The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

4.15 of 5 stars 4.15 · rating details · 3,096 ratings · 443 reviews

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year

The author of The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence.

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 Pinke...more

Hardcover, 832 pages

Published October 4th 2011 by Viking Adult (first published January 1st 2011)

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Sep 24, 2012 knig rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

I have a peripheral awareness that Pinker awakens red penitus in a goodly proportion of his stalwart readers: but I don’t know why. I shan’t delve into this before I write up ‘better angels’: don’t want to be distracted by ‘noise’.

800 pages of socio-economic postulating: always an inexact science, is going to rub someone the wrong way hither or thither. We see what we want to see, and 800 pages of the ‘humanities’ is like waving a red flag to a bull: plenty of scope to flare up, statistically s...more

29 likes · like · see review

Feb 11, 2012 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Richard by: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html

Shelves: non-fiction, social-political, awaiting-review, own

Steven Pinker certain ranges widely in intellectual circles. Although he is nominally a professor of psychology at Harvard, but even with specialties (per Wikipedia) in experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, he somehow dove into history to present one of the best TED Talks, back in 2007: Steven Pinker on the myth of violence (watch those nineteen minutes, if you haven't already).

Wonderfully, he has now followed that presentation up with an entire volume.

Peter Singer wrote the...more

18 likes · like · see review

Jan 09, 2012 Miquixote rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, overrated, 60a, history, academic, a, intellectual-value-5, enjoyment-value-4

Breathtakingly mindless for 2/5 of the book, blowhard the whole way through.

Sometimes a good joke is more revealing than 800 pages of blowhardness. Pinker gives himself away with this quote by George Carlin on page 622: I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!...

...I hope I am not the only one who thinks it is not necessarily a good thing to...more

33 likes · like · see review

Apr 30, 2013 Blaine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-cultural, social-science

This book is sure to piss off or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but especially postmodern-liberal-progressive types: "What? You gotta be kidding - violence has declined over time? No frikin' way - just look at the news." But be assured - after you read only a few pages of this book, you'll be reminded of what life used be like in the foreign country called the Past and you just might change your tune and recognize how different life is today.

Pinker's basic thesis i...more

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Feb 14, 2012 David rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: disappointing, never-gonna-finish, intellectual-con-artist-at-work, read-in-2012

This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book.

I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (8...more This seems like a stunning misstep by the normally brilliant Steven Pinker. His ability to write with extraordinary force and clarity has been demonstrated repeatedly in two separate areas of expertise -- linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, the brilliance of his earlier books in those areas is nowhere in evidence in this regrettable dog's breakfast of a book.

I found it almost unreadable - poorly argued, undisciplined, self-indulgent, and - despite its grotesquely bloated length (800 pages) - support for its main thesis is woefully inadequate, dependent on a highly selective interpretation of existing data and completely unconvincing. Pinker can sling the statistical jargon (Poisson processes, power laws, the gambler's fallacy, the Gini coefficient) like a pro, but all the jargon in the world cannot make up for his recurrent habit of over- or mis-interpreting data whose limitations he consistently glosses over.

The jacket cover breathlessly promises "more than a hundred graphs and maps". Any graph is open to misinterpretation. Three of the most common ways of doing so are (i) selective interpretation (ignoring or explaining away the data that don't fit one's preconceived ideas) (ii) inappropriate extrapolation beyond the range of available data and (iii) failure to acknowledge the data's limitations, such as likely sources of bias, or extreme sparsity of information.

Pinker commits each of these errors, with such numbing frequency that one loses all respect. We are seriously asked to draw conclusions from a graph of the "rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts between 1900 and 2005" (Figure 6-1) while being instructed to ignore the figures for the first and second world wars. After all, "the world has seen nothing close to that level since". This kind of rubbish insults the intelligence. Or you could look at Figure 7-28. Lest you be distracted by the actual data, Pinker has helpfully superimposed some very impressive looking solid lines documenting his cheerful belief in the rise of vegetarianism. These are much darker than the actual data points, presumably in the hope that the reader might be distracted from noting their complete lack of fit to the data. Worried about racially motivated killing of black people? Here are the yearly data (number of such killings) from 1996 to 2008:

5,3,3,4,3,3,3,4,1,2,1,1,1

Pinker's gleeful trumpeting of a five-fold reduction seems to rest on a pretty flimsy foundation to me. Not to mention being a little premature.

