The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

This is one of those books where I really wanted to believe and like the premise. I binge read it a few years ago after getting it out of the library, and really liked it. The book has some pretty great quotes, too.

However, it has some problems. Early reviews by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and popular science writers, as well as public intellectuals, were all pretty positive, just like my own naive reaction. However, very few academic historians were asked about their assessment, and from my understanding, that's kind of a big deal considering this is a history book, with primarily historical arguments. In reality, a large number of historians find this work to be critically flawed.

It's been too long since I've read it, but I admit I don't recall it talking much about how colonialism has shifted strategies in the modern world and tries to go by a different name these days. If you read this book, you might want to try reading a book like Sorrows Of Empire afterward, and statistics on unreported sexual violence make me really dubious that's actually gone down. In some places I'm pretty sure it's gone up after we messed with people's homelands, because that kind of thing is really destabilizing and destabilized societies aren't really conductive to living in safety -when people feel unsafe, their beliefs often become more radical, superstitious and aggressive in nature.
(Examples: 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used CIA to depose Mohammed Mossadegh, the popular elected leader of the Iranian parliament and an ardent nationalist who opposed British and American influence. The coup severely tarnished trust in American claims of protecting democracy. Other incidents: The 1986 Iran-Contra Affair revealed that President Ronald Reagan's administration had secretly negotiated arms-for-hostages deals with Iran, discrediting Reagan’s claim that he would not negotiate with terrorists.
Also famously, Americans supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War.
It isn't just limited to the Middle-East, either.
In 1973, the CIA helped foment a coup, personally approved by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, against the democratically elected Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile, which brought to power the dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a devastating crackdown on the rebellious Bengalis, and this was supported by Nixon and Kissinger. Over 100,000 people died, possibly 3 million.
In 1965 and 1966, the American government assisted in the murder of approximately one million Indonesian civilians in the name of anticommunism. Suharto, a powerful Indonesian military leader, accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of organizing a brutal coup attempt, following the kidnapping and murder of six high-ranking army officers, and the USA backed him when he became a dictator. The National Declassification Center published a batch of U.S. diplomatic cables covering USA policy at the time; horrifyingly, the documents show U.S. officials knew most of his victims were entirely innocent.)
Basically, we've been messing with other countries and making things worse for a long, looong time, and it makes it quite hard to believe that we've gotten any less violent as a result of having a Democracy; more like we've simply hidden the dynamics of who gets the violence. Now, I do think we've had decreases in violence from the invention of television and the removal of lead, but the reasons for this should be pretty obvious: you aren't hurting anyone if you are binging TV instead, and lead causes brain damage.

I do think we can make a less violent world by making people more secure, by making sure victims have a voice, and by not, oh, I dunno, subverting other people's democracies when they vote for some economic system we don't like. I don't think this will happen if we simply pat ourselves on the back for having 'already achieved a better world'.

Quote: "The problems that come up time and again are: the failure to genuinely engage with historical methodologies; the unquestioning use of dubious sources; the tendency to exaggerate the violence of the past in order to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the modern era; the creation of a number of straw men, which Pinker then goes on to debunk; and its extraordinarily Western-centric, not to say Whiggish, view of the world." - From the introduction to a critical analysis collection of essays www.berghahnjournals.com/view...

(Unfortunately, most of those articles are under a paywall, but the introduction isn't.)

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 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".

I have read this book slowly and carefully over a long period of time. I give it an unreservedly positive review.

Warning: I am only an "expert" in a tiny area of what the book covers, and a layman in most of the rest.

I will discuss two things that I liked most about the book: the way in which it is written (both large scale organization and specific wording), and the ambitious scope in pursuing this material.

Vis-a-vis how the book is written:

Pinker is a persuasive writer who marshals his arguments well, presents a variety of points of view on each topic, and is clear enough that I was never confused about who is making what point, nor was I confused about the overall logic and Pinker's conclusion. He also points out carefully where the "established research" ends and his opinion begins.

He also makes the story lively with interesting (but never confusing) ways of turning phrases, and with cultural references both to icons of his own time (Bob Dylan, Woody Allen) and to great thinkers of the past. With his references he sometimes renders the mood of the times he is discussing, as when he inserts Mr. Jones into a discussion of what people were trying to understand in the 1960s. Other times he illustrates an idea from a research result by quoting a Woody Allen passage about sex, or a St. Augustine passage about temptation.

The use of language is rather full, as is the assumption about a "framework knowledge" of political and intellectual history. When something more specialized is required he explains it, often very well. I was particularly impressed by how he explained poisson statistics and power law distributions when discussing the statistics of war. The explanation was accessible to someone who has never studied those concepts in a math or science class.

The result is an enjoyable read and deeply instructive about many subjects, even beyond the main topic of the book.


Vis-a-vis the ambitious scope in pursuing this material:

What struck me the most about this book is that Pinker is not at all lazy. He never cuts corners in how he explores material. If a certain argument needs to be made with some knowledge of statistical distributions, he will introduce all of material and then make the argument. When he turns from a more historical arena to a psychological one he introduces the relevant psychology and brain-physiology knowledge. I never got the impression that I was supposed to take any aspect of the argument on faith.

Another part of the "no laziness" is that he consistently offers up a variety of arguments on each topic. I never got the impression that he presented his favorite argument and then one devil's advocate argument pro-forma. I felt like I was always given the full picture of the debate surrounding any topic. Sometimes a debate is inconclusive, or the "pretty" explanations don't capture the full complexity, and in those cases he rolls up his sleeves and says "with no single explanation we will need to examine how several separate factors contribute to this phenomenon" - one example is the increase in violence in North America from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

I also found interesting and important the way he brings in the intellectual aspects of history. Cesare Beccaria and Immanuel Kant and many other thinkers are shown to have had a big impact on the development of ideas. He taps into other philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes, to show the origin of crucial insights in how aspects of societies evolve. He presents a convincing picture that the maturation of ideas is an important part of history, specifically how people and governments decide to wage war and to allow or disallow violence.

Pinker also discusses the development of taboos in societies, returning to it when he discusses individual psychological factors.

THe "no laziness" I observed was inspiring, reminding me of some of my scientific collaborators (not all of them, sadly) who truly complete projects rather than getting a "minimum publishable unit".

I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic (the history of violence, both warfare and crime). If you feel that you do not have some of the background to read it comfortably, you might look at some books I have discussed on goodreads - accessible history books:

[b:The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century|191280|The Way of the World From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century|David Fromkin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403175071s/191280.jpg|184943]

[b:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind|23692271|Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind|Yuval Noah Harari|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420585954s/23692271.jpg|18962767]

* [b:A History of Western Philosophy|243685|A History of Western Philosophy|Bertrand Russell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344399003s/243685.jpg|1167354]