Review of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
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 …
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.)
