Steven Pinker

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 show more 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. show less

A lot of reviews of this book I’ve read set up a false dichotomy that you must love it or hate it, swallow it whole without argument or reject it in its entirety. I think the reality is somewhere in between. Yes, some of Pinker’s arguments are flawed (I rely on better-informed intellectuals’ fact-checking for this assertion). Yes, he tends to hyperbolize and cherry-pick, particularly when finding fault with today’s progressives. But I tend to agree with him that problems are show more solvable, if we identify the problem and set our will to solving it. Or at least I think catastrophizing our problems is not going to solve them, and approaching them as potentially solvable is the only rational, workable position to take. And I hope he’s right about nationalism and populism. show less

Let me save you a huge amount of condescension and repetition:
Mr Pinker is a sort of neo-Hobbesian whose entire argument hinges on 2 concepts:
1) Per-capita/percentage (he frequently alternates between percentage and percapita) death is markedly less under a 'leviathan' model where a centralized State controls the absolute authority to mete out punishments.
2) Any exceptions to this rule are to be elaborately explained away, but essentially comes down to claiming individuals or groups involved show more are somehow 'stateless'.

I happen to largely agree with point 1, yet still can't stand the methods and tap-dancing he uses to arrive at it.

Onto the book itself:
Steven Pinker wanders from point to point like a drunken squirrel. He believes that the plural of 'anecdote' is 'data', and that using wildly inaccurate statistical samples and methods is perfectly fine as long as they support his underlying world view. He cherry-picks quotes, data, and models, and fails to apply basic scientific methods to the data. Instead, he applies confirmation bias to it.
The writing is condescending, dull, full of wandering and side-tracking and virtually guaranteed to offend as many people as possible - even people like me who actually *agree* with most of his point.

Hiding casual ethnocentrism like his claim that England is the source of all modern civilization behind vague anecdotes and stories (then excusing away the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh, British Imperialism, and anything that might inconveniently disprove his assertion) all the while ignoring entirely the Scandinavians, all of Asia, and even the Middle East is just plain foolish.

I find it amusing at best that he uses the *bible* as his source for 'ancient barbarism', somehow deciding that works of fiction are a reliable source for a society. By that same yardstick, Greeks and Romans would have engaged in massive amounts of incest (since their mythology has so much of it), and modern Westerners would be the most violent vigilante culture in history (since our videogames, books, and films revolve largely around one or two people killing scores in some form of 'against the system' narrative)

Just avoid this pile of pulp. He may claim to be a 'Cognitive Scientist', but he seems to have long since fallen into the trap of soft science - "if you can't dazzle them with data, baffle them with bullshit". show less

Stephen Pinker has written two-thirds of a classic.

What do I mean? Pinker’s goal here is to demolish three myths springing from modernists’ fundamental misunderstanding of human nature: that we are born tabula rasa, and are wholly socially-constructed into who and what we are (i.e. the eponymous blank slate); that there exist, or have existed ‘pure’ societies that live in blissful harmony, and in balance with Nature (i.e. the Noble Savage); and that we possess some quality of show more consciousness – call it soul, perhaps – that makes us special (i.e. the Ghost in the Machine).

Pinker succeeds admirably in demonstrating the implausibility, indeed outright ridiculousness, of the myths of the blank slate and noble savage. He also (quite bravely, given his position in American academia) follows out many of the policy implications of trying to engage in the inevitable social engineering these views inspire.

But he fails, I think, in debunking the third of his myths, i.e. the ghost in the machine. He argues for a kind of computational brain whose hardware encompasses and produces its software, i.e. what we perceive as consciousness, but I didn’t find his appeals to neuroscience here convincing.

And this leads to what is perhaps Pinker’s greatest failing: if we reject the modernist view of human nature, with what do we replace it? Yes, it’s clear enough that some significant proportion of both individual and group personality and behavior is genetically-determined, and that trying to deny this leads to unpleasant consequences. But how then do we temper and form human nature in ways that seem to run against evolutionary fitness? How do we make the kids play nice and the grown-ups be good? Here I find Pinker on thin ground. Give him credit for raising the issues – for example, why shouldn’t men engage in violence such as rape in order to spread their genes? – but take points away for his answer, which seems to boil down to an assertion that we humans can simply ban actions that we (at least most of us) believe should be banned. It’s the kind of faintly smug circular reasoning made popular by Richard Rorty and other humanist thinkers, and it’s in fact a retreat back into a socially-constructed safe haven that runs against the rest of Pinker’s arguments.

The real problem, of course, is that a conception of humanity minus a Creator and a soul will always fail to satisfy.

Still, this is an important and well-reasoned book, and is recommended. show less