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The Better Angels of Our Nature Paperback – January 1, 2012
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- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2012
- Dimensions7.76 x 5.08 x 2.46 inches
- ISBN-100141034645
- ISBN-13978-0141034645
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- Publisher : Penguin; First Edition (January 1, 2012)
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 0141034645
- ISBN-13 : 978-0141034645
- Item Weight : 1.56 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.76 x 5.08 x 2.46 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,381,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,971 in Violence in Society (Books)
- #2,468 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions
- #3,172 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions
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Steven Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind. His popular and highly praised books include The Stuff of Thought, The Blank Slate, Words and Rules, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. The recipient of several major awards for his teaching, books, and scientific research, Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He also writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and other magazines.
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This is a marvelously detailed book with vast numbers of details about the decline of violence over the past centuries. For someone who wants to try to understand why violence occurs among humans, at any level from genocide to suicide, this volume is a phenomenal place to start. The dozens and dozens of graphs themselves are worth the price of admission. But, expect to be overwhelmed with detail, much of it very speculative and largely irrelevant, so overwhelmed that no clear themes will ever become apparent. You will leave this book vastly better informed but overloaded with information and utterly confused. Pinker acknowledges his debt to Peter Singer, who in his book," The Expanding Circle, advanced a theory of moral progress in which human beings were endowed by natural selection with a kernel of empathy toward kin and allies, and have gradually extended it to wider and wider circles of living things, from family and village to clan, tribe, nation, species, and all of sentient life. The book you are reading owes much to this insight." However this debt is largely lost in the mass of many irrelevant details that follow.
After reflecting on the book for a while, as both a psychologist and a historian, and a student of genocide, I am both extremely impressed by the incredible depth of detail offered in this volume across a huge range of relevant domains, and quite annoyed at the absence of synthesis, as if he researched any topic to great depth but offered us only the results of that research in the order and sequence that he found them. Of course that is an impressive feat, and I am very grateful, but... Now that he has done this research, it would be quite pleasurable and transformative to read a much smaller volume that synthesized what he found in some accessible format; perhaps even in a magazine article.
Pinker spends much of his time deriding the notion of "empathy" and it is pretty obvious why: it offers a simple and direct explanation for the decline of violence that reduces the complexity of his book enormously. It would be hard for him to find a way for us to plow through his mountainous work of scholarship if things were this simple: The world was ruled by psychopaths and sadists for millions of years, but gradually the silent majority of decent, caring people found a voice through democratizing and civilizing influences of empathy and compassion, overcoming xenophobia, selfishness, and revenge, and violence has declined dramatically with the gradually broadening sense of community in (increasing order) villages, duchies, nations, and now global interdependence. Outline of story with many wonderful details to be filled in, but requiring much less voluminous discussion. Any theoretician needs to be aware of how seductive complexity is, and try to reduce it. Occam's razor needs much sharpening here.
To get another frustration off my chest, that constantly irritated me throughout the book: it is much too flippant. Take the quote above about a farmer castrating a horse. Surely we did not need to be affronted by this horrible image. What purpose did it possibly serve? It was not funny. As if Pinker was reduced to a juvenile prurience himself after being anesthetized with too much violence in his research. It seems part of the same issue: he provides flippant generalizations much too easily about many of the "facts" in this book, without the kind of reserve and care to provide alternative hypotheses that is the hallmark of careful science, at the admitted cost of dullness and impartiality. Even his criticism of empathy suffers from over generalization. For empathy he puts up roadblocks that he nowhere else raises for other processes. He portrays the understanding of empathy as ambiguous ("The problem with building a better world through empathy, in the sense of contagion, mimicry, vicarious emotion, or mirror neurons, is that it cannot be counted on to trigger the kind of empathy we want, namely sympathetic concern for others' well-being.") as if there were no ambiguity about what "civilizing" means! He also shoots down "mirror neurons" as a strawman for empathy; yet, there is a vast literature on "empathy" that requires no help from the pop psych of mirror neurons, or the equally pop psych of "rage" circuits. Pinker dabbles with neuroscience at best, and exploits its seemingly concrete explanations to a vast and unwarranted degree.
The most serious frustration with the volume is the discrepancy between its title and content: the better Angels of our nature are largely ignored in favor of the devils: murder, suicide, rape, genocide, hatred, revenge, dominance, torture, and aggression of all kinds. The mystery of religion is barely acknowledged. There is all too little talk of love, compassion, empathy, and community; yet, repeatedly he acknowledges these are equally important and essential to the hypotheses he does raise about the decline of violence. So, this book is really about violence, and not about the forces that restrain it and have created its decline. In that sense, it is quite disappointing. For instance, the discussion of dominance and revenge could just as easily have been about trust, forgiveness and contrition, especially in the section on the prisoner's dilemma, which has been used extensively for theorizing and extrapolating to real life cooperation and conflict. Of course, there should be many caveats: the simplistic domain of a prisoner's dilemma game is far removed from the complexities of real life. Life is not so simple that we can begin to understand it with primitive abstractions!
