The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined

Abstract

Reviews the book, The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined by Steven Pinker (see record 2011-19860-000). This thick tome argues that humanity has enjoyed a global decline of violence in every sense: over centuries and millennia, in every corner of the globe, and with respect to all kinds of physical violence from war, to genocide, to torture and cruel punishment, to slavery, bloody vendetta and even in the treatment of animals. It is an audacious thesis and deliberately so. With it, Pinker seems intent on settling a few accounts. Pinker's attempt to marshal the numbers to debunk the myth of the noble savage is on the whole less convincing than his statistical challenge to the 'lugubrious conventional wisdom' about rates of violence in modern societies. The main goal of the following five chapters is to document the gradual decline of violence in North Atlantic societies from the Middle Ages to the present and this notwithstanding two world wars, the holocaust, the crushing dictatorships of Russia and Cambodia, the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, etc. The basic claim becomes far more intuitively plausible when one bears in mind that Pinker is concerned with relative rates of violence not absolute ones. The point is almost certainly valid and undoubtedly important but the whole approach seems too high-brow to have much meaning for the book's primary audience of educated Americans. These readers, I expect, are exercised less by death tolls and homicide rates in distant times and places than by statistical trends in violence at home and in their own lifetimes. It comes as something of a surprise, then, that when Pinker deals with this issue, he takes declining US crime rates as entirely given. The really big idea in this really big book, though, is its explanatory account of the widespread decline of violence around the world. The measure of this book's success will be its ability to instill in readers a renewed sense of gratitude towards modernity and optimism about humanity's future. Gratitude, because despite modernity's many unprecedented challenges, it has at least managed to largely eradicate one social scourge. Optimism, because if we can understand what drove violence down we can make social choices that keep our inner demons in check and unleash our better angels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).