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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Steven Pinker

4.2 · Rating details · 15,176 Ratings · 1,502 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 Pink ...more

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Hardcover, 802 pages

Published October 4th 2011 by Viking (first published 2010)

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Dec 30, 2011 Miquixote rated it did not like it

Shelves: history, canada, super-classics-2500-citations, 10-non-fiction, philosophy, psychology, science, most-acclaimed-2010s-non-fiction, most-acclaimed-non-fiction

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

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Apr 16, 2013 Warwick rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, sociology, social-history, violence, psychology

VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, AND I WILL KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SAYS IT HASN'T

Disappointingly, Pinker strikes a slightly less confrontational tone than that, but the basic idea is the same. His thesis is that violence of every kind, from international warfare down to murder and corporal punishment, has been on a steady decline throughout human history, up to and including the present day – and not only does he make this case in considerable detail, but he goes on to give a very wide-ran ...more

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Dec 05, 2011 Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-civilizations, screened, science-evolution, science-gen, reference, r-r-rs, media-hyped, pop-history

The Skeptic’s Peace

Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the b
The Skeptic’s Peace

Pinker warns the reader upfront that the book is huge, and with more than 800 dense pages there is no question about it. It is so wide-ranging that it is fortunate it has such a memorable title - the reader might have easily lost track of where it is all supposed to be heading. Individually, any single section of the book is a throughly entertaining masterpiece, but as a whole, in terms of coherence, and on how the thesis and the direction of the arguments hold together, the book is not as much of a delight.

But it is an ambitious book and is in some respects a new sort of history - almost a moral history of the world and Pinker deserves praise for the attempt. The next such historian to come along has been given much to work with.

Pinker is very convincing about the fact that violence has indeed declined; he is even persuasive on why it was but bound to happen. But when it comes to explaining the phenomenon (which he spends most of the book convincing us is real) based on his strength (psychology and evolutionary biology), he comes up slightly short. Pinker says all the right things and spares no punches and doesn’t flinch from taking on the worst arguments the critics might throw at him but his arguments still seem to lack that knockout blow.

This is not to say that the arguments are weak. Pinker does a remarkable job in his survey of history, of stats and of a multitude of ideas. The scholarship is immaculate, the intentions are noble and the conclusions are plausible but I would still wager that Pinker would fail to convince the majority of his readers.

Why? Because he ignores the contingent nature of history and he forgets that the 'better angels' has not only made us a more moral society but has also made us a more skeptical society. I was disappointed that Pinker does not explore the preventive powers of sheer skepticism.

My own thesis, which was evolving as I read Pinker’s, is ultimately that the skeptical mentality is what the ‘civilizing process’ (and the years of bloody wars) has ultimately given us - a conviction that there are no easy answers, no ‘final solutions’. And that is a powerful deterrent to most forms of drastic action, since now it is harder to justify them. This to me is the real cause for optimism (of the measured and skeptical sort, as is our wont now). ...more

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Feb 07, 2012 David rated it did not like it

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 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. ...more

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Mar 18, 2012 Nebuchadnezzar rated it did not like it

Shelves: hack-jobs-and-bullshit, history, politics-and-political-philosophy

When an academic steps outside his or her field of expertise, it's best to brace yourself for a torrent of nonsense. Steven Pinker, whose work in linguistics and psychology I greatly enjoy, has made a habit of using that work as a springboard to foist his pet political theories on the public. Whereas his previous attempt in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was a vehicle for his ideological ramblings, it was at least not based on a gaping statistical flaw and had some value in r ...more

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Feb 25, 2012 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biology, ethics, history, psychology, sociology

In this book, Steven Pinker explores a very controversial thesis, that is, violence is declining. Different types of violence are declining on multiple time scales. It would seem like the twentieth century had some major wars and plenty of genocide to make his thesis sound rather foolish. But in the first seven chapters he shows lots and lots of statistics to back up his thesis. In the eighth and ninth chapters he also explores the scientific reasons for violence and the reasons for increasingly ...more

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Feb 10, 2013 Tom Tabasco rated it liked it

I love optimistic books, and there is a lot of optimism in the almost 800 pages of "The better angels of our nature". At the same time, I find it impossible to give a single opinion about this behemoth of a book, because I found some of its elements truly excellent, some ok, and some absolutely scream-out-loud dreadful.