Another theme that I found annoying was the insistence on a final solution of the issues of decline in violence with an appeal to evolutionary forces that are as ideal and free of imperfection as any deity; which of course evolution is not: it leads to many blind alleys and dead ends (Mistakes!). I find the arguments about genes and evolution as sources of explanation for human cognition and emotion very unsatisfying. We have no understanding of how genes translate into human cognitive structures or emotions (or drives and instincts, to bring up some ancient and much ridiculed abstractions). The psychology of instincts has few adherents. Yes, genes control the structure of the brain, and various brain structures are involved in cognition and emotion, but the linkages to evolution are indistinct at best. Our brains are intimately like those of apes and even all mammals in general. To then argue that human kinds of dominance and frustration and aggression have been created by evolution seems ultimately empty. All too often evolutionary explanations are as ambiguous as Freudian ones: the "facts" are not reductive and can be used to explain anything.
I find that Frans de Waal's ( The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates ) attempts to clarify the sources of empathy and social networks in the examples of these cognitive structures in chimpanzees much more enlightening. Throughout his book, Pinker denigrates this approach to "hippy" instincts in humans as unfounded in a very off - handed way. His book would have been much improved with a more serious treatment of forgiveness, empathy, caring, concern, and compassion; that de Waal's approaches empirically provide. Of course there are many other attempts to understand empathy through social psychology, neuroscience, and other social sciences. While we have no serious understanding of how "instincts" and "emotions" are expressed in genes and cognitive structures, an analysis of the role of empathy, compassion, and social relations in general would have provided a seriously strong foundation for the democratization processes of civilization that have clearly driven the decline in violence. It would have set the context for this decline in violence as the triumph of the huge "silent majority" of humanity over the thugs and antisocial ogres who have led humanity to their own selfish ends and at the cost of enormous anguish in the lives of mankind. "Psychopaths make up 1 to 3 percent of the male population, depending on whether one uses the broad definition of antisocial personality disorder, which embraces many kinds of callous troublemakers, or a narrower definition that picks out the more cunning manipulators. 80 Psychopaths are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals, and commit half the serious crimes. 81."
"Now, I have nothing against empathy," he says. The perfect sentence that reveals that he does in fact think that empathy's role in peace and cooperation is much exaggerated. However, his reasoning about this is not very clear, while his attitudes are all too clear. "But empathy today is becoming what love was in the 1960s-- a sentimental ideal, extolled in catchphrases (what makes the world go round, what the world needs now, all you need) but overrated as a reducer of violence." Calling the kettle black: the number of catch phrases about the sources of violence in this book is astronomical.
Instead of compiling empirical evidence, here is his "devastating" destruction of any believability in empathy: "When the Americans and Soviets stopped rattling nuclear sabers and stoking proxy wars, I don't think love had much to do with it, or empathy either." And yet, has he changed his mind when he says: "This chapter is about the better angels of our nature: the psychological faculties that steer us away from violence, and whose increased engagement over time can be credited for declines in violence. " Thorughout the book he argues for subtle but persistent influences of human attitudes and emotions on the grand sweep of history; yet, when it comes to empathy he derides this nuanced approach.
He seems to devalue empathy because he can find no center for empathy in the neuroscience literature, and the richest areas of mirror neurons does not correspond to the pathways. He further denigrates the value of the concept (or deconstructs it, in his unimitable semantic phrase) because it is connected to a primitive hormone, oxytocin, not the pinnacle of humanity's cortex (he derogates it with "hormonal plumbing", an unfortunate phrase. ) This seems a short sighted reason.
AT another point he says that sympathy (a kind of empathy) is not automatic, as if that weakens its effects. But of course sympathy is automatic, and beyond our control, if the conditions are right: if we have communal relations with a person; if they are in need; and if it will make us look good to help them. This is true of any drive, instinct, or emotion; so why he emphasizes if for empathy and not for dominance or revenge or other "angels", which are all affected by context and meaning (or cortical control, to capture his biases), is a mystery.
Part of the book's appeal, and its underlying weakness, is his fondness for grandiose and sweeping generalizations that are largely unfound and poorly thought out. Here's just one: "Dominance is an adaptation to anarchy, and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilizing process or in an international system regulated by agreements and norms. Anything that deflates the concept of dominance is likely to drive down the frequency of fights between individuals and wars between groups. That doesn't mean that the emotions behind dominance will go away-- they are very much a part of our biology, especially in a certain gender-- but they can be marginalized."
