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The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History…
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

by Steven Pinker (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
2,835724,975 (4.13)1 / 59
A masterly and authoritative work on the historical trends in violence and conflict within and between communit ies and polities. Like Piketty's volumes on Capital, one wishes the information and the arguments had been put forward in a more concise form! Indeed, each of the half dozen chapters could well be a medium sized book in itself, of a hundred pages or more. However, the style is direct and straightforward, and the arrangement of sections and arguments is logical and helpful, making it easy to read, even if a somewhat daunting undertaking, like a long road disappearing into the distance! ( )
  Dilip-Kumar | Aug 18, 2020 |
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Lots of gory detail on violence of the past and a generally convincing thesis in good style... Yes, we are not as violent, not in the same way, as a society.

However I would have preferred of the book was shorter and more to the point. I walk away with lots of extra visions of medieval torture that I had managed to avoid to date. ( )
  yates9 | Feb 28, 2024 |
[Pre-reading comments. I ordered this one from the library because it's one of Bill Gates's recommendations for the year. I was dismayed when it came and I saw that it not only is 700 pages long (not 806 as listed here; there's a hundred pages of back matter), but has narrow margins, small type, and almost no white space on the pages. I bet it's the equivalent of a thousand pages of more conventional book design. Yikes! But as I flipped through it reading a paragraph here and there I kept thinking, "hm, that's interesting." Let's see how far I get in it.]

Aaand no. Sorry. I just kept picking up other books instead.

  JudyGibson | Jan 26, 2023 |
Overwhelming argument that human society has become less violent over time. Nice to read some good news for a change. But proving it involves hundreds of pages about how awful people are to each other - fortunately less awful now than in the past. ( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millenia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesom punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the esesnce of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives--the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away--and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society. ( )
  Karen74Leigh | Aug 1, 2022 |
Excellent book. But somewhat long. At times it seemed like he wanted to bludgeon us with more and more data to prove his point. By the end I was finding it a little redundant and looking forward to the end.

But overall, a book I learned a lot from. ( )
  smbass | Jan 30, 2022 |
Important but later work is more succinct ( )
  dualmon | Nov 17, 2021 |
Ever the optimist, psychologist Steven Pinker posits that the world is getting better, not worse in this very long (almost 900pages) book He is certainly correct in that we no longer burn witches at the stake, and the Catholic Church has abandoned The Inquisition. However, I would like to see him bring our a revised version to update our current society in the age of Trump & Brexit. ( )
  etxgardener | Oct 18, 2021 |
Very good book. Well argued and always entertaining. Backed up by facts. A long read though. Some chapters are a hundred pages long. Each could be a book in itself. Definitely something that could change your outlook on the world though. Read it if you get a chance.
( )
  mgplavin | Oct 3, 2021 |
Although it took me a long time to read, (this is a very dense book, well written but full of examples of statistics) I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.
Steven Pinker proves that our world is getting less violent. This is flatly contradicted by our senses and experience every day. Any person alive now will be inundated with news of terrible violence around the world and believe that it's getting worse.
All the proof is here. Examined from all sorts of angles, with doubts and attempts to disprove thrown in, as in all good science. But the proof still stands.
It doesn't shy away from reality and includes all the atrocities and massacres but puts them into a greater context of all of humanity's history.
This is one book that truly has changed my life, and it continues to protect me from tendencies to total cynicism and pessimism. ( )
  Phil-James | Oct 1, 2021 |
Hardly counts as a book, more like a paper full of statistics. Could be easily published as CSV file with numbers available to parse with software. ( )
  zenlot | Sep 21, 2021 |
The 20th century was famously soaked in blood, but it turns out that it may have been the most peaceful ten decades in human history. Pinker's basic thesis is that over any time span, at any level, human beings have gotten unprecedentedly less violent, to the point where even the worst pockets of violence on the planet today would barely qualify as average in past eras, to say nothing of the the expansion of tolerance and reciprocity to entirely new areas due to the many revolutions in racial/gender/sexual equality. It's a book that has to be read to be believed, both because of the depth of its argument and because of the horrifying details on just how awful to each other people used to be. Unlikely as it may seem, humanity might actually be progressing. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
This is medicine for a severe case of misanthropitis brought on by current politics.
  Tracyalanb | Apr 4, 2021 |
This is a very big book packed with information so pretty hard to summarise. But I'll try (for my own benefit rather than for any readers). Pinker's basic thesis is that violence of various sorts has actually declined from the stone age...through early civilisations, medieval period, right through various world wars and into the current era. He musters a huge amount of evidence to support his case which is pretty much impossible to summarise here. But he's done things like taking data from pre-history burial sites and looking for signs of a violent death (such as smashed skulls or embedded spear points etc., and found that the violent deaths range from 4-60 percent with an average of 15 percent. Now this is pretty much his technique throughout the whole text. He collects the data (and sources of data are pretty varied and generally unreliable) and he takes averages. So far so good? well not exactly. At least one critic (whom I quote extensively below) claims that Pinker's averaging technique is statistically invalid there there are "fat tails" to the distribution. In other words, the "normal distribution" doesn't approach the base-line asymptotically but extends a fair way out. And events with large scale violence tend to be spread out over long periods of time..