In brief:

- the great: the quality of the writing is superb. This is one of the best books I've ever read in terms of clarity of exposition and effectiveness of the writing. Also ...more

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Aug 20, 2012 knig rated it really liked it

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

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Jun 23, 2014 Jan Rice rated it really liked it

Shelves: audio, history, psychology, morality-justice

Steven Pinker has written a monster of a book. He has used his intelligence to crunch a huge volume of material. He has made a number of great points to which I'm sure to be referring often.

Yet despite all the insights and accompanying drum rolls, I am suspicious of the dramatic hypothesis, the grand prediction that humankind has learned in any permanent sense to be kinder and gentler. That hypothesis is a welcome change from all the dystopian predictions, and I do think I, and western civilizat ...more

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Dec 09, 2013 Kate Savage rated it did not like it

Make me a t-shirt that says “I read an 800-page book and all I got from it was this lousy review.”

The Good:
There’s a nice irreverent romp through the Bible, he shows what monsters "chivalrous" knights were, shows why we shouldn't be so afraid of terrorist attacks or child abductions or Iran.

The bad: everything else.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Conquistadors:

“Though imperial conquest and rule can themselves be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered” (56).

P ope ...more

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Oct 10, 2011 Richard rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Richard by: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/boo...

Shelves: nonfiction, social-political, own, awaiting-big-review

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

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Feb 15, 2016 Scott rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fic, history

Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent pas Are you afraid of being of being attacked or murdered? Do you think our society is becoming more violent and less safe? If you watch the news, read the papers and listen to politicians it would be logical to be afraid of the seemingly rising tide of violence and criminality in the world. However, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature will show you your feelings are misguided- crime and violence in society is lower than it has ever been, and our often idealized past (even the recent past) was a very violent and scary place.

Before you read this book (and you should read it) be aware that it is Looooong. Weighing in at 832 pages The Better Angels of our Nature is no reading Everest, no Tolstoy, but each of those pages is a heavy bit of paper, drowning in a kudzu of fascinating facts and info that has spread to near every sentence. It was a long march to the final page, but trust me, it was worth it.

This is a fascinating and constantly surprising read. Pinker presents the perfect antidote for the doom, gloom and bolt-your-doors crime hysteria present in the media. I already knew that we live in a comparatively safe era of history- the lack of recent Viking raids on my apartment block is noticeable - but Pinker makes it clear that this is by far the safest period of human history that there has ever been. Present-day developed nations make even the 1970s and 80s look like a time when to step outside was to enter a gritty urban version of the hunger games, complete with roving packs of armed rapists (the sexual violence stats for those decades are genuinely horrifying).

The United States, sadly, is still more violent than Europe or Australasia, but even with all the shootings and killings of recent years the cold hard statistics show that Americans are still safer than ever. This completely flips the established narrative in politics and the media, and the hard data shows that suicide is a greater threat than murder, or even from war and natural disasters combined. The average person in twenty-first century society is more likely to die by their own hand than they are by the hands of others.

The reality of contemporary crime and violence is completely contrary to the apocalyptic vision presented by fearmongering politicians and news outlets and The Better Angels of our Nature, or at least a summary of Pinker’s findings, should be compulsory reading for anyone standing for public office. Pinker's book stands as an engaging testament to how much progress we have made in making our broader human society far less violent. ...more

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Nov 01, 2017 Daniel Clausen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-of-2017, international-relations-classics

Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices.

Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behav Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" is a big ambitious book. Perhaps too big, perhaps too ambitious. And perhaps, too sprawling for its own good. One could opt for a Peace Studies reader and get a more eclectic taste of what research is out there. Would it be as comprehensive as this book? Maybe, maybe not, but you would get the benefit of tasting the many kinds of literature through many different voices.

Here, we get a great deal of peace science, behavioral science, religious literature and more, all sifted through one scientific (and often brilliant) voice. Much research is included in this volume, and the many references often drown out the voice, but the voice is also in control of how we receive the literature.

So, what is the book -- polemical argument, scientific memoir, or reference volume? I doubt it knows the answer.

The point of the book is simple: to outline how violence has decreased, and to answer why so that we may learn from our successes and continue to replicate them.