In contradiction to this view, a good case can be made for hierarchies in social institutions as control structures for violence to reduce its spread throughout society: one of the truly civilizing influences. Besides, what would our societies look like without hierarchies in our social institutions. They are built on them: the Prez in govt; the Pope in religious institutions; CEOs in business; down to the lowest scout troop leader. If anything these hierarchies reduce conflict, not foment it. As any ethologist will tell you, a chimp troop with a clear established hierarchy has many fewer fights then one in which a challenger upends the natural order.
So what is to be made of all these inconsistencies: I suggest they are the product of a very creative but uncontrolled mind, an unscientific one that has had its brilliant ideas go unchallenged and is unconstrained by scientific rigor and skepticism. Self criticism, autocritique as Binet called it, is the cornerstone of intelligence, and the free flow of random ideas makes for interesting reading but a frustrating intellectual experience. More synthesis, please.
One good piece of synthesis is his conceptualization of the Moralization Gap. People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous. This bookkeeping makes the two sides in an escalating fight count the number of strikes differently and weigh the inflicted harm differently as well. It makes people hold grudges and seek revenge. It would have been informative to try to explore the source of this gap: why do we do this? Of course the basis for the generalization is derived from just one excellent study that has a fundamental ambiguity: the gap is caused by discrepancies in understanding; yet the incidents by both victims and perpetrators were chosen exactly because they each saw no discrepanc ies. What incidents would have been chosen if they had been asked to relate narratives where both victim and perpetrators had become aware of the discrepancies in perspectives: would they have reconciled and apologized? would there have been no anger? There is a long history of cognitive consistency, famously carried by Leon Festinger as a salient proponent, and historically begun by Bartlett's memory task, that could be invoked to help explain this phenomenon, but is not (neither by Pinker nor his source, Baumeister.) Widespread semantic frames ( which Pinker should be very familiar with) that are different for "victim" and "perpetrator" could already hold the major features of these stories, as they are selected from memory or stored for future use. Even empathy and its limitations could be invoked to help understand this "moralization gap" if it indeed exists.
Empathy, like love, he argues is not all you need. True enough, but then he seems to reduce its effects too much from the mix of what is necessary. That seems too extreme.
Pinker spends a lot of effort on self control, but it should be mentioned that the science of self control is barely a science, and the assessment of self-control is fraught with difficulties, hardly the stable trait he makes it out to be. The measurement of self control is haphazard and unreliable. The very low correlation with intelligence at 0.23 is as much a reflection on the low reliability of measurement of self control as it is on the relationship. On the other hand intelligence is the most thoroughly studied human trait in psychology, with absolutely the best measures. Instead of wasting abstractions on self control, it would have been much more productive to focus on intelligence, and not just the Flynn Effect. Instead we are given essays on reason, which may or may not have much to do with intelligence and knowledge. While intelligence probably has not changed much in the past millennia, its application has, and the amount of knowledge and understanding about the world has multiplied immeasurably. This increased understanding of our place in the world might have had an effect way beyond anything that self control could possible effect. Slovenly food and personal habits that have been improved for health reasons also have raised the value of life and longevity, and so increa sed our compassion and empathy. We don't believe in witches any more; there are fewer ignorances that lead to xenophobia; we understand each other better; here are many more opportunities for empathy and forgiveness. He then draws out a long chain of speculative links between self control and violence, any one of which has minimal correlational support. This may be an exercise in empirical futility. The link between intelligence and violence is much more direct and manifold. Of course, his final section on reason is really about intelligence, although for some reason he is loathe to use this time honored and important word.
I find his reification of a "moral sense" to be overdone. While there may be many psychological processes that contribute to moral judgments, it is a stretch to unify them into anything as concrete as a "moral sense". Of course, the same critique could apply to any of his "angels". These are all conceptual structures with varying degrees of coherence and consistency. However, the analysis of this moral sense into relational models of community, dominance, and fairness suggests it could have been much more foundational in the analysis of the civilizing process than Pinker makes it out to be. The analysis does not provide a level of detail that makes it possible to connect empathy with this moral sense in a review, yet many connections seem apparent.
The summary section on religion is also a bit mystifying. "Speaking of ideologies, we have seen that little good has come from ancient tribal dogmas. All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorized the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent power." While this may be true to an extent in the blood thirsty past, it is an extreme exaggeration to say that little good has come of it. It is undeniable that recent religious activities help the poor and starving masses in the world; and deal effectively with the aftermath of genocides. The mystery of religion and its role in the world is as impenetrable as ever. Perhaps his elevation of the importance of reason prevents him from a fair assessment of religion, as much as it does of empathy.