But nothing as inconvenient as facts, or their absence, can stand in the way of a man who has already decided he knows the answer. The threat of nuclear holocaust? Exaggerated, because - as any fool can see - nuclear weapons have never been used in wartime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One imagines this argument must be of great comfort to those who survived those particular "anomalies". Just as Pinker's breezy insistence that the only meaningful way to interpret the number of people killed in a given conflict is relative to the world's population at the time is surely meaningless to anyone who has lost a family member in battle. It's at best breathtakingly insensitive; some would find it deeply offensive.

To anyone who respects the scientific method, this is a horrifyingly bad book, one which completely obliterates Pinker's credibility. Don't waste your time.(less)

19 likes · like · see review

Nov 12, 2011 Hadrian added it

Shelves: psychology-and-cognition, nonfiction, society-and-culture, the-evil-that-men-do, better-angels-of-our-nature, neuroscience

I have recently learned about some stunning statistical anomalies and misinterpretations in here which I had shamefully missed. A simple understanding of Chinese history in the 20th century already seems to be a profound stumbling block for this hypothesis. The jury is out. Further deliberation continues.

4 likes · like · see review

Jan 22, 2013 Xox rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

If this is your first Steven Pinker book, then you are in for a treat.

I have read several of his work and they all make me learned something new.

As this is a long book. I would do it section by section.

First section: Prefix

This is more like an overview when Steven explains his intention of writing this book, and what he set out to convince his readers on the decrease of violence in the human race.

First Chapter

Started off with the discovery of ancient men who lived thousands of years ago. Plus...more

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Jun 19, 2012 Bettie rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: fraudio, published-2011, nonfiction, philosophy, summer-2012, tbr-busting-2012, abandoned

Audio Books : Educational : MP3/Variable : English

blurb - We've all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, "What is the world coming to?" But we seldom ask, "How bad was the world in the past?" In this startling new book, the best-selling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. In fact, we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence.
Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: the genocides in the Old Testament and crucifixions in the New; the gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm; the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals; the nonchalant treatment in popular culture of wife-beating, child abuse, and the extermination of native peoples. Now the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified.
With the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the numbers they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals - all substantially down.How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? What led people to stop sacrificing children, stabbing each other at the dinner table, or burning cats and disemboweling criminals as forms of popular entertainment? Was it reading novels, cultivating table manners, fearing the police, or turning their energies to making money? Should the nuclear bomb get the Nobel Peace Prize for preventing World War III? Does rock and roll deserve the blame for the doubling of violence in the 1960s - and abortion deserve credit for the reversal in the 1990s?
Not exactly, Pinker argues. The key to explaining the decline of violence is to understand the inner demons that incline us toward violence (such as revenge, sadism, and tribalism) and the better angels that steer us away. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.
With the panache and intellectual zeal that have made his earlier books international best sellers and literary classics, Pinker will force you to rethink your deepest beliefs about progress, modernity, and human nature. This gripping book is sure to be among the most debated of the century so far.

SHEEIT - turned off half way through the introduction so how could I possibly force myself to trudge through nearly 900 pages of earnest non-subject.

NEXT!!(less)

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Mar 22, 2012 Joseph D. Walch rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: great-scientists, history, nonfiction, public-policy

But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
--The Federalist, No. 51, James Madison

This is easily one of the best books of 2011, and I suppose it must already be earmarked as a Pulitzer finalist. It’s about violence, but so much more than that since it strikes at the very core of human nature, the huma...more

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Feb 14, 2013 Chad Kettner rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science, non-fiction

Pessimism is widespread these days - especially about the prospects for living in more peaceful world. And it is understandable, as we are bombarded with reports of murder, suicide bombings, armed conflicts, hate-crimes, and uprisings... and so much more.

