The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Kindle Edition

I've struggled a bit to write this review because I have mixed feelings about The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker.

I started reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined with the attitude that Pinker needed to first convince me violence had declined before getting into explaining why. To be perfectly honest, given the world we currently live in, it's hard to imagine that violence has declined.

While I finished the book convinced that violence has declined, I felt like the explanations for why seemed more hypothetical than proven. Pinker explored violence quite thoroughly beginning his book at the beginning of human existence and moving to modern times in the almost 700 pages of The Better Angels of Our Nature. He explored historical myths as well as historical documents to arrive at his conclusions. He used archaeological finds to disprove mythical battles. He described how the development of etiquette and the creation of government helped quell violence and change our norms about violence. He used a combination of statistics, anecdotal evidence, and archaeological studies to present his case.

Yet, the more I read, the more my college corrections statistics professor's words haunted me. He always warned our class to be careful when writing papers not to allow our biases and our desires to prove our points to affect the weight we gave the studies we used as evidence.

Pinker seems less objective in some areas of The Better Angels of Our Nature than in other sections. He seemed to excuse violence against some people while unequivocally condemning it against others. This bias felt incredibly out of place in a book on why violence has declined.

For example, when talking about things like the FBI's crime report and other such studies on crime, Pinker never mentions the effect of police discretion and biased court results on crime rates or how the statistics for individual areas are sometimes skewed by reporting or not reporting data. My assumption is he believes the numbers wouldn't be enough to skew the overall results, and a simple paragraph could have addressed that issue. Maybe even just a few sentences; however, if those sentences existed I couldn't find them.

His inconsistent handling of anecdotal evidence and research surveys deemed certain groups of people more credible than others without giving a clear reason why.

As I read The Better Angels of Our Nature, I found myself wanting it to be better than it was yet I still think it's a book worth reading. Pinker obviously studied violence in great depth. He explains the statistics in an easy to understand, straightforward method, and he tells the story of violence quite well. He makes violence the main character, for better or worse, in a story that is ongoing and relevant and important. In fact, Pinker tells the story so well and brings up such important points, facts, and conclusions, that I am tempted to dismiss the things that bothered me about the book. Yet, I can't do that in good conscience. Pinker drives home the fact that violence is much less acceptable than it used to be for a variety of reasons and that unacceptability has come about as humans have developed civilization and sought out ways to live together more peacefully. The Better Angels of Our Nature left me hopeful that we can continue to rise above violence and find nonviolent solutions in spite of my skepticism about certain sections of the book.

Being a recent college graduate, the moment I saw that Bill Gates had recommended this book, I bought it and began reading. This book has some important, intriguing, and profound themes such as how far we have come collectively as humans from even the middle ages to now. Though we are by no means close to being angels, (as evident by the chapter about our inner demons), progress is undeniable. I also am a fan of Pinker's style of writing. He adds humor intermittently, has some interesting anecdotes, and does a good job at explaining most of his reasoning and data. I found the length of this book to be excessive though. This is a big book, make no mistake about it. At times, when Pinker is backing up his claims with copious amounts of data and graphs in the middle sections of the book, it can be a chore to read. However, I think I am the better for having read this book, and though I personally would not say that this book changed my life, I am glad to have read it.

I would also like to mention that if you buy the paperback version, towards the beginning, the text on the pages is uniformly at an angle, and not entirely horizontal across the page.

This is truly a marvelous piece of work. I can't imagine the amount of time and research that went into crafting this epic - and that is truly what it is. The author takes so many different perspectives - historical, psychological, biological, evolutionary, etc. to explain the decline of violence over the course of human history, and it is truly amazing and engrossing to read.

However, I had to dock a star for a few reasons. First, I believe Pinker uses excessively obsolete and/or "advanced" vocabulary throughout the entirety of the book. The vast majority of people reading this book, I believe, will have a very difficult time reading the book without a dictionary nearby (or of course, an app on your smartphone, which I admittedly used). I have a college background in writing, and was proficient in writing throughout my schooling days, but Pinker's vocabulary is advanced to the point of being frustrating and annoying; I found hundreds of words throughout the ~ 700 pages that I hadn't a clue as to their meaning. Eventually, it became frustrating enough that I downloaded the Merriam-Webster dictionary app for the sole purpose of having it on hand while reading this book! Never had that problem with any other book.

Second, Pinker tends to run off on tangents on a consistent basis, and you will often forget you are even reading a book on violence. Many of these tangents are relatively interesting, but at times I thought perhaps he was just stroking his own ego rather than staying on topic. The book could have been much more concise and delivered the same message.

As a whole, however, the book is excellent and definitely worth a read, if you are up for a challenge. Or hey, maybe I'm not as great a reader as I thought I was! I found it a challenging but rewarding read and I came away from the experience with a great deal of knowledge and insight.

While generally slow and plodding to read (despite innumerable attempts of varying success by the author to make it readable as a narrative with witticisms and anecdotes), this book comes across as an exhaustively researched, massively referenced academic endeavor. I decided it deserved five stars rather than four because I think any less exhaustive approach would have been less convincing, and from the professional reviews I've read, this is clearly a ground-breaking, masterly achievement in consolidating, synthesizing and logically interpreting the research in this area. I am a more optimistic and hopeful human for reading it!