The next summary section on "Gentle Commerce" raises many hackles as well in this era of the 1% dominating financial benefits and government, exploiting their intelligence and social networks to inflict countless harm on the 99%. Violence has come to have a different face today, but its effects are just as inimical.
Probably no section is as effective a support of the power of empathy as the section on Feminization. If all the rational forces of peace are so powerful, how can this section's devastating analysis of the disruptive and violent power of young males hold?
But finally, once again, the truth of so many theses in this book are undeniable, none more so than the overriding importance of the decline of violence in the improvement of human lives: "The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species. Its implications touch the core of our beliefs and values-- for what could be more fundamental than an understanding of whether the human condition, over the course of its history, has gotten steadily better, steadily worse, or has not changed?"
His closing comment is worth repeating: "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." Those forces of sympathy and compassion, with the intellect to make them triumph, are alive within us today.
Overall, this is a magnificent resource, but to be provocative I have given it a one-star rating to emphasize how poorly it has synthesized the vast literature it has so scholarly compiled.
In fact, Pinker has written a shorter article in October 2011 in Nature: [...]
whose heading is (more appropriately than the subhead of the book): Taming the Devil Within Us. Rather than providing a trenchant summary of the book, it wanders along the same channels and muddles to a conclusion about reason and the Flynn Effect that seems as unsatisfying as the book. It says that we are getting smarter, and as a result the world is becoming more peaceful. In it he rightfully acknowledges "empathy" as the most famous "better angel" source of this decline in violence, but once again says it is not enough. Similarly he debunks the "moral sense" as creating more violence than inhibiting it. Instead he agrees with Peter Singer (without ever referencing him in the article!): "The most important psychological con- tributor to the decline of violence over the long term may instead be reason: the cognitive faculties, honed by the exchange of ideas through language, that allow us to understand the world and negotiate social arrangements." I would say they are equally important, but cannot disagree with him on the importance of our intellect.
I have no idea why he later throws in this seemingly self-conradictory comment about contradicting Hume: "Reason can also lead people to want less violence. This may seem to violate Scottish philosopher David Hume's dictum that "reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions" . Reason, by itself, can lay out a road map to peace or to war, to tolerance or to persecution, depending on what the reasoner wants." Personally, I think his arguments about reason, by itself, without a basis in empathy, reducing violence are very weak. It stems largely from one meta-study of SAT scores and the Prisoner's Dilemma experiment, that is fundamentally flawed. In any event, in the only world we know, it is clear that empathy, as Hume held, is the driving force for the intellectual creation of institutions of peace and harmony.
He then quotes from the final chapters of his book: "They prefer to live rather than die, keep their body parts intact and spend their days in comfort rather than in pain. Logic does not force them to have those prejudices. Yet any product of natural selection -- indeed, any agent that has endured the ravages of entropy long enough to be reasoning in the first place -- is likely to have them." As Spock would say, it is so logical!, but any scientist knows that logic is not enough to be convincing about empirical truth.
He then goes on to give a quick and somewhat mis-informed snapshot about the Flynn Effect, and concludes that we are getting smarter, and so with a paean to a glorious future, proclaims that these improvements in our conceptions of humanitarian sympathies are all a bright product of reason, which, with some hiccups, will lead us into an ever better future. While I am as optimistic as he is, I still agree with Hume, and perhaps so does Pinker in a nagging way, understand that this explanation is not quite logical.
There is a tendency for generations to envision aporia, endgame, or final justice. FL Watkins claimed that while we were the first generation physically able to sterilize the world through nuclear annihilation many societies could visualize the utter collapse of their world as they knew it. Bounded by geology or geography or all-inclusive culture or even dispersed by diaspora the end of the world was near and total in finality. Many of my friends bemoan often the horrible increase of violence today, They fear kidnapping, rape, and murder as if it were imminent and lock their kids inside or trade them odd car to car, door to door.
Pinker demonstrates with some 200 charts and graphs and nearly 800 pages of text we are in a decrease of violence. Violence has been declining for the last several thousand years. Tribal warfare was 9 times greater than 20th century violence. The murder rate in medieval Europe was 30 times greater than today. It's working! I am relieved and optimistic. I was born with the polarity of nuclear discovery. Nuclear power could eliminate all hunger and energy needs, forever. Nuclear bombs could sterilize the earth, in an hour.
For all of our modern fear of increasing kidnapping, rape, murder and war now is the best time to live. Late in the book in the subchapter "Reflections" Pinker notes "A loathing of modernity is one of the great constants of contemporary social criticism. Whether the nostalgia is for small-town intimacy, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, family values, religious faith, primitive communism, or harmony with the rhythms of nature, everyone longs to turn back the clock. What has technology given us they say, but alienation, despoliation, social pathology, the loss of meaning, and a consumer culture that is destroying the planet to give us McMansions, SUVs, and Reality Television?"
