“The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”
By Steven Pinker
Viking. $19.99
BUY NOW
If you were raised on terror of nuclear annihilation, “Lord of the Flies” and History Channel documentaries about Hitler, you might reckon there’s no straightening the crooked timber of humanity. The notion that man’s violence against man has been on the wane since the Middle Ages, that we dwell now in a golden idyll of unprecedented peace and that the gruesome enormities of the 20th century amount to no more than a statistical blip in a long trend of pacification might seem, well, hard to credit. Yet this is precisely what Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues in his backpack-busting new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” and he is maybe a little too well prepared for your incredulity.
Pinker’s argumentative strategy is simple. He wants to convince us that the past was more violent, cruel and deadly than we are inclined to think, and that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’s existence.” This development, Pinker says, “may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
Once sickeningly common, torture, corporal punishment and the death penalty are now nonexistent in many countries and relatively rare where they do persist. (If you want lovingly detailed descriptions of the Inquisition’s elaborately gruesome methods of torture and execution, Pinker’s your man.) Court and county records in England show homicide rates dropping by as much as a factor of 100, from around 100 homicides per 100,000 souls in the 14th century to 1 per 100,000 in swinging mid-century London. Records in other European countries tell a similar story. America, however, remains markedly more homicidal than our Continental brethren, with about 5 of every 100,000 Americans dying at another’s hand. But Pinker notes large regional differences within the United States. Homicide rates in New England, the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest resemble Europe’s. Where vestiges of more honor-based frontier cultures remain, Americans are unusually quick to kill — though far less so now than in the past.
And we are less likely than ever to die in war. Drawing on archaeological discoveries of human remains from all around the world and evidence from hunter-gatherer societies of more recent vintage in places from Paraguay to the Philippines, Pinker figures the chance one of our ancient forbears would die in war was 15 percent at the low end. The odds that a citizen of a contemporary nation state — that’s you — will die a casualty of war is a somewhere in the neighborhood of drowning in a bathtub. If we think in per-capita rather than absolute numbers, as Pinker insists we do, even the war-ravaged 20th century seems tranquil compared to life in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer band. If we add to the heinous death toll of the 20th century’s massive wars all related deaths from famine, disease and genocide, the sum comes to a staggering 180 million — about 3 percent of the population. Of course, the 20th century’s killing fields and death camps were far from evenly distributed. Ukrainian farmers in 1933 and Polish Jews in 1942 might not have been cheered by news of the historically low global death rate.
You may kvetch along the way, but Pinker’s relentless evidential maximalism will eventually break you. We used to watch public disembowelings for fun; now we worry about the comfort of chickens. There’s no disputing that we have become kinder, gentler primates. But why?
There is the transition from anarchic tribal society to the centralized state; the civilizing effect of commerce on manners and mores; the caution of the newly wealthy. And then there is the Enlightenment! Pinker credits the invention of the printing press, the spread of literacy, and the emergence of a cosmopolitan “republic of letters” in the 17th and 18th centuries with the development and rapid spread of Enlightenment ideal, reason foremost among them. Reason is Pinker’s pick for the engine of pacifying moral progress. But given Pinker’s theoretical predilections, it’s an odd choice that leaves him, and the reader, in a lurch.
Pinker is among the world’s foremost evolutionary psychologists. The prevailing Darwinian view, to which Pinker subscribes, is that the mind is a cluster of interrelated “modules” selected by evolutionary pressures to perform specialized tasks. But there is no general-purpose reasoning module. Rationality, in its abstract, impartial Enlightenment glory, does not come naturally to us. Pinker understands this. “Humans were not, of course, created in a state of Original Reason,” he says.
But then how does reason develop? Pinker expects that “as collective rationality is honed over the ages, it will progressively whittle away at the short-sighted and hot-blooded impulses toward violence, and force us to treat a greater number of rational agents as we would have them treat us.” But how did rationality get this far? How did it get off the ground in the first place? How does it spread? How does it stick? If the progress of morality depends finally upon the progress of reason, Pinker owes us a fuller account of how mental modules meant for other purposes were made to work in concert to produce something like Enlightenment reason. He owes us an account of how this discipline of mind is cultivated, “honed over the ages,” and passed along culturally. If the key to the astounding decline in human cruelty and death is the cultural evolution of reason, I’d like to hear rather more about it.
The overarching task of “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is to show that moral progress is compatible with a secular, Darwinian worldview. Pinker has mounted a powerful, worldview-changing case that we can and have made immense moral progress. This should be a source of both hope and consolation. But we must look elsewhere, I’m afraid, to learn how we worked this worldly miracle.
Will Wilkinson blogs about the moral sciences for Big Think and about American politics for The Economist.