The book might strike some as counter-intuitive -- in the time of Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, mass-casualty terrorism, runaway gun violence in the US, and much, much more, it would seem like our times are just "another bloody century". Surely, if we subtract the effects of nuclear weapons in deterring warfare between major powers, and on top of that, if we discount the way modern battlefield medicine has led to a decrease in fatalities from warfare (many are still wounded and crippled), then our century can't be that much more peaceful than others. And there is also the other issue, the possible historical contingency of our own "long peace" (much like the long relative peacefulness between the Napoleonic wars and the first World War). One really bloody hegemonic war between nuclear powers might be all that's needed to eliminate our current gains.

And yet there is a surprising body of evidence that suggests that violence has decreased that spans across multiple disciplines. Pinker makes the case that this trend is deep, enduring, and possibly sustainable. Ancient and medieval societies took genocide, rape, mutilation and other types of violence as given. All of these forms of violence were permissible as long as customs and traditions were adhered to.

For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the tracking of the rights movements and the civilizing processes. These are truly fascinating aspects of the evolving peace that I was not fully aware of. I think for many of the scholars coming to this book with some background in peace studies or studies of violence, they will have a similar reaction to mine. I know that...and I know that...and I know that...but ah!, I didn't know that!

This speaks to the benefit of having such a comprehensive volume. Peace researchers who are aware of one of type of literature might be bored by some chapters of the book, and yet, find themselves enthralled by others.

Overall, a fantastic read and one that I would readily recommend to others. ...more

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Jun 26, 2013 Lois Bujold rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Lois by: chat list contributor who'd just read it

After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.

Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of After a steady recent diet of short-attention-span theater internet surfing, it was very interesting to dive into a dense read that took me a week to chew through. (I am not a very fast reader, but I'm usually faster than that.) The exercise of following a really long, complex, sustained argument was probably good for me.

Seven chapters of convincing examination of historical evidence to the best approximation that could be managed, all of which jibes well with what I know or have experienced of history, followed by three chapters of attempts to figure out the why of the what. Pinker was pretty good about fencing off his facts from his hypotheses with suitable disclaimers. Several times he more-or-less interrupts his narrative to give the reader tutorials on basic statistics, in a desperate bid to bring his audience up to speed so that they can understand his data and how he massages it to get it to yield up more understanding. I was very interested in the brief survey of recent formulations in neurology and cognitive psychology that he used to underpin his arguments.

I was also reminded of a classic little book from the 50s, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff, which should really be required reading for every voter and consumer. (It has been reprinted in paperback and is now available on Kindle, I'm pleased to note.) Pinker, I think, is trying very hard to tell the truth with statistics; that little book would help ground one's evaluation either way.

I was charmed by how many of my own humanist beliefs about history and human nature were supported variously, not to mention how many of the jokes and cultural references I got, but naturally, I would be; Pinker and I are of the same generation and share a certain amount of world-view, after all. I am pretty fond of the modernity that cocoons me and has repeatedly saved my life, and he does not underrate it, either. Not everything worked for me in his arguments, but enough did for going on with. He footnotes the hell out of everything, which I appreciate. Along the way he dropped recs for what sounds like a lot of potentially interesting further reading, should I find energy for it. (31 pages in very small print of sources one could go check up, ditto.)

Highly recommended. ...more

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Jul 18, 2012 Blaine rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history-cultural, social-science-theory, all-time-favorites

This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "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, for large sectors of the world's This book is sure to anger or confuse just about everyone who cares about the world today, but particularly those who love to hate the idea of cultural progress: "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, for large sectors of the world's population, life today is less violent, less brutal, and less cruel.

Pinker's basic thesis is that, no matter how you look at the data, no matter what time frame, no matter what part of the world or what era, and no matter what form it takes, violence, cruelty, and brutality in human society has declined over time. With over 700 pages of detailed charts, data, and references to other such studies (such as the books "Homicide" by Daly/Wilson and Keeley's "War Before Civilization"), Pinker demonstrates the astonishing fact that, despite the continued violence everywhere in the world today, much of today's world lives in a time of relative peace and safety unknown to past generations. It's not an argument that violence has been eliminated but that there is a pacification and civilizing process at work in history in which violence in its many forms has been decreasing over time. It is especially an argument for the success of secularism, modernity, liberalism, the democratic state, and societies based in law and order, an argument many just don't want to hear. Many of my friends simply refuse to read it because they're unwilling to challenge their adherence to some version of the narrative that "the world is going down the toilet" and that some version of modern western culture is the reason why. They may be right in some sense but they're not in terms of what Pinker is talking about.