Summary of the critics: "We propose a methodology to look at violence in particular, and other aspects of quantitative historiography in general, in a way compatible with statistical inference, which needs to accommodate the fat-tailedness of the data and the unreliability of the reports of conflicts. We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, incompatible with fat tails and non-robust to minor changes in data formatting and methodologies. There is no statistical basis to claim that “times are different” owing to the long inter-arrival times between conflicts; there is no basis to discuss any “trend”, and no scientific basis for narratives about change in risk. We describe naive empiricism under fat tails. We also establish that violence has a “true mean” that is underestimated in the track record. This is a historiographical adaptation of the results in Cirillo and Taleb (2016).
All this tells us that the absence of a conflict generating more than – say – 20 million casualties in the last 20 years is highly insufficient to state that its occurrence probability has decreased over time, given that the average inter-arrival time is 252 years (73 for rescaled), with a MAD of 267 (86 for rescaled) years! Unfortunately, we still have to wait quite some time to say that we are living in a more peaceful era; the actual data we have are not in favor nor against a structural change in violence, when we deal with war casualties. Very simply: we cannot say.
Conclusion: Is there any trend?
The short answer is no.
Our data do not support the presence of any particular trend in the number of armed conflicts over time. Humanity seems to be as belligerent as always. No increase, nor decrease. Nobel Foundation Symposium 161: The Causes of Peace. Cirillo and Taleb.

In short, for this stream of pro-war apologetics Pinker relies on pure assertion, the uncritical acceptance of official and implausible claims, and a refusal to report inconvenient evidence. Reality Denial : Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence. Review of Steven Pinker's Book. By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. Global Research, June 28, 2014".

So that's what the critics say. Basically they reckon that Pinker hasn't established his case and has been pretty naive in his use of statistics. I must confess that when I first read the book......apart from a few doubts about his data (especially the really old stuff)......I was more or less convinced. I thought there was enough data there to support his contentions. At least the broad thrust of his argument that violence has been declining. And with academics, it seems that there will always be someone around who is delighted to be able to "shoot-down" some grand new theory. Nothing wrong with that! A good theory should be able to withstand criticism. But I'm not sure that Pinker's work does stand the test.
What about the more modern stuff such as rate of deaths from terrorism worldwide? (p424). Well, I assume the basic data is ok (It's from a global data base on terrorism but it starts in 1970 (why 1970?.....a report by the Parliamentary Library in Australia says that between 1968 and 1977 casualties occurred in only 303 incidents out of a total 1019 with most lives lost in a small number of plane crashes and major assaults. So that's about 33 deaths per annum. And world population was about 3.7 billion at the time so the crude death rate would have been about 0.009 per 100,000. That's more or less what Pinker's diagram shows. But his diagram omits Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Is it because by including those countries the declining rates between 1990 and 2005 would not show a decline? In other words, Pinker has "cherry picked" his data here ...and maybe elsewhere.

It's also easy to be critical of other data such as that on p563 showing the decline in the percentage of American households with hunters (1977-2006)....from about 32% to about 18%. Ok that seems pretty straightforward ...a clear decline in violence. But there are a couple of other factors at play here. The USA was still urbanising from about 76% urban in 1977 to about 81% urban in 2006. (And one would expect rural people to be more likely to be hunters). And, simultaneously with this, the US population grew and number of households grew from 76 million to 114 million ...further diluting the absolute rural numbers. Were these changes enough to account for the statistical decline .......probably not but it does seem that in an ideal world they should be taken into account and the straightforward decline in percentage of hunter households might be less than claimed.