By Steven Pinker
Viking. $19.99
BUY NOW
If you were raised on terror of nuclear annihilation, “Lord of the Flies” and History Channel documentaries about Hitler, you might reckon there’s no straightening the crooked timber of humanity. The notion that man’s violence against man has been on the wane since the Middle Ages, that we dwell now in a golden idyll of unprecedented peace and that the gruesome enormities of the 20th century amount to no more than a statistical blip in a long trend of pacification might seem, well, hard to credit. Yet this is precisely what Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues in his backpack-busting new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” and he is maybe a little too well prepared for your incredulity.
Pinker’s argumentative strategy is simple. He wants to convince us that the past was more violent, cruel and deadly than we are inclined to think, and that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’s existence.” This development, Pinker says, “may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
Once sickeningly common, torture, corporal punishment and the death penalty are now nonexistent in many countries and relatively rare where they do persist. (If you want lovingly detailed descriptions of the Inquisition’s elaborately gruesome methods of torture and execution, Pinker’s your man.) Court and county records in England show homicide rates dropping by as much as a factor of 100, from around 100 homicides per 100,000 souls in the 14th century to 1 per 100,000 in swinging mid-century London. Records in other European countries tell a similar story. America, however, remains markedly more homicidal than our Continental brethren, with about 5 of every 100,000 Americans dying at another’s hand. But Pinker notes large regional differences within the United States. Homicide rates in New England, the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest resemble Europe’s. Where vestiges of more honor-based frontier cultures remain, Americans are unusually quick to kill — though far less so now than in the past.
And we are less likely than ever to die in war. Drawing on archaeological discoveries of human remains from all around the world and evidence from hunter-gatherer societies of more recent vintage in places from Paraguay to the Philippines, Pinker figures the chance one of our ancient forbears would die in war was 15 percent at the low end. The odds that a citizen of a contemporary nation state — that’s you — will die a casualty of war is a somewhere in the neighborhood of drowning in a bathtub. If we think in per-capita rather than absolute numbers, as Pinker insists we do, even the war-ravaged 20th century seems tranquil compared to life in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer band. If we add to the heinous death toll of the 20th century’s massive wars all related deaths from famine, disease and genocide, the sum comes to a staggering 180 million — about 3 percent of the population. Of course, the 20th century’s killing fields and death camps were far from evenly distributed. Ukrainian farmers in 1933 and Polish Jews in 1942 might not have been cheered by news of the historically low global death rate.
You may kvetch along the way, but Pinker’s relentless evidential maximalism will eventually break you. We used to watch public disembowelings for fun; now we worry about the comfort of chickens. There’s no disputing that we have become kinder, gentler primates. But why?
There is the transition from anarchic tribal society to the centralized state; the civilizing effect of commerce on manners and mores; the caution of the newly wealthy. And then there is the Enlightenment! Pinker credits the invention of the printing press, the spread of literacy, and the emergence of a cosmopolitan “republic of letters” in the 17th and 18th centuries with the development and rapid spread of Enlightenment ideal, reason foremost among them. Reason is Pinker’s pick for the engine of pacifying moral progress. But given Pinker’s theoretical predilections, it’s an odd choice that leaves him, and the reader, in a lurch.
Pinker is among the world’s foremost evolutionary psychologists. The prevailing Darwinian view, to which Pinker subscribes, is that the mind is a cluster of interrelated “modules” selected by evolutionary pressures to perform specialized tasks. But there is no general-purpose reasoning module. Rationality, in its abstract, impartial Enlightenment glory, does not come naturally to us. Pinker understands this. “Humans were not, of course, created in a state of Original Reason,” he says.
But then how does reason develop? Pinker expects that “as collective rationality is honed over the ages, it will progressively whittle away at the short-sighted and hot-blooded impulses toward violence, and force us to treat a greater number of rational agents as we would have them treat us.” But how did rationality get this far? How did it get off the ground in the first place? How does it spread? How does it stick? If the progress of morality depends finally upon the progress of reason, Pinker owes us a fuller account of how mental modules meant for other purposes were made to work in concert to produce something like Enlightenment reason. He owes us an account of how this discipline of mind is cultivated, “honed over the ages,” and passed along culturally. If the key to the astounding decline in human cruelty and death is the cultural evolution of reason, I’d like to hear rather more about it.
The overarching task of “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is to show that moral progress is compatible with a secular, Darwinian worldview. Pinker has mounted a powerful, worldview-changing case that we can and have made immense moral progress. This should be a source of both hope and consolation. But we must look elsewhere, I’m afraid, to learn how we worked this worldly miracle.
Will Wilkinson blogs about the moral sciences for Big Think and about American politics for The Economist.