But is human nature - the way we treat each other on a global as well as individual scale - actually getting worse? Steven Pinker says no... and offers over 800 pages of content to support his claim that "believe it or not, today we may be livin...more

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Feb 10, 2013 Cheryl rated it 4 of 5 stars

Now that I am done, I can look at the book as a whole, and say it was fascinating, and an amazing book to debate and talk about. Not that I agree with it all, I am still wary of evolutionary psychology, but I feel smarter at least, and have gained some new ways of thinking about the world we live in and my own pacifist and liberal nature. I love love this quote near the end of the book, and it was said by a man who survived Hiroshima, and fled to Nagasaki for safety where he then survived the ot...more

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Apr 22, 2013 Bill Pardi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

Steven Pinker doesn't shy away from big topics. Whether it's nature vs. nurture in "The Blank Slate" or the construction of ideas in "The Stuff of Thought, " Pinker goes after tough topics and doesn't mind if his conclusions don't line up with conventional wisdom. "The Better Angels of Our Nature" ups the ante, and may turn out to be Pinker's magnum opus. The book is massive in scope, and meticulous in its analysis. It is part history, part anthropology, part statistics and part philosophy -- of...more Steven Pinker doesn't shy away from big topics. Whether it's nature vs. nurture in "The Blank Slate" or the construction of ideas in "The Stuff of Thought, " Pinker goes after tough topics and doesn't mind if his conclusions don't line up with conventional wisdom. "The Better Angels of Our Nature" ups the ante, and may turn out to be Pinker's magnum opus. The book is massive in scope, and meticulous in its analysis. It is part history, part anthropology, part statistics and part philosophy -- often combining all four at the same time. The reason for the size and scope of the book, according to the author, is that it attempts to make the case for the counterintuitive idea that violence has been, and is continuing to decline as part of the human way of life. Here in the U.S., in the wake of a decade of war and recent massacres by gun toting lunatics, that's a tall order.

Does it succeed? I think it does. Pinker spends the bulk of the book chronicling not only how history has many more people dying violent deaths as a percentage of the population than we do today, but just how dramatically our attitudes toward violence have changed over time. One of the reasons, Pinker argues, that we are so averse to war and so shocked by the random violence we read in the news is that we no longer take those events as the norm. He also explores why this has happened and, while there is no guarantee it will continue, how we can give ourselves a chance to maintain this positive trend. He methodically refutes the idea that the cost of modernity is more violence by more sophisticated "evil doers", and in fact shows that the opposite is true. Also interesting to me is that his five causes for the reduction of violence are not what I expect most people would guess they would be.

While Pinker does show some personal bias in spots, and the pacing can be uneven at times, overall the book is a major triumph. More importantly, his conclusions have serious implications for how we deal with some rather significant public policy issues as a society, and how we deal with each other as individuals. I highly recommend it.(less)

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Apr 09, 2013 Fred R rated it 3 of 5 stars

I liked 'The Blank Slate", and I've been a fan of Norbert Elias and Manual Eisner for a while. I've done a fair amount of thinking on how and why social behavior has changed over the time periods Pinker discusses, and I agree with a lot of his facts. So by all accounts I should love this book, but something about it really rubbed me the wrong way. First, you could out about half of it. Pinker feels obligated to throw in references from every random magazine article or research paper he's read th...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Lane rated it 5 of 5 stars

Few books truly qualify as "must-read", but the evidence Pinker marshals for the historical decline in violence is so massive that it simply must be seen by a serious student of history, society or psychology. Pinker begins with the obvious culprits of war, genocide and murder, but persuasively links these declines with equally striking declines in things like spanking, rape and animal cruelty. Perhaps most interestingly for Pinker's career, he is an "innatist", believing that the human being ha...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Broodingferret rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: anthropology-sociology, history, psychology