Anyway, the decline in violence claim is not the full story here. Pinker devotes about half the book to his ideas about the reasons for the decline. (The better angels of our natures). Pinker suggests that there are 4 types of violence:
1. Practical violence...predation....means to an end. Whilst predatory violence is purely practical, the human mind quickly backslides into evolutionarily prepared and emotionally charged categories.
2. Dominance...the drive for suprmacy. This is an adaptation to anarchy and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilising process.The emotions behind dominance are still very much part of our biology ..but they can be marginalised. The mid and late 20th century has seen a deconstruction of dominance and related virtues like manliness, honour, prestige and glory.And partly the decline in these "virtues" has come through the inroads of women into professional life.
3. Revenge...begins with the rage circuit in the mid brain-hypothalamus-amygdala pathway..it requires the disabling of empathy and gives pleasure when achieved. Apologies have been a way of defusing revenge.
4.Sadism...the joy of hurting...as demonstrated by torturers etc. (some horrific stories about cruelty and torture that people are capable of) but various reasons why it is curbed or does not get out of control...aversion to screams of pain for example.
He suggested that ideologies (especially religion) have been responsible for many of the worst things that people have done to each other ..and there is no real cure.
However, some of the forces behind our better angels are : empathy....but Pinker is rather negative about the word empathy and suggests that it's a comparatively new concept (from about 1904) and its meaning has become hopelessly scrambled. He says that the overall picture that has emerged from the study of the compassionate brain is that there is no empathy centre with empathy neutrons ..but complex patterns of activation and modulation. He prefers the term "sympathy" and suggests that what has really expanded (to reduce violence) is not so much a circle of empathy but a circle of rights....a commitment to other living things. (Doesn't place much emphasis on the reading of fiction as a way of developing sympathy). There is also evidence that self control can be strengthened both for an individual and for societies. And while recent biological evolution may have tweaked our inclinations to non-violence we have no good evidence that it actually has.
Pinker says that "the world has too much morality". Basically he suggest that a high proportion of violence is due to ideologies and casualties of religious and revolutionary wars. He talks about the "Moral sense" (p752) apparently without any concessions the fact that this is a thoroughly discredited concept in moral Philosophy. (Surely he would be aware of this). He suggests that moralised acts can be universalised; that moral beliefs are actionable (you should do it); and moralised infractions are punishable. But, as he says, just substitute idolatry or homosexuality for 'murder' and you can see how human moral sense can be a major force for evil...especially since one's moral sense tends to be of the Ugh ... That's terrible! kind of reactions. And there are are a few models for classifying the world's moral concerns. For example:
Shwerder's Ethics.......................Divinity.............l...................Community ......................l ............Autonomy.......................................................l
Haidt's Moral Foundations .......Purity/Sanctity....l In-group loyalty l authority/respect.. ..l ..Harm/care l Fairness/Reciprocity.............................l
Fiske's Relational Models .................Communal sharing ..............l Authority Ranking...l...Equality Matching l Market pricing/Rational-Legal...l