Yet, there is less violence. Even more. We have had a world food surplus. The workplace is so rich we have OSHA laws and unions are being negated; 40 hr work weeks and mandatory safety equipment for the smallest of particulate matter. We have a black president named Obama. Yes, the financial crisis is a zoo but no one has killed Obama or John Stewart. Is violence a sign of well being? If no one were killed but everyone were oppressed?
The last sentimental card drawn after many debates has been the profusion of violence in modern times. The lack of well being rooted in the physicality of violence. Yet, violence by any measure has gone down considerably. Writers who have noted the decrease in violence express puzzlement as to why. Tempting to reach for a nebulous divinity, cosmic author, almost magic, or higher power as Robert Wright and Stephen Payne infer. Rather, Stephen asserts "forces of modernity--reason, science, humanism, individual rights" are the cause for this peripatetic but nevertheless positive trajectory towards peace.
The beginning spends considerable time demonstrating the violence of the past. For most historians it doesn't take much critical examination to get that rape, murder, slavery, kidnapping, and physical abuse were plentiful as found in the archaeology and literature of the past whether biblical, greco-roman, medieval chivalry, or even hunter-gatherer societies.
Hunter-gatherer societies in particular raise sentiment to a high fever. It is tempting to extrapolate the journals of the early Spaniards eulogizing specific HG cultures like the Coastal California, Florida, and Japanese areas where resources remained plentiful and various tribes, Chumash, Ohlone, and PreCalusa lived the good life. Though they traded off death by warfare with, for example, grizzly attacks, the biggest killer of California Coastal Native Americans. HG societies having found internal peace may still be plagued by other contingencies of their environment and ideology. Tempting too to extrapolate the low hours required by HG societies to sustain themselves, 2-4 hrs per day versus the 10-12 of modern man. Would you trade a life duration of 40 versus 70 if you only had to work 2-4 hrs per day?
But these examples do not scale or universalize easily and their exceptionalism is notable as means of supporting potential benefits but also require geographic, geologic, and cultural boundaries not likely to ever be seen again. Alfred Krober notes in the over 1,000 tribes of California tribes cultural mores range from slavery to freedom, money to barter, peace to full warfare, stability to nomadism. This hodge podge of cultures serves as excellent idea sources but not as scalable models easily obtained by modern society. The Society of Primitive Technology and works by Norm Kidder and Pegg Mathewson as well as myself have shown the ease of living off the land but that is irrelevant to the contingencies of living together.
While there are good examples of a less intensive life style with a surplus of free time for gaming, story-telling, and time consuming functional art work it is no guarantee against violence. For years I listened to the debate about Anasazi and cliff dwellers. Whether those painful cliff climbs were for defense or some perverse kind of architecture. It has been with great difficulty that even trained anthropologists could accept such ritualized violence. We deeply want to believe in an Eden, primitive purity, at some time or that humans are basically peaceful but easily corrupted. Consider the rejection of Lorenz's Territorial Imperative or Adler's will to power. Such a dream is a balm to the everyday violence we experience and see as our own and worse than all before.
Hobbes exaggerated the solitary tooth and fang aspect of the precivilized world but as Pinker quotes Hobbes commenting on the logic of violence of one intelligent species to another "So that in the nature of man, we find three principles of quarrel. First competition; secondly diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second for safety; and the third for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second to defend them; the third. for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name."
Hobbes' solution is that a tyrant of the most vicious sort is better than precivilized life. He completely misses the boat for democracy and commerce but nails the problem on its head. Reputation is the most critical aspect most undervalued as a human motivator. It is not resource depletion so much that encourages internal warfare but the unabated zeal for reputation and status as a means of ensuring competitive and defensive success over time. While R. Buckminster Fuller said boredom breeds creativity it is not true unless within a structure of accomplishment. Boredom leads to negative group dynamics. Time needs to be filled with activity or humans turn to each other for entertainment and it is often cruel, Machiavellian at best, to preserve or enhance reputation.
Jim Riggs ran an aboriginal living skills program where individuals learn HG material culture and then survive on the land. It is a twisted unreal game as the skills involved take time years for expertise and the environment is bleak. Nevertheless there is considerable leisure time. I have met a number of these students, some Phd anthropologists, and the complaint I heard the most was not being hungry, not being tired, but the difficulty of group dynamics.
In the end the greatest difficulty of living together is interpersonal relationship. Jared Diamond writes of an annual meeting between tribes and notes an exceptionally difficult time when a wronged member repeatedly, yearly, raises anger of a past wrong to his family. For the sake of reputation of a single member the only intertribal meeting for a year is hijacked. Other members, peacemakers, assuage the wrong feeling but with difficulty.