Once again Pinker has produced another great book (though I think "tome" has the cadence to better convey the work's sheer size). Exhaustively researched and cogently presented, Pinker makes a convincing argument for the decline of violence in the world over the past few centuries. As with his other books, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined reveals Pinker to be one of the modern day's great thinkers and polymaths, as he demonstrates a greater-than-passing familiarity with...more Once again Pinker has produced another great book (though I think "tome" has the cadence to better convey the work's sheer size). Exhaustively researched and cogently presented, Pinker makes a convincing argument for the decline of violence in the world over the past few centuries. As with his other books, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined reveals Pinker to be one of the modern day's great thinkers and polymaths, as he demonstrates a greater-than-passing familiarity with disciplines as diverse as history, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and literature. Starting with a brief tour of the history of human cruelty, Pinker then dives first into the sociohistorical events that he views played the largest parts in pacifying (and continue to pacify) our species. He then follows up with a wonderfully thorough treatment of human psychology and neuroscience, illuminating clearly and point-by-point how our own wiring and heuristics can influence us towards the path of angel or demon, depending on the context. Pinker wraps up his work with a concise summary of how he views that his previously enumerated sociohistorical trends have been playing the right way to the right parts of our brains, helping to gear us away from the senseless brutality of our past.

Pinker's recognition of the fact that the overall decline of violence in the world is likely due to multiple factors is refreshing, given that most who have tried to tackle the subject attempt to explain our historical pacifying trend as the result of only one or two causes. Pinker brings up many of these alternate views, describes their reasoning in detail, and then meticulously explains why he doesn't see them working (in particular, he does a wonderful job of deconstructing the idea that legalized abortions lowered violence in the U.S., which was first popularized by Levitt and Dubner in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything). Pinker also doesn't shy away from saying he doesn't have all the answers to all the details of violence's decline, though in such cases he still puts forth numerous hypotheses. An excellent book for anyone to read.(less)

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Mar 21, 2013 Cymberleah Dawne rated it 5 of 5 stars

In the midst of my fiction reading there are occasional islands of non-fiction. Since I get most of my books from the library, the criteria for picking a non-fiction book isn't very strict. Some look possibly interesting. Some look educational. Some say they are going to draw new conclusions from old evidence in support of a new theory. Some are on topics I enjoy learning about.

This book looked educational. While I was initially put off by the part where it's 700 pages of dense writing on large...more

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Mar 20, 2013 Ed rated it 5 of 5 stars

Book report: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker

This book makes the unbelievable claim that violence has declined in the world and that we are, in fact, living in the least violent time in human history. What?! Is he crazy? Come on, pal! Watch the news for an hour – with school shootings and terrorists and serial killers and abusive boyfriends – and then tell me what you think!

And that’s actually one of the issues he talks about. What we see on the news i...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: humanism, feminism, education, peace

In some ways this might be one of the most important books about Humanism and Enlightenment values ever written, because it charts, scientificallyand even mathematically, the trends that contribute to a quantifiably more peaceful world. Fearmongers would have us believe that the world is a worse place than it once was, but the truth is that the past, which featured slavery, genocides and torture beyond all reckoning, was much much worse. Even if we look at the terrors of modern American industri...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Ilya rated it 3 of 5 stars

This 700-plus-page tome, which cries for better editing and excision of irrelevant material, makes two main claims. The first is that through human history, violence has been declining on average: the percentage of people who died of violent causes was greater in pre-state societies such as Australian Aboriginal bands than in early states, even ones that practiced human sacrifice such as Mexico under the Aztecs, where it was greater than in modern states. This is true of deaths due to war, capit...more This 700-plus-page tome, which cries for better editing and excision of irrelevant material, makes two main claims. The first is that through human history, violence has been declining on average: the percentage of people who died of violent causes was greater in pre-state societies such as Australian Aboriginal bands than in early states, even ones that practiced human sacrifice such as Mexico under the Aztecs, where it was greater than in modern states. This is true of deaths due to war, capital punishment, homicide by criminals, and other causes. The two World Wars of the twentieth century were a deviation from the trend, but some of the wars in the earlier centuries killed a greater percentage of the world's population: several Chinese civil wars in which a dynasty was overthrown or almost overthrown; the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and the conquests of Tamerlane two centuries later. A census taken after an eighth-century civil war in China found that the population of the country had dropped by two-thirds since the last census; even considering that the country had lost some provinces and that the postwar census figures may have been inaccurate, it is still an impressive number. Torture has been on the decline in the West and in countries colonized or influenced by the West for centuries, and so has been slavery, execution for crimes, violence towards children and animals, rape and other violence towards women. There are many tables and graphs in this book to buttress this claim, which is indisputable.