With Fiske's model, Communal sharing is where people freely share resources and conceptualise themselves as "one Flesh. His Authority ranking is defined by dominance, etc...where superiors take what they want...paternalistic and presumably evolves from our primate forebears. Equality Matching is the basis of our sense of fairness and embraces tit for tat reciprocity; Market pricing is the system of prices, rents salaries, currency, interest, credit etc., that power our modern economies...but market pricing is by no means universal...unlike the other relational models. But NO society defines everyday virtue and wrongdoing by the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative . Instead morality consists of respecting or violating one of the above relational models. But Sacred values are those that may not be traded off against anything else....eg if someone offered to purchase your child ..it's not just the money, it's the concept that is offensive. (It's the psychology of the taboo). Tetlock distinguishes three types of tradeoffs. Routine tradeoffs are those that occur within a single relationship model such as choosing to be with one friend rather than another. Taboo tradeoffs pit a sacred value in one model segment against a secular value in another.....such as selling out a friend for cash. Tragic tradeoffs pit one sacred value against another .....Sophie's choice between the lives of one of her children for the other. Politicians reframe the issue ...eg with reforming social security, instead of breaking faith with our senior citizens it becomes lifting the burden on hardworking tax-payers.
In traditional western marriages the husband wielded authority over the wife. This model was mostly overturned in the 1970s..and some couples switched to equality matching. Though the members of one society may allow land to be sold and be bartered that another society does the same for brides, or vice versa. Differences in the deployment of the relationship models also define political philosophies: Fascism, feudalism, theocracy are based on the primal relational models of communal sharing and authority ranking. The interests of an individual are subsumed within the community. In several surveys, Haidt has shown that liberals believe that morality is a matter of preventing harm and enforcing fairness. Conservatives give equal weight to all five foundations including In-group loyalty, (stability, tradition and patriotism)....Purity/Sanctity, (values such as propriety, decency and religious observance....and Authority/Respect, (values such as respect for authority, deference to God, acknowledgement of gender roles. Ideologues at each pole are apt to regard their opposite number as amoral.
Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful...such as dueling, bullfighting and jingoistic war. It's humour. it works by confronting an audience with an incongruity; ...eg Woody Allen...."I'm very proud of this watch....my Grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed"....It works because of the switch from communal sharing (in the family) to Market Pricing. But if people fall outside your particular relationship model they tend to get de-humanised and thus be fair game for conquest, rape, assassination etc.
The historical movements that have accompanied the decline in violence have been a move from left to right with the relationship models: from communal values towards market pricing. And we are probably going to have proponents of each of the sub sets in the models with us for a long while...but if the communal sharing can be expanded to embrace not just "my group" but the whole of humankind...then we have a way to progress. What's causing the shift from left to right? Well one driver is increasing mobility and mingling of individuals; a second factor is the objective study of history...and Pinker points to the use of reason and increasing intelligence (as measured by rising IQ scores). Empathy, self control and the moral sense have been around since ever there were humans but they have been unable to prevent war slavery, institutionalised sadism etc. Reason offers us the best way forward. It can generate an unlimited number of new ideas and its own logic should impel it to respect the ever increasing needs of others.
There are a few forces that are important to the processes of lessening violence:
1. Weaponry and disarmament: Not the main issue. When people are rapacious or terrified they develop the weapons they need; when cooler heads prevail , the weapons rust in peace.
2. Resources and power: they may be a vital dynamic in history but offer little insight into the grand trends of violence. Wealth really originates with what you do with resources (processing/marketing etc) rather than who has them. Trade is an alternate way of securing resources.
3. Affluence: There is a tangled relationship between wealth and violence or poverty and violence and a lot of our violence comes from destructive ideologies rather then enough wealth.
4. Religion:Despite all the evidence of the previous 800 pages, Pinker can't bring himself to confirm that Religion has been a major contributor to violence. He rather weakly concludes that it is when fundamentalist forces stand athwart the currents (of ecumenicalism, and other liberalising forces) and impose tribalism, authoritarian and puritanical constraints that religion becomes a cause for violence.
And there are five developments that have pushed the works in a peaceful direction:
1. the Leviathan ...the larger state with a monopoly on force...though just enough force into the right cells of the decision matrix.
2. Gentle Commerce...seems to work as a positive sum game we don't know as yet whether exchange itself reduces tensions. (Having worked in this field myself, I might say that trade brings people into contact and over time usually builds trust and understanding of the different slices of the matrix that are important to others...so I think trade is an important force towards the reduction of violence ..though it can be used in reverse..in trade sanctions and trade wars).
3. Feminisation...direct political empowerment; deflation of manly honour, promotion of marriage on women's terms; the right of girls to be born and women's control over their own reproduction have been forces in the decline of violence .
4. The expanding circle...of sympathy by living in a more cosmopolitan society, and opportunities for taking the other's point of view; the technological revolution of printing leading to books, leading to a reading revolution in which the seeds of the humanitarian revolution could take root...mass media...the global village and the electronic village have helped along the long peace.
5. The escalator of reason....when cosmopolitan currents bring people together; where freedom of speech allows discussion to go where it pleases; when histories failed experiments are held up to the light. the evidence suggests that the value systems evolve in the direction of liberal humanism.
As I said at the start: this is a big book packed with ideas and information. Whether the critics are right about his failure to correctly interpret the statistics...I'm not sure. I think they are probably right at the micro level. Still I think Pinker makes his point reasonably well and his reasons for the move towards liberal humanism seem cogent and logical. Happy to give it 5 stars. ( )
  booktsunami | Mar 6, 2021 |
enormously long, dry and dense.

says interesting things, but you'll learn a lot more through reading a bunch of reviews and critiques of the book rather than reading this whole book. ( )
  mjhunt | Jan 22, 2021 |
Pinker makes a bunch of arguments in a variety of ways generally pushing the argument that violence has declined over the centuries through a variety of things which could broadly be called “progress”. The book is so wide ranging that there isn’t much more of a central argument than that, although there are some individual interesting arguments.

What he seems to fail to take into account is the increased potential via technology and interconnectednees to let smaller groups (and eventually individuals) essentially wage large scale violence against the broader world. I will accept his broad arguments for decreasing desire by individuals, groups, and societies to violence, but this only really applies to “mainstream” society; it doesn’t matter if 6.5b people are increasingly successful and peaceful if a sufficient minority (which may someday consist of a single individual) decides to engage in mass scale violence. ( )
  octal | Jan 1, 2021 |
I've never wanted to call a book "too long" until I read this.

The premise is interesting, the meat of the content brilliant, and the author strikes the right tone to keep what could be a very depressing topic(the history of human violence and the factors of its decline) very inspirational and positive. I'll leave out any analysis of the validity of his premise because really, it's a prolonged discussion of a strongly held and well-supported idea rather than a forced ideology, which I appreciate. Pinker leaves plenty of room to be proven wrong and in that way, makes his ideas seem that much more valid.

But man, oh man. A good editor could easily have trimmed a good 300 pages from this and kept all of the relevant information intact. There were points, when reading some belabored accounting of the math and science leading to some conclusion-or-other where I found myself wondering if the author understood the concepts himself. There is good information peppered with salient thinking/discussion points bogged down by over explanation and wordy tangents on things that have already been explained pretty sufficiently.