Resource rich tribes of the Pacific Northwest arrived at a culture of totem and potlatch one upmanship where status was based on the impoverishment of families by giving away everything and more. No longer the hunter coming home and sharing the meat but a drive to wanton excess no different than the missionaries in Mexico/Central America plundering all resource and capital to destitution to render ever larger missions in an absurd competition. The former no longer having anything to do with egalitarianism and the latter having nothing to do with God's word.
Pinker notes Laura Betzig who has shown that "complex societies tend to fall under the control of despots; leaders who are guaranteed to get their way in conflicts, who can kill with impunity, and who have large harems of women at their disposal." Pinker adds "People were less likely to become victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptomaniacs." Not until the enlightenment, democracy, and individual rights will there be a cultural ideology that lowers the desire for violence.
Glossing over several dense chapters discussing the flow of violence Pinker resets his path in "Inner Demons". Sadism, Masochism, ostracizing, excommunication, all contribute to violence yet seem to be part of the nature of man. It is tempting to either say someone is evil or they are the victim of their passions. Neither is correct. A keen insight is revenge.
In various experiments and games revenge does have an advantage but only at cost. "Revenge can work as a deterrent only if the avenger has a reputation for being willing to avenge and a willingness to carry it out even when it is costly." The other side of reputation is just punishment.
Pinker quotes Daly and Wilson "The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane pragmatic matter; discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil." The danger is the escalation of revenge. Innocence is exaggerated as is their adversary's malice.
Too often we punish more and more severely way past the pragmatic end of prevention. The way out "The desire for revenge is most easily modulated when the perpetrator falls within our natural circle of empathy. We are apt to forgive our kin and close friends for trespasses that would be unforgivable in others. And when our circle of empathy expands...our circle of of forgivability expands with it"
Men strive for dominance. People are overconfident of their success. In contests of dominance parties are no longer sorted by merit. People can overcome the revulsion of violence but seek it and privatize it as in S & M games and worse. "And people can avow a belief they don't hold purely because they think everyone else avows it; such beliefs can sweep through a closed society and bring it under the spell of collective delusion."
The chapter "Better Angels" is a pleasure to read. It is the optimist's antidote. The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist is afraid that it is true. What is it that has allowed us to reject violence? What are the underlying forces of democracy, commerce, and individual rights that make them work?
Empathy, sympathy, understanding, and compassion all encourage the expanding circle of self. The facile mantra of oneness is annoying but its merit is the desire for inclusion. Pinker rightly notes "What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights--a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm or exploitation."
Peter Singer does not use empathy or emotion to expand the circle of self; Singer coined the phrase. Reason is sufficient. It is reason that expands the circle beyond self, family, nation, and species and not rubbing shoulders or the imagining of rubbing shoulders. It makes sense to include others.
Commerce encourages empathy, or at least sex and drinking together. The trade routes of the world are littered with Romeo and Juliet stories. Business cuts through class and preference. Trade encourages integration. Physical contact encourages acceptance of varying views. People will engage in commerce as an excuse to socialize. Integration works but is not initially accepted except by a big carrot like commerce.
Self control. "Economists have noted that when people are left to their own devices, they save far too little for their retirement, as if they expected to die in a few years. " Pinker spends considerable time supporting Elias that self-control and violence are related. Furthermore that practicing self-control and impulse-control lowers violence. This is mostly a futuristic chapter with ideas and plans best stated "It's also possible that people can learn strategies of self control, enjoy the feeling of mastery over their impulses, and transfer their newfound tricks of discipline from one part of their behavioral repertoire over another." Apparently we have room for improvement here.
The historic difficulty is the compulsion to prioritize present needs over future needs. In the past delaying gratification removed motivation to action now for immediate survival. Now, delaying gratification benefits future states. It is as if the extent of reputation has extended far into the future. Grandparents, oral tradition, writing, and governance are all means of allowing the individual to extend the perception of life into the future. Overall, Pinker calls this the Civilizing Process. Who would have guessed that we would live beyond the reproductive phase?
Moral process. Pinker quotes Fiske and Tetlock "Over the last three centuries throughout the world there has been a rapidly accelerating tendency of social systems as a whole to move from Communal Sharing to Authority Ranking to Equality Matching to Market Pricing" Further Pinker writes "The trend towards social liberalism, then is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and towards values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights." Haidt has researched this and many chafe that conservatives are authority, purity, and loyalty based but the up side is that conservatives no longer invoke authority, tradition, or religion to justify racism, female domesticity, and gay bashing. Or at least not as much as they did.