The second claim is that this has been due to the Enlightenment revolution of the eighteenth century, the spread of formal schooling in the nineteenth and the twentieth century, and the subsequent spread of scientific thinking through culture, which allowed the "better angels" in people's heads to prevail over the "inner demons". This claim is mostly true, but it needs some caveats. As conservative polemicists like to remind their audience, one of the biggest genocides of the twentieth century took place in Cambodia, where Pol Pot and other leaders of its perpetrators had read Rousseau and other philosophers of the French Enlightenment. This is true; however, the genocide was stopped by the Vietnamese Communists, who claimed to follow the teachings of a nineteenth-century German philosopher; also, if we are to judge philosophies by the worst atrocities carried out by their self-proclaimed followers, then what about the French and German wars of religion? A much greater percentage of the world's population died in these than at the hands of the Khmer Rouge four to five centuries later. There is a famous nineteenth-century adage that the victory of the Prussians over the Austrians in the Battle of Königgrätz was a victory of the Prussian schoolteacher over the Austrian one. Formal schooling can instill either critical thinking necessary to prevent violence, or unthinking obedience to king and country, which can cause violence, depending on the curriculum.

In a book on Australian Aborigines, I once saw an estimate that their tribal warfare had casualty rates on the order of those of the Eastern Front of World War II, and it wasn't over in four years, but went on constantly. The Nazis killed more people in the countries they occupied (over 5 million Jews and over 3 million Soviet POWs, among others) than soldiers they fought against, and this was nothing compared to the wholesale genocides they were planning to carry out after winning the war. A nation that was one of the world leaders in science and technology was more bloodthirsty than Mesolithic savages. Civilization might make people more peaceful on average, but it does not do so automatically.(less)

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Mar 06, 2013 Jason Modisette rated it 3 of 5 stars

The first half of the book, in which Pinker tries to prove THAT violence has declined, is very well put-together. That violence has declined is somewhat surprising and opposes the implicit world-view of almost all of the media, so it's important to document it thoroughly. Pinker does so.

Then he gets into WHY it has declined. I found this part of the book much less satisfying; fewer statistics, and parts of it feel like he has a bunch of cool factoids he wants to jam in regardless of their releva...more

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Feb 23, 2013 Mathias Richter rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book really challenged me!!! It is highly recomendable to anyone wanting overcome prejudices. Here is a man with real in depth knowledge who overcomes his own background (jewish) . This book is tremendously deeply inspiring and anyones english is bound to improve!! This book says everything . The only limit is its western point of view. In eastern thinking it might be slightly different way how to view violence but it is definetly a spiritual look , not to mention psycholgical from a profes...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Carol rated it 4 of 5 stars

This latest work by Steven Pinker, a lively and ambitious review of the recent decline of violence in human civilizations, views the following as major contributors: the Leviation, or the state's monopoly on force, "gentle" commerce, feminization, the expanding circle, and the escalator of reason (this last one arouses the mischievous suspicion that Pinker, a Harvard professor, has not attended a faculty meeting recently!) Pinker's wide-ranging review of this important topic, and its philosophic...more