I might use this as a reference, and I've highlighted massive portions of the book. However, I don't see myself recommending this to anyone because it's not the most enjoyable of reads when taken in its entirety. ( )
  EQReader | Dec 1, 2020 |
Pinker's “Better Angels of Our Nature” is a terrible book that no historian takes seriously. There are numerous problems with it so I'll just highlight a few of the biggest.

1. The central premise is a straw man. Nobody says that the 20th century was the most violent century ever, apart from people speaking in a purely rhetorical way. It's not an argument that needs to be disproved. Moreover, everyone from professional historians to the person in the street is aware that, at least in the West, violence is less prevalent than it was in the past: there is no dueling or corporal punishment, less capital punishment and torture, fewer cruel sports, etc. So the central argument of the book is neither original nor interesting.

2. The use of data is shambolic. Pinker just takes any figure that suits his argument and accepts it uncritically, including figures from the website of an amateur "atrocity expert" (I'm not joking). He never confronts the problem that there are no reliable figures for violent death (or anything else) from more than 200-400 years ago (depending on country). His unoriginal argument may be correct, but it can't be quantified.

3. He treats key concepts such as "war" as if they're stable across millennia and across different civilizations, when they are not. Our definition of war relies on a certain understanding of public and private that was utterly different in earlier periods. An example of a completely stupid argument is his claim that in the modern period the frequency of wars decreased while their size increased until we reached huge events like the First World War. He fails to recognize that something like WW1 is constructed this way by historians. It could equally be described as several different wars. Or it could be made bigger still by including the Balkan Wars, the Turkish War of Independence, the Russian and Chinese civil wars, etc. The way we categorize these things are just conventions and you can't engage in comparison without at least recognizing this and engaging the problem.

4. Pinker's explanation for the decline in violence is pretty much borrowed in its entirety from a 60-year-old sociology text, Norbert Elias's Civilizing Process, without any substantial critique.

Overall, the book is unoriginal in both its argument and explanation, and only pretends to be original by inventing a non-existent "conventional view" to argue against. Pinker's attempt to bolster the argument with figures is laughably bad and of no value whatsoever. There is no serious engagement with the huge historical scholarship on the topic (if Pinker had read any, it would have immediately blown up his straw man). The book is an amateurish attempt at history by a pop psychologist who didn't bother to learn even the most basic elements of historical method. ( )
  antao | Aug 22, 2020 |
A masterly and authoritative work on the historical trends in violence and conflict within and between communit ies and polities. Like Piketty's volumes on Capital, one wishes the information and the arguments had been put forward in a more concise form! Indeed, each of the half dozen chapters could well be a medium sized book in itself, of a hundred pages or more. However, the style is direct and straightforward, and the arrangement of sections and arguments is logical and helpful, making it easy to read, even if a somewhat daunting undertaking, like a long road disappearing into the distance! ( )
  Dilip-Kumar | Aug 18, 2020 |
Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try David Giltinan's review .

But also http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-wes... is worthy of a read.

Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.
  bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |
Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try David Giltinan's review .

But also http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-wes... is worthy of a read.

Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.
  bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |
Pinker has disappointed me for so long that it is no surprise to me to discover that this is the work of a charlatan. Here on goodreads try David Giltinan's review .

But also http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-wes... is worthy of a read.

Is his basic message pretty much that if first world white people aren't dying, then violence is decreasing? And has this been greeted with great approbation in - ummm - the first white world? Oh deary me.
  bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |
I had - eventually - to agree with the author. While the 20th century was awful, it was the best we've had so far. So there is hope for the 21st. Maybe we have to accept 2 truths: human beings are terrible to one another but it is getting better despite how bad things still are. I guess that's something. ( )
  StephenCummins | Mar 31, 2020 |
This book... tome really (it's really really long) is stunningly good and so very clearly written and researched. I've been long thinking about this topic, but it took a Stephen Pinker to confirm most of my suspicions as to why violence has not only declined but dramatically declined. He then, of course, adds plentiful evidence, reasoning, numbers, and description that paints a contextually rich historical picture of where we once were, and where we are today.

I can't recommend this book enough. It's worth the time to work your way through it. Outstanding accomplishment. ( )
  ErrantRuminant | Mar 13, 2020 |
Pinker, Steven (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking Press. 2011. ISBN 9781101544648. Pagine 832. 25,29 $

Di Steven Pinkert su questo blog abbiamo parlato più d’una volta, sia recensendo una sua opera precedente (The Stuff of Thought), sia accennando di sguincio a The Blank Slate nella recensione di The Moral Animal di Robert Wright, sia – di recente – parlando dell’influenza che Robert Trivers ha avuto su di lui (The Folly of Fools).