Reason takes a dive in society now but the interesting point is the proliferation of reasoning and arguments to accomplish the goal. Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes did not opine from the heart and emote their intuitions. Some of the most extravagant and difficult arguments come from postmodernism. Neuroscience has used tremendous amounts of reason to show how we are biased as do economists. Never has reason been abandoned but rather if anything fetishized. Only conservative authority adherence discussions abandon reason for abeyance.
The best part of this chapter was a note on Hume. Many people think Hume refers to rationalizations. That people follow passions and support with reason. Pinker rightly notes "...he was not advising people to shoot from the hip, blow their stack, or fall head over heels for Mr Wrong. He was basically making the logical point that reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of the propositions."
Nevertheless reason according to Pinker allows us to modify self control and moral sense. What is important here is that reasoning leads to accuracy. Bad arguments, bad inferences, and bad premises are more easily sorted out by reason.
The growth of education and the expanse of reason leads to less violence. "It is not a big leap to conclude that an education-fueled rise in reasoning ability made at least some parts of the world safe for democracy. Democracy by definition is associated with less government violence, and we know that is statistically associated with an aversion to interstate war, deadly ethnic riots, and genocide, and with a reduction in the severity of civil wars."
In "On Angel's Wings" Pinker makes a strong supposition for protective government or the Leviathan. "A state that uses a monopoly on force to protect its citizens from one another may be the most consistent violence-reducer that we have encountered in this book...A Leviathan--or his female counterpart--Justitia, the goddess of justice--is a disinterested party whose penalties are not inflated by the self serving biases of the participants, and who is not a deserving target of revenge." By imposing a cost that is greater than the benefit a governance can make peace more attractive than agression.
Feminization. Acknowledging Yamaguchi the only survivor of both atomic bombs "The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers , those who are still breast feeding their babies." Furthermore "Several varieties of feminization, then--direct political empowerment, the deflation of manly honor, the promotion of marriage on women's terms, the rights of girls to be born, and women's control over their own reproduction--have been forces in the decline of violence." This is a long way from the biblical admonishment that a rapist must marry his victim.
Pinkers' penultimate reflection concerns humanism. "Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force."
His ultimate plea is that while he understands the mother's cry for a lost child that it is the proportion of violence that does indeed count. It is not the number of people but the percent of people. Many reviewers criticize this aspect. That 1 death in 50 is better than 10 of 500 and so on. I present that we are more sensitive to death in numbers than ever before. The battle of Antietem took 23,000 lives in one day. 9/11 a tenth of that. Our wars now measure casualties in double digits rather than thousands or tens of thousands. Our sensibility towards individual death is now so great that we watch the news of murders with the same kind of anger we reserved for battles.
This heightened sensitivity shows how far we have progressed. We too should close with Pinker "For all of the tribulations in our lives, for all of 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."
Top reviews from other countries
I love books that can give brand new insights even to the things that I already know. This book is choke full of brand new insights into very familiar things.
I love information and facts and this book is filled to the brim with new information and facts.
I love writers who have close personal relationship with the information that they do present. Steve Pinker has a very passionate relationship with his data.
I love books that contain Big History, or books that look at the big and to the naked eye often quite invisible big trends that really change our societies and this book is Big History at its best.
I also love writers who use language to convey ideas and not to show off their craftsmanship or knowledge of tall words. Steven Pinker is one of those writers who just wants his reader to understand what he is writing. I just love this rare trait when I meet it in writers.
This is book with its 800 pages is without doubt Steven Pinker's opus magnum. (Thus far, at least...) It draws together many threads from his earlier works. It happens to an extent that a recent reading of his other works makes some parts seem even too familiar.
However, they are necessary parts of the whole, as this book forms a single argument and this argument is for many difficult to accept as it runs against all conventional wisdom. We are bombarded by the media hour after hour, day after day, year after year with images of violence and destruction. Steven Pinker really needs to march all available forces of science to counter this immense trend.
Steve Pinker argues basically for 800 pages that violence in the world has been diminishing for a long time. He uses dozens and dozens of well-documented and well-researched studies to prove his point. If fact, this book is a wonderful tour to the literature that covers all aspects of human aggression.
This book is truly cross-scientific. The boundaries of scientific disciplines are not of importance for Steven Pinker when he is in search for truth. Neurology, psychology, social psychology, sociology are all covered.
Steven Pinker does not limit himself to retelling of the findings of others, but he has the courage to interpret them against a bigger picture. All good science starts with a strong hypothesis. Steve Pinker does show without any doubt that his hypothesis of overall diminishing of violence is not just speculation, but is based on extremely wide and solid set of scientific facts.
I heartily agree with his thesis that an effective and fair rule of law is one of the central factors in diminishing violence. The medieval societies with their honor culture and highly ineffective systems of feudal government just were not at all as safe places for humans as modern democracies, even if their they meted out cruel and brutal punishments indiscriminately.
