hobbesian political philosophy. It really is a superb book, but you don't know how glad I was when I finally finished it. It may be his best book so far though, and I thought nothing was going to beat Blank Slate. ( )

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. ( )

I have recently learned about some stunning statistical anomalies and misinterpretations in here which I had shamefully missed. A simple understanding of Chinese history in the 20th century already seems to be a profound stumbling block for this hypothesis. The jury is out. Further deliberation continues.

The psychologist, Steven Pinker, provides a multi-disciplinary argument for the answer to his leading question, "Why has violence declined?" He documents historical trends away from a wide variety of forms of violence -- we no longer see live involuntary sacrifices of animals, children and virgins, slavery and war are marginalized. He attributes this decline to a decrease in the virulence of our demons--revenge, sadism, and ideological fanaticism. And finally, Pinker documents the increase of Enlightenment humanism-- morality, empathy, and reason.

He concludes that humans are good, and getting even better because we are getting smarter.

His data is straightforward and not in dispute. The vast majority of humans are better off than ever. Much of the "noise" we hear to the contrary is to lure eyeballs and ears to media trying to hype products or monetize hits. The tyrants and their media empires still exist, and may pose serious threats, but the scale is moderated down from the total annihilations and enslavements of the past. Negative reports have more to do with attention-getting and marketing than reality.

Of course, exceptions prove rules. There are bitter mullahs and plotting plutocrats who still convince gullible minions to sacrifice themselves to advance their evil agendas. But Osama bin Laden and Karl Rove/Koch Brothers keep complaining of the lack of quality and skill in the idiots who make themselves available to evil schemes. After all, the "underwear bomber", and the Lyin' Ryan, did not have admirable character. They wasted billions to accomplish nothing.

The men and women of ability do stand in vivid contrast to those devoted to twisting that "moral arc" into a pretzel. We are proud of Schweitzer, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Gates and Buffets. Those who fight them make us queasy and we cling to our wallets. Liberals really are "winning", because of the quality of people who rise to do good. Idiots do tend to empty the gene pool.

An amazing blend of evolutionary psychology, sociology, neuroscience, statistics, and history, Professor Pinker’s book takes the reader on a tour of our violent past from pre-history nomadic raids up to the ethnic cleansings of today. His point: as a species we have become progressively less violent. Fewer murders and wars, fewer deadly quarrels, fewer rapes, less cruelty and abuse all are carefully documented in this fine, well-written book.
But why has violence declined? After considering our brain structures and the results of numerous psychology experiments (often humorously recounted), Pinker settles on five key developments: the government as Leviathan, the influence of “gentle commerce”, feminization of culture—that is, taking the interests and welfare of women seriously--, our ability to create an expanding circle of empathy, and “the escalator of reason”.
A large, heavy book, it is lightened somewhat by the author’s quick wit and smooth style. ( )

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 surprising, but this is a long book. A dauntingly long book. And I can't help but wonder if Mr. Pinker should have condensed his point to half as many pages because his overall message is important, and certainly some brevity would have made Better Angles a more accessible read. ( )

This is an important, fascinating, and -- wonder of wonders -- hopeful book that readers interested in our future as a species should take the time to read. And it does take time. Pinker wanders through many fields (archaeology, primatology, history, evolutionary biology, ethics, and on and on) to develop and support his premise: violence among human beings has fallen very sharply, not just over the long run, but in the short run too. I found most (though not all) of the arguments and evidence he cites compelling, though I do want to check out the footnotes to get a clearer sense of his methodology (I listened to the book: have ordered hard copy). One other reviewer referred to Peter Singer's excellent review in the New York Times, which gives a much better impression and evaluation of the book than I can do. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-b...). To use the short form, however, I found this book engrossing, reasonable, and -- so rare in this day and age -- encouraging. ( )

If you can stand evolutionary psychology, this is a very interesting book arguing that violence, while still a huge problem, has declined substantially across many categories of behaviors, from wars to intimate violence to animal cruelty. Pinker argues that literacy and rationality have contributed to the decline: both lead us to put ourselves in other people’s positions, and make it harder for us to explain why I should be able to hurt you just because I am me and you are not. He also suggests that cleanliness/health may have something to do with it too: it’s very easy to make the fundamental attribution error of concluding that people who live in bad conditions are therefore bad. I wish I could write the essay about this book’s perspective on human nature versus that of David Graeber’s Debt, because Pinker seems to believe that money/market capitalism is the natural form of mutually beneficial exchange, when Graeber makes a strong case that reciprocal indebtedness without measurement is more firmly rooted in human history. ( )

couldnt finish too technical ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Intense and convincing. ( )

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! ( )

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. ( )

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.) ( )

See peter singer's review in nyt