Pinker, oltre che un autore controverso, è un autore che ama le controversie e – dopo avere conseguito una meritata notorietà come studioso del linguaggio e delle sue origini – ha voluto affrontare nelle sue opere destinate al pubblico non specialistico temi che sembravano fatti apposta per provocare reazioni anche emotive, non solo dalla destra repubblicana (Pinker è canadese ma insegna a Harvard) e dai credenti di qualunque religione, ma anche nella sinistra legata a quello che nel 1992 John Tooby e Leda Cosmides hanno definito “Standard Social Science Model” (The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture).

Come già The Blank Slate, anche questo The Better Angels of Our Nature conta detrattori e sostenitori, affratellati soltanto dalla vis polemica con cui sostengono tesi contrapposte. Pinker, per la verità, spiega il perché del suo interesse per il tema della violenza nella storia e nelle società umane come uno sbocco naturale dei suoi interessi:

Many people have asked me how I became involved in the analysis of violence. It should not be a mystery: violence is a natural concern for anyone who studies human nature. I first learned of the decline of violence from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s classic book in evolutionary psychology, Homicide, in which they examined the high rates of violent death in nonstate societies and the decline in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present. In several of my previous books I cited those downward trends, together with humane developments such as the abolition of slavery, despotism, and cruel punishments in the history of the West, in support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. [256: il riferimento è alla posizione sull'edizione Kindle]

Ma questo non spiega (mi pare) né la passione con cui l’autore affronta l’argomento (in un tour de force di oltre 800 pagine!) né la virulenza dei detrattori, che hanno accusato Pinker un po’ di tutto, e soprattutto di usare dati statistici di dubbia robustezza. Sospetto che le divisioni di campo siano da attribuire ad almeno due altre ragioni. La prima la individua lo stesso Pinker:

The question of whether the arithmetic sign of trends in violence is positive or negative also bears on our conception of human nature. Though theories of human nature rooted in biology are often associated with fatalism about violence, and the theory that the mind is a blank slate is associated with progress, in my view it is the other way around. [142: il corsivo è mio]

Sospetto che una seconda spiegazione sia più sgradevole per chi si professa di sinistra: la sinistra è storicamente e ideologicamente legata alla critica sociale, nel senso che fa leva sull’insoddisfazione sullo stato di cose presenti e sull’ipotesi che esse siano destinate a peggiorare (“o socialismo o barbarie”, per esprimersi con la Juniusbroschüre di Rosa Luxemburg), a meno di una vigorosa correzione di rotta apportata dal movimento di sinistra stesso. Questo, incidentalmente ma non troppo, mi sembra alla radice di un’altra frase-slogan molto citata – quella, attribuita ad Antonio Gramsci, su “pessimismo della ragione e ottimismo della volontà”. In realtà, anche se non sono né gramsciano né gramscista, a me risulta che abbia scritto, nella lettera dal carcere del 19 dicembre 1929:

Mi pare che in tali condizioni, prolungate per anni, con tali esperienze psicologiche, l’uomo dovrebbe aver raggiunto il grado massimo di serenità stoica, e aver acquistato una tale convinzione profonda che l’uomo ha in se stesso la sorgente delle proprie forze morali, che tutto dipende da lui, dalla sua energia, dalla sua volontà, dalla ferrea coerenza dei fini che si propone e dei mezzi che esplica per attuarli – da non disperare mai piú e non cadere piú in quegli stati d’animo volgari e banali che si chiamano pessimismo e ottimismo. Il mio stato d’animo sintetizza questi due sentimenti e li supera: sono pessimista con l’intelligenza, ma ottimista per la volontà. Penso, in ogni circostanza, alla ipotesi peggiore, per mettere in movimento tutte le riserve di volontà ed essere in grado di abbattere l’ostacolo. Non mi sono fatto mai illusioni e non ho avuto mai delusioni. Mi sono specialmente sempre armato di una pazienza illimitata, non passiva, inerte, ma animata di perseveranza. [i corsivi sono miei]

E purtroppo, qualche anno più tardi, a Gramsci l’ottimismo si era ormai esaurito:

Fino a qualche tempo fa io ero, per cosí dire, pessimista con l’intelligenza e ottimista con la volontà. Cioè, sebbene vedessi lucidamente tutte le condizioni sfavorevoli e fortemente sfavorevoli a ogni miglioramento nella mia situazione (tanto generale, per ciò che riguarda la mia posizione giuridica, come particolare, per ciò che riguarda la mia salute fisica immediata), tuttavia pensavo che con uno sforzo razionalmente condotto, condotto con pazienza e accortezza, senza trascurare nulla nell’organizzare i pochi elementi favorevoli e nel cercare di immunizzare i moltissimi elementi sfavorevoli, fosse stato possibile di ottenere un qualche risultato apprezzabile, di ottenere per lo meno di poter vivere fisicamente, di arrestare il terribile consumo di energie vitali che progressivamente mi sta prostrando. Oggi non penso piú cosí. Ciò non vuol dire che abbia deciso di arrendermi, per cosí dire. Ma significa che non vedo piú nessuna uscita concreta e non posso piú contare su nessuna riserva di forze da esplicare. [29 maggio 1933]