When you are able (willing?) to separate out just how Pinker is framing "violence" from your overall view of violence in today's world, his argument becomes crystal clear. He is quite aware that there still exists cruelty, slavery, and horrific brutality in today's world but, like the difference between the institutionalized, culturally-sanctioned slavery of the past and the clandestine forms of human trafficking of today (not to mention the sheer numbers difference), there really has been progress here as there has in so many other areas.

Pinker's book deals mostly with human-on-human violence and to a lesser extent, human-on-animal violence. While the evidence he presents points to an ongoing decline in the former, it could be argued that human>animal and human>natural world violence has actually increased as human populations increased. The question for Pinker is: have certain privileged parts of the world's population gained a relatively violence-free society at the expense of the continued violation-destruction of nature, of plant and animal species?

Edited: Jan2016 ...more

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Jan 11, 2018 Max rated it really liked it

Shelves: science

Pinker goes into voluminous detail to show us that violence has steadily declined in human society since prehistoric times. In this well-structured work rich with statistics, charts, and the ideas of influential scholars he identifies six prevailing trends: The Pacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions. Turning from history to psychology he identifies five inner demons that lead us to violence: Predation, ...more

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Aug 13, 2013 Faruk Ahmet rated it did not like it

Shelves: history, non-fiction

Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I Loathing is the word. It infuriated me. You'd think that after all these years one would stop being surprised by this style of typical new-atheist/liberal argumentation but when I see this much cherrypicking, oversimplification, handwaving and western supremacism shoved into a single book, I still get all worked up. And of course, it doesn't help that they call themselves "The Brights" and "The Enlightened" etc. I mean, who does that? Even if I was intellectually convinced by their arguments, I still wouldn't wanna hang around these jerks.

His main thesis is simple and for anyone brought up after the 19th century, overly familiar: We were savages, then we were saved by Science and Reason. Not all of us, of course, only Europeans and Americans at first, but thanks to Capitalism (or as he labels it, the gentle commerce), everywhere else is catching up slowly, too. One time this evil thing called Communism had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and caused many deaths and suffering but it was ultimately defeated by the Allies of Light. Etc.

"If you'd suggest occupying another country today, everyone would laugh at you and they'd think you were crazy; it is a thing of the past", he says (paraphrasing). So what about Iraq or Afghanistan? Panama, Bolivia, Vietnam, Libya and countless other bloody conflicts and interjections by the Western forces, mainly USA? Oh, they are not "wars", he says, but merely unfortunate but "defensive" actions taken by civilized nations to protect their democratic ways. Isn't it incredibly telling that in an EIGHT-HUNDRED-page book about the history of world politics and violence, the word "imperialism" is not uttered at all. Not even once.

There are a myriad of graphs and numbers stuffed inside. But the way he handles them and the way he chooses the sources he gets them from is so blatantly manipulative that it's cringe-inducing. A source repudiates his claims about "The Long Peace" and "the waning of war", and draws a bleak picture of the condition the world is in outside TheCivilizedNations? Well they are extremist, communist, leftist fanatics, you can't trust their data. Here, we have a government-funded organization that prints out numbers that fit my theory beautifully; surely they're the trustworthy ones. In one of the most embarrasing moments of the book, «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»**. Why should we ignore two world wars, while looking at the history of wars, you ask? Because "after all, the world has seen nothing close to that level since". It was a fluke. This is kinda like saying "please don't call it murder just because there's a body lying on the floor with a knife in the back, since it's not like we see something like that everyday". Forgive me for the vulgar language, but this reminds me of a lovely Turkish idiom: "If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle".

Well, I could go on and on (like this occasionally biased and contrived -leftists!- but very detailed and informative review does) but you get the gist. In the end, it's not that I find the claim that violence in general is getting comparatively subsided (and it's at least partially thanks to Western Civilization) completely worthless. It doesn't even have to be a glorious, total, irreversible change of paradigm to be worth praising. If we are living in a marginally better, more peaceful world, we should know about it, and understand the why and the how so we can push it further. If it really turns out that the Westerners are morally superior and more evolved or something, so be it; it's not the premise that bugs me at all, but if it takes this much deceptive and manipulative "scholarship" to prove a point, maybe we should at least raise an eyebrow in mild suspicion before patting our world of gentle commerce in the back, you know.

**Quote from David's review, because I'm too lazy to look it up myself. ...more

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May