The main point of course is that the rule of law must be universally accepted in a society and it must be fair and just for it to have an effect on the level of violence. Even the harshest and cruel police-states have failed miserably in achieving similar stages of security as such societies where most members of the society agree on general outlines of government and have the ability to change governments when they fail.
I really think that his central ideas and findings are quite to point, but I beg to differ with him in certain individual findings. For example, I don't just buy it, when he claims that the counter-culture with the overt disrespect for authority and disdain of self-control would have been even the main reason for the rise in violence in the USA from the 60's to 80's.
I think that here the correlations just could go the wrong way, as maybe the rise of a new kind of drug-culture brought about the changes in culture. I think that the very same drug-culture drove millions of people beyond the boundaries of law, where personal violence is all too often the only way to survive.
The turf-wars, drive-by-shootings or random killings were perhaps caused by the physical drug-culture and not the popular culture, which could just have followed the changes in reality a few steps behind.
Overall, Steven Pinker gives much credence to a Civilizing Effect that starts from good table-manners and spreads from the upper classes downwards. I must say that I don't really think that even here the causality could at least partly go the other way round. A rise in living standards just could make people imitate the behavior of the upper classes.
However, what is important, he also very strongly appreciates also the role of humanism that has in my mind been the decisive factor in the process.
I think he forgets to mention how already the early Greek humanists influenced Christians. They in turn had a new kind of attitude towards violence and shedding blood for fun, that was a common pastime in the Roman Empire.
Of course, the Christian totalitarianism did later on lead to burning of witches and heretics. Extremely cruel and bloody criminal punishments were widely used in Christian societies. Hangings were a popular form of public entertainment even in the most pious states.
The philosophers, writers and scientists of the Age Of Enlightenment were carriers of a new kind of humanistic thinking that saw value in every human life. This kind of concepts had been quite foreign before their time.
For me, it is quite odd that Steve Pinker does not use the concept of zeitgeist or the spirit of the time in this marvelous book, even if the changes he is describing in many different phases are just changes in zeitgeist: the way the world was seen was changing.
Another failing in my eyes is his inability to accept the basic fact the thermonuclear weapons themselves in their absolute destructiveness were the reason why we did not have the third world. I think that he tries to tip-toe his way around this problem in a very round-about way.
Of course, accepting that men can develop so fearsome weapons that men cannot use them anymore can sound like accepting these monstrous weapons, but I think that a scientist should be able to face the facts, even if he does not like them.
Humanism was naturally not the only force a plays here. Also the spread of humanistic thinking was aided incredibly by the invention of the printing press and cheap books.
The ensuing rise in the general level of knowledge had its effect, but Steven Pinker believes that the simple ability to be able to look at the minds of other people through novels did much to spread the levels of empathy and sympathy up in a society.
It is of course impossible to give even a rough outline of a book with 800 pages of densely packed information. I can only suggest that you read by yourself. The time used in this book will be well spent, as the reader will have a much clearer picture of very many human developments.
(Originally published in my blog at: [...])
The premise is: is today's world less violent than the past? Steven Pinker makes the case this is true and takes us through historical, religious and contemporary texts and stories. This book might offend religious people but Steven is not out of stating religion is wrong (he is an atheist and he has different views); instead, he uses the stories from the Torah, Bible, Koran to illustrate that violence was perfectly normal and acceptable in the old days. It might also offend everyone else as he pops most balloons that people hold value to: "terrorism is a huge problem" - is it really? "Wars kill more people than ever" - the data shows differently. It is not a light read and in fact it is quite depressing, reading how humans posed some much suffering on each other for various reasons. Even Steven himself describes how the readings about genocide haunts him at night.
The book is long but it is an interesting read. As a species we have come a long way in getting less violent. Our descendants will look at us today as how we look to people from a century ago: less progressed and more violent. Having finished the book, I can conclude we still have a long way to go. While yes, the data shows from many different sources that we as a species are less violent than before; the violence is still there. While I might not experience much of it in the relative safe country I live in; we cannot say the same about the people that live in other places in the world. I really hope that one day we stop put all our energy and efforts in killing one and another and use it to the benefit of humankind. The data shows it will give a better life to everyone but for now that is just a hope.
If you are able to read through sometimes extremely graphic descriptions of acts of violence of especially the first six chapters I recommend it. It changes your view on what the media, politicians, governments and companies want you to believe to what is really happening compared to the past. I like that so many different resources were used to find out what the real narrative is. I can understand why some people will not want to read it: it's brutal at times and you should not take things personally that Steven writes; it's not meant like that.











