★★★★☆ Violence has declined, and no one really knows why

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, is about a fact that many people find startling: violence has declined steadily over the course of history, and we now live in the least violent time in human history. Wait, WHAT!?! Is that actually a FACT? Yes, it is, and the most compelling and valuable accomplishment of Better Angels is to document it. Pinker also spends a lot of ink in trying to explain the decline of violence, and in this he is less successful.

There are two aspects of the way Pinker thinks that will put off many readers. (Well, there are more than two, but these two are somewhat intentional.) First, Pinker's argument is quantitative. If you don't like or understand numbers, his arguments will whizz right past you. For instance, he laments "the innumeracy of our journalistic and intellectual culture," giving this example

The journalist Michael Kinsley recently wrote, “It is a crushing disappointment that Boomers entered adulthood with Americans killing and dying halfway around the world, and now, as Boomers reach retirement and beyond, our country is doing the same damned thing.” This assumes that 5,000 Americans dying is the same damned thing as 58,000 Americans dying, and that a hundred thousand Iraqis being killed is the same damned thing as several million Vietnamese being killed.

If you can't distinguish 5,000 from 58,000, you're not going to get much out of Better Angels. Second, in the interest of trying to explain why violence has described, Pinker often finds himself obliged to try to understand why violence happens. To an undiscerning reader, such explanations may look like justifications. I don't think they are intended to be that or are that, but I am quite certain that some readers will be offended.

Better Angels has ten chapters. The first, "A Foreign Country", is a relatively brief survey of some sources and facts we are all familiar with, whose aim is to convince you that it is in fact plausible that the past was much more violent than the present. Chapters 2-7 then carefully document in quantitative detail six ways in which we have become less violent, from decreases in war and murder through decreased abuse of children, women, and animals. Chapters 8 and 9 are Pinker the professional psychologist attempting to explain the psychology of the processes that he believes underlie the reduction in violence. The final chapter, chapter 10, is a kind of executive summary of the entire book.

Chapters 2-7 are the heart of the book. I found them quite convincing overall. You aren't going to believe everything that Pinker tells you. And experts have sniped around the edges some of his figures. But the reduction in violence he documents is so huge, something like a 150-fold decrease in violent death over the course of history, that none of the revisions some experts would like to make to his figures amounts to more than a minor correction.

Better Angels has one major fault -- it is far too long. It is hugely bulked out by Pinker's attempts to identify causes for the trends he documents, and to document the scientific evidence, where it exists, for these causes. He clearly worked very hard on explanations, and it pains me to say that they are not very convincing. You will believe them if you already believed them before reading.

I would advise a first-time reader to begin with chapter 10. Then read chapters 1-7. In chapters 2-7 I would advise skimming or skipping the attempted explanations -- pay most attention to the parts that document the trends in violence. (These are usually obvious by the presence of large numbers of down-sloping graphs.) Read chapters 8 and 9 only if you are a glutton for tedium.

This review sounds more negative than I wanted it to. Better Angels is actually a very good book. At least it contains one.

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