Insomma – scusate la lunga divagazione – ma sospetto che la sinistra abbia bisogno di poter dire che le cose vanno male e tendono al peggio (anche i doverosi riferimenti al “tanto peggio, tanto meglio” e alla “caduta tendenziale del saggio del profitto” meriterebbero lunghe digressioni, che però per il momento ci risparmiamo) per convincere cittadini ed elettori a sostenerla e, nei casi peggiori, per giustificare le proprie malefatte (“il fine giustifica i mezzi“).

Pinker si pone invece nella prospettiva che (recensendo Risk di Dan Gardner, il cui ultimo capitolo è intitolato There’s never been a better time to be alive) ho chiamato del neo-ottimismo quantitativamente fondato, il cui manifesto è The Rational Optimist di Matt Ridley. Rispetto a quest’ultimo, che è più liberista che liberal (Ridley si chiama in realtà Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, figlio dell’omonimo 4th Viscount e di Lady Anne Katharine Gabrielle Lumley, nipote di un ministro conservatore, etoniano e oxfordiano, proprietario di un avito maniero in cui risiede, presidente della banca di famiglia Northern Rock fino al fallimento del 2007: insomma uno di quegli inglesi come non ne fanno più. Ha una rubrica fissa, Mind & Matter, sul Wall Street Journal. E rimasto famoso un intervento su Edge nel 2006 il cui titolo dice tutto: Government is the problem not the solution), Pinker è però su una linea più liberal (nel senso americano del termine), anche se – pur avendovi partecipato – considera la controcultura e i movimenti di protesta degli anni Sessanta un arretramento nel progresso storico verso una società meno violenta.

Nel complesso, è un libro da leggere e da raccomandare, sia perché le sue tesi, anche quando e qualora non le si condivida, sono uno stimolo importante alla riflessione liberata dai preconcetti che inevitabilmente abbiamo sull’argomento; sia perché le 800 pagine del libro sono talmente ricche di digressioni e di spunti intelligenti da meritare la lettura anche solo per incontrare idee e riflessioni inconsuete e territori poco battuti.

Per avere un’idea del libro e del suo autore vi presento qui sotto un suo intervento TED del 2007 (una lezione più recente ma molto più lunga a una master class di Edge la trovate qui).

***

Rinuncio a mettere le centinaia (letteralmente) di passi che mi sono annotato, per limitarmi a quelli che mi sembrano di interesse più generale. Il riferimento è come di consueto alle posizioni sul Kindle:

In the teeth of these preconceptions, I will have to persuade you with numbers, which I will glean from datasets and depict in graphs. In each case I’ll explain where the numbers came from and do my best to interpret the ways they fall into place. [161]

Honor is a bubble that can be inflated by some parts of human nature, such as the drive for prestige and the entrenchment of norms, and popped by others, such as a sense of humor. [782]

“Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.” [1475: è una citazione di Tacito]

For as long as I have known how to eat with utensils, I have struggled with the rule of table manners that says that you may not guide food onto your fork with your knife. To be sure, I have the dexterity to capture chunks of food that have enough mass to stay put as I scoot my fork under them. But my feeble cerebellum is no match for finely diced cubes or slippery little spheres that ricochet and roll at the touch of the tines. I chase them around the plate, desperately seeking a ridge or a slope that will give me the needed purchase, hoping they will not reach escape velocity and come to rest on the tablecloth. On occasion I have seized the moment when my dining companion glances away and have placed my knife to block their getaway before she turns back to catch me in this faux pas. Anything to avoid the ignominy, the boorishness, the intolerable uncouthness of using a knife for some purpose other than cutting. Give me a lever long enough, said Archimedes, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. But if he knew his table manners, he could not have moved some peas onto his fork with his knife! [1496]

Another historical change was that homicides in which one man kills another man who is unrelated to him declined far more rapidly than did the killing of children, parents, spouses, and siblings. This is a common pattern in homicide statistics, sometimes called Verkko’s Law: rates of male-on-male violence fluctuate more across different times and places than rates of domestic violence involving women or kin. [1572]

[…] we will look at a faculty of the mind that psychologists call self-control, delay of gratification, and shallow temporal discounting and that laypeople call counting to ten, holding your horses, biting your tongue, saving for a rainy day, and keeping your pecker in your pocket. We will also look at a faculty that psychologists call empathy, intuitive psychology, perspective-taking, and theory of mind and that lay people call getting into other people’s heads, seeing the world from their point of view, walking a mile in their moccasins, and feeling their pain. [1742]