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Feb 14, 2013 Ioannis Savvas rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Η τρέχουσα κοινωνική αντίληψη -όχι μόνο σήμερα, αλλά σε κάθε εποχή- είναι ότι ζούμε σε μια εποχή βίας, ανομίας, ηθικής κατάπτωσης και εξαθλίωσης. Οι άνθρωποι χάνουν την ανθρωπιά τους, δεν σκέφτονται τον συνάνθρωπο, παντού βία, πόλεμοι, ανασφάλεια, φόβος. «Οι παππούδες μας κοιμούνταν με ξεκλείδωτες πόρτες». «Σήμερα φοβάσαι να βγεις από το σπίτι σου». «Πώς να αφήσεις μόνα τα παιδιά σου;». Κι όμως, από μια έρευνα που έγινε στις ΗΠΑ, αν μια οικογένεια επιδιώκει την απαγωγή του παιδιού της, τότε θα π...more Η τρέχουσα κοινωνική αντίληψη -όχι μόνο σήμερα, αλλά σε κάθε εποχή- είναι ότι ζούμε σε μια εποχή βίας, ανομίας, ηθικής κατάπτωσης και εξαθλίωσης. Οι άνθρωποι χάνουν την ανθρωπιά τους, δεν σκέφτονται τον συνάνθρωπο, παντού βία, πόλεμοι, ανασφάλεια, φόβος. «Οι παππούδες μας κοιμούνταν με ξεκλείδωτες πόρτες». «Σήμερα φοβάσαι να βγεις από το σπίτι σου». «Πώς να αφήσεις μόνα τα παιδιά σου;». Κι όμως, από μια έρευνα που έγινε στις ΗΠΑ, αν μια οικογένεια επιδιώκει την απαγωγή του παιδιού της, τότε θα πρέπει να το αφήνει να κάνει μόνο του τη διαδρομή σπίτι-σχολείο και πίσω, κάθε μέρα (365 ημέρες το χρόνο) για 750.000 χρόνια!

Παρά λοιπόν την κοινή κοινωνική πεποίθηση και την τρομολαγνεία των ΜΜΕ, η βία μειώνεται. Δύσκολο να το πιστέψουμε. Αλλά ο Steven Pinker σε αυτή την τεράστια εργασία, με δεδομένα από πολλές επιστήμες (νευρολογία, ψυχολογία, οικονομία, ιστορία, κ.ά.) δίνει την ιδέα: ο άνθρωπος γίνεται πιο ειρηνικός με το πέρασμα του χρόνου. Με κοντά 1.000 αναφορές σε επιστημονικές εργασίες, ο Pinker έχει γράψει ένα καταπληκτικό βιβλίο, που ακόμα και ο πιο δύσπιστος τουλάχιστον θα προβληματιστεί.

Σε δέκα ογκωδέστατα κεφάλαια, ο συγγραφέας παραθέτει δεδομένα για την εξέλιξη της βίας στη διάρκεια της ιστορίας. Και βέβαια φαίνεται ξεκάθαρα πως ο 20ος αιώνας δεν ήταν ο πιο βίαιος, παρά τους δύο παγκόσμιους πολέμους. Οι πιθανότερες εξηγήσεις που δίνονται για αυτή την ροπή προς την ειρήνη και τη συνεργασία των λαών, αλλά και των ατόμων, είναι: η κρατική οργάνωση, το εμπόριο, η εξίσωση των δικαιωμάτων της γυναίκας, η συμπόνια και η λογική.

Είναι η μοίρα του ανθρώπου να ζει ειρηνικά; Είναι το περιβάλλον που τον οδηγεί εκεί; Ό,τι κι αν συμβαίνει, όσο δύσκολο κι αν είναι να το δεχτούμε, ζούμε σε έναν κόσμο που γίνεται συνεχώς ασφαλέστερος και ειρηνικότερος.(less)

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Dec 28, 2012 Taras rated it 4 of 5 stars

Good:
Pinker is an extremely engaging author. He has an amazing talent for finding interesting quotes and facts. Pinker's linguistic background surfaces in random explanations of origins of words such as rape, dandelion, etc. His language is casual and non-uptight, there is no pussyfooting around taboo subjects such as religion. In this book he has a lot of fun at the expense of: circumcision, old testament, "anthropologists of peace", chivalry, American south, small government proponents, German...more Good:
Pinker is an extremely engaging author. He has an amazing talent for finding interesting quotes and facts. Pinker's linguistic background surfaces in random explanations of origins of words such as rape, dandelion, etc. His language is casual and non-uptight, there is no pussyfooting around taboo subjects such as religion. In this book he has a lot of fun at the expense of: circumcision, old testament, "anthropologists of peace", chivalry, American south, small government proponents, German military, intellectual property, Ukrainians, Jeremy Rifkin, Russian peasants, American presidents, vegetarians.

This may be the funniest serious book I've read, but if you feel strongly about superiority of your culture or religion, you may not like this book.

