The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
By Steven Pinker
Viking Adult (2011)

In a single book Steven Pinker changes the world twice. First, he presents exhaustive evidence that the tragic view of history is wrong and always has been. A close examination of the data shows that in every millennium, century, and decade, humans have been drastically reducing violence, cruelty, and injustice—right down to the present year. A trend that consistent is not luck; it has to be structural.

So, second, he boldly founds a discipline that might as well be called “psychohistory.” As a Harvard psychologist and public intellectual (author of The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate), he sought causes for the phenomenon
 he’s reporting—why violence has declined. He found the answer outside the usual subjects of historians—it wasn’t in the outcomes of wars nor the personalities and successes of national leaders; nor in religions, economics, or global exploration. Real ethical progress, he found, came from 
a sequence of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and mental tricks employed by whole societies to change their collective mind and behavior in a peaceful direction.

He names six historical events. The arrival of cities 
and governments 5,000 years ago reduced human lethality fivefold. Another tenfold reduction came with the aggregation into large kingdoms. The Enlightenment brought “the first organized movements to abolish socially sanctioned forms of violence like despotism, slavery, dueling, torture, superstitious killing, sadistic punishment, and cruelty to animals.” Following World War II there has been a durable “Long Peace”—with zero use of nuclear weapons, zero direct combat between superpowers or great powers, zero interstate combats in Europe (where there used to be “two new armed conflicts a year since 1400”), zero expansion of territory by a developed country through conquest, zero nations that have disappeared through conquest. And ever since 1948 there has been a growing “rights revolution” protecting minorities, women, children, and animals.

Pinker sees these
 events being driven by
 five historical forces. Government monopoly on violence takes it out of amateur hands. Growing trade sets in motion a positive-sum game encouraging cooperation rather than conflict. Since violence is routinely male, the feminization of the world helps calm things down. Literacy and travel teach empathy with the lives of people formerly considered alien. Science and reason “reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.”

Psychologist Pinker also examines how human nature gradually reforms itself by using its “better angels”— empathy, ethical sense, reason, and self-control—to manage its inborn impulses for revenge, sadism, glory, and the simplistic joys of ideology.

Humanity’s great project of civilizing itself is far from complete, but this summary look at how far we’ve come builds confidence that the task will be completed and illu- minates how to get there.

–STEWART BRAND

Inside The Book

Seen through modern eyes, the Bible depicts a world that is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their own families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and stolen like sex toys. And Yaweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or no reason at all.

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Cannibalism may have been so common in prehistory as to have affected our evolution: our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases that are transmitted by cannibalism.

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Over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor—the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions.

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Challenge a person’s beliefs and you are challenging his dignity, his social standing, and his power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile.... Since a belief based on faith cannot be defended by persuading skeptics that it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

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The chronological sequence in which the Age of Reason preceded the Humanitarian Revolution reminds us of [a point] captured in Voltaire’s quip that absurdities lead to atrocities. A debunking of hogwash, such as that gods demand sacrifices, witches cast spells, heretics go to hell, Jews poison wells, animals are insensate, children are possessed, Africans are brutish, and kings rule by divine right, is bound to take many rationales for violence with it.

The Humanitarian Revolution saw the decline of many barbaric practices that had been unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. They include torture and mutilation as routine punishment, cruelty as entertainment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means
of acquiring real estate, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, and dueling as a form of conflict resolution.

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The idea of democracy, once loosed on the world, would eventually infect larger and larger portions of it, and ... would turn out to be the greatest violence reduction technology in human history since the appearance of government itself.... Two nations that are democracies
can each recognize the validity of the principles that govern the other. This sets them apart from theocracies based on parochial faiths and from autocracies based on a clan, dynasty, or charismatic leader.

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In his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, the historian Ben Kiernan notes another curious feature of utopian ideologies. Time and again they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise which they seek to restore as a healthful substitute for prevailing urban decadence.... It was agrarian utopianism that lay behind Hitler’s dual obsessions: his loathing of Jewry, whom he associated with commerce and cities,
and his deranged plan to depopulate eastern Europe to provide farmland for German city-dwellers to colonize. Mao’s massive agrarian communes and Pol Pot’s forced expulsion of Cambodian City-dwellers to rural killing fields are other examples.

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