A classic positive-sum game in economic life is the trading of surpluses. […] Of course, an exchange at a single moment in time only pays when there is a division of labor. […] A fundamental insight of modern economics is that the key to the creation of wealth is a division of labor, in which specialists learn to produce a commodity with increasing cost-effectiveness and have the means to exchange their specialized products efficiently. [1820-1823]

[…] with Homo sapiens a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood. [2356]

[…] the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it’s a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response. [2882]

«First, . . . set fire to their synagogues or schools and . . . bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them…. Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed…. Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them…. Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb…. Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews…. Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen. 3[:19]). For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. Let us emulate the common sense of other nations . . . [and] eject them forever from the country». [3150: la citazione è da Martin Lutero]

«Some say that because the crime consists only of words there is no cause for such severe punishment. But we muzzle dogs; shall we leave men free to open their mouths and say what they please? . . . God makes it plain that the false prophet is to be stoned without mercy. We are to crush beneath our heels all natural affections when his honour is at stake. The father should not spare his child, nor the husband his wife, nor the friend that friend who is dearer to him than life». [3163: questo, per par condicio, è Calvino]

Beccaria began from first principles, namely that the goal of a system of justice is to attain “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (a phrase later adopted by Jeremy Bentham as the motto of utilitarianism). [3293]

[…] democracies tend to avoid wars because the benefits of war go to a country’s leaders whereas the costs are paid by its citizens. [3670]

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions. [3839]

Oppressive autocrats can remain in power even when their citizens despise them because of a conundrum that economists call the social dilemma or free-rider problem. In a dictatorship, the autocrat and his henchmen have a strong incentive to stay in power, but no individual citizen has an incentive to depose him, because the rebel would assume all the risks of the dictator’s reprisals while the benefits of democracy would flow diffusely to everyone in the country. [3940]

Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time. [3978]

The universality of reason is a momentous realization, because it defines a place for morality. [3999]

Morality […] is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.[ 4010-4011]

[…] narratives without statistics are blind, statistics without narratives are empty. [4215]

In the case of a war of attrition, one can imagine a leader who has a changing willingness to suffer a cost over time, increasing as the conflict proceeds and his resolve toughens. His motto would be: “We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain.” This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making. [4725]

One of the dangers of “self-determination” is that there is really no such thing as a “nation” in the sense of an ethnocultural group that coincides with a patch of real estate. [5170]

“The greatness of the idea of European integration on democratic foundations is its capacity to overcome the old Herderian idea of the nation state as the highest expression of national life.” [5534: l'ha scritto Vaclav Havel]

Though it’s tempting to think of this stereotyping as a kind of mental defect, categorization is indispensable to intelligence. Categories allow us to make inferences from a few observed qualities to a larger number of unobserved ones. [6891]

The capital necessary to prosper in middlemen occupations consists mainly of expertise rather than land or factories, so it is easily shared among kin and friends, and it is highly portable. [7038]

For all the rigor that a logistic regression offers, it is essentially a meat grinder that takes a set of variables as input and extrudes a probability as output. What it hides is the vastly skewed distribution […] [7312]

Still, you might ask, isn’t it the essence of science to make falsifiable predictions? Shouldn’t any claim to understanding the past be evaluated by its ability to extrapolate into the future? Oh, all right. I predict that the chance that a major episode of violence will break out in the next decade—a conflict with 100,000 deaths in a year, or a million deaths overall—is 9.7 percent. How did I come up with that number? Well, it’s small enough to capture the intuition “probably not,” but not so small that if such an event did occur I would be shown to be flat-out wrong. My point, of course, is that the concept of scientific prediction is meaningless when it comes to a single event—in this case, the eruption of mass violence in the next decade. [7726]

Junk statistics from advocacy groups are slung around and become common knowledge, such as the incredible factoid that one in four university students has been raped. [8552]

Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex’s unalloyed desires. Pornography for men is visual, anatomical, impulsive, floridly promiscuous, and devoid of context and character. Erotica for women is far more likely to be verbal, psychological, reflective, serially monogamous, and rich in context and character. Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. [8616] ( )
  Boris.Limpopo | Apr 29, 2019 |
I grabbed this book when I found out that Bill Gates mentioned that, for him, it was the most inspiring book he has ever read.

The book contradicts everything that we hear on TV or we read on the Internet. It is a rich, earnest source of information about the history of violence and an insightful and comprehensive analysis of factors which created the modern world.

On 600 pages (more than 200 pages of notes, references and the index excluded) you will read about the reduction of vicious interpersonal violence such as cutting off noses, the elimination of cruel practices like a human sacrifice... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/2018/09/19/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-why-vi... ( )
  LeadersAreReaders | Feb 19, 2019 |
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2 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.

Editions: 1846140943, 0141034645

 

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