Notes on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
Violence is ubiquitous. Whether driven by predation, revenge, sadism, ideology, or an urge for dominance, it can be found in every society, historical era, and species. The good news is that it has declined. In his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker attempts to explain why and why it matters. “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. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.”
The book begins with an overview of violence through the ages. The data are unequivocal: the past was much worse than the present. Even the Second World War, with all its atrocities, barely makes the top ten of the bloodiest events in recorded history.
The halcyon days of the past are a myth created by a combination of several factors: historical myopia (we know less about the distant past than about the recent past), the availability bias (it is easy to come up with examples of recent violent acts), and failure to consider population size differences (killing one million people out of one hundred million is not the same as killing one million out of seven and a half billion).
We have improved in virtually every measurable aspect. We no longer routinely kill our own children when they are weak, hungry, or female. And instead of punishing them by beating or food deprivation, we are discussing which other “violent” games to ban after dodgeball.
We are no longer sentenced to die after an 8.5-minute trial for cutting a tree as was the norm two hundred years ago in England. We are no longer tortured into confessing that we are witches. We are no longer summarily sacrificed to propitiate a deity. We are no longer in real danger of being eaten by another human being. What is more, just thinking about any of these forms of violence would fill most of us with horror and disgust. And that is progress.
We have become more capable of empathy and self-control than our predecessors, and our moral senses have grown less group-centric. We have learned to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and to work together on a global scale. We have changed for the better.
Undeniably, people still die by the millions from preventable causes, including war. We have not eliminated racism, social injustice, intolerance, and countless other sources of suffering. But violence as a whole has declined significantly.
It is difficult to pinpoint which factors have contributed the most to this. Nevertheless, substantiated by extensive research, Steven Pinker argues persuasively that five developments have played important roles.
- The advent of states that have a monopoly on the use of force to protect their citizens from one another. By suppressing raiding and feuding, the first states decreased the rate of violent death fivefold. The first kingdoms and sovereign states facilitated an additional thirtyfold decrease.
- The spread of gentle commerce. It taught us that cooperation is more advantageous than warfare.
- The feminization. We finally acknowledged that women are less violent and less willing to take risks than men.
- The expansion of our circle of empathy to nonrelatives. The Reading Revolution triggered this. Books became more widespread, and people began considering new points of view suggested by the fictional characters they encountered.
- The escalation of reason. Owing to democracy and mass media, more people started thinking like scientists. Thus, they purged superstitions and inconsistencies from the contemporary systems of belief.
Overall, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a difficult book. It can depress, disgust, and disillusion even the most indifferent reader with its data on genocides, democides, ethnocides, homicides, politicides, regicides, infanticides, filicides, siblicides, gynecides, uxoricides, mariticides, and terrorism by suicide. But it’s a must-read if ever there was one. After all, ignoring the uncomfortable past won’t make it disappear, whereas learning from it might help in preventing it from coming back. And prevent it we must.