The first part of the book is spent discussing various macro-level subjects: conflicts, casualty figures, influence/evolution of social norms and how it all points at the world becoming less violent. This is all very engaging and convincing. If the book ended 2/3rds of the way through, I would rate it 5/5.

Bad:
After building up my expectations with interesting historical figures, funny quotes, etc Pinker unexpectedly[1] dives into micro [individual] level violence.

This part feels like pop-science. It consists of a lot of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology and other soft "sciences". Nothing makes me sadder than suffering through someone drawing conclusions on human behavior based on the poorly understood structure of our brains. It gets worse, Pinker then embarks on business-book/self-help style advice on how we can control human vices.

The last 3rd of the book essentially lived up to my worst expectations for this book. Pinker tries to balance out wishy-washy science by beating up on some of the worst examples of neuroscience-gone-wrong, but that still does not excuse the literary crime committed.

Conclusion:
The first part of the book is amazing and outweighs the kick in the balls that is the last 3rd of the book. Negatives aside, this is the most intellectually stimulating, yet approachable book I've read.

[1] After writing this I learned that Pinker is a 'Cognitive Science' bigwig. (less)

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Dec 21, 2012 John Harder rated it 5 of 5 stars

Pick up any newspaper and you will be deluged with editorials and news bemoaning the violence in our society. From regional skirmishes, wars and your neighbor sticking a knife in her husband’s eye, our world seems drenched in mayhem. However, your neighbor’s sudden loss of depth perception aside, Stephen Pinker contends we live in a historically pacific age.

Taken from a historic perspective your chances of meeting a violent death is up to 30 times less than previously. In days of yore small city...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Benjamin Pennington rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'm giving this book 5 stars because I learned a hell of a lot from it. I haven't cross referenced everything or checked all the facts or plunged into the bibliography and checked sources, but I found it quite persuasive and well argued. There were some spots that seemed a little shaky fact wise, but the overall picture of a less violent world made sense to me. I can see people who are far left/marxist/etc. not liking this book just because of what he is arguing. That being said, it isn't a righ...more

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Sep 30, 2012 Nilesh rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: good-non-fiction

Here is a truly scholarly work. Whether one agrees with its basic conclusions or not, and whether these conclusions are proven right in the coming decades or not, the work is comprehensive, reasonably unbiased and extremely well presented.

Even as the book turns repetitive in its basic message, the sheer variety of descriptions is breath-taking. From historic to sociological, genealogical to anecdotal, the book spans various eras, cultures, aspects of violence as well as reasons. The book's mess...more

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Sep 09, 2012 Drew rated it 3 of 5 stars

I've been reading Pinker's books for some years now -- I figure that I ought to follow what's going on in psychology, and Pinker is broad enough to inform that wish.

This volume, as some other reviewers have noted, is rather long. That's fine -- one can always skip or skim, one cannot interpolate things the author has left out easily (that isn't fine in a book you assign to others in a course, though).

The first thing he's gotta do is establish that violence has declined. Some folks who watch too...more

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Jul 21, 2012 Judith rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a very intelligent, well-documented new book which claims that we are living in the most peaceful, least violent time in our species' existence. It is truly the ultimate "glass half-full" book. I guarantee you will be challenged when you bring up this topic of conversation anywhere you go. But Pinker has all the documentation, charts, graphs, studies, and evidence you could need to prove that statistically speaking,this is truly the "best of times". And it is important to know this becau...more

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Jul 06, 2012 Tim Byron rated it 5 of 5 stars

Judging by this book, Steven Pinker really likes graphs. There's a lot of graphs here! Almost every second page has one. And what pretty much every graph here shows is that the world is a much safer, nicer, kinder place than it has ever been. Including if you take into account places like Afghanistan. This is a counterintuitive idea, because the world doesn't *seem* that way - it seems like a pretty unsafe place to be, full of danger. Which is why all the graphs, I guess - Pinker really wants to...more

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About Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven b...more Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a school psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has no children.

He is currently working on an upcoming book about the evolution of human morality, specifically focusing on "the historical decline of violence and its psychological roots" as stated by the author himself on the Harvard website.(less)

More about Steven Pinker...

Books by Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

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“Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — 10 people liked it

“Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” — 9 people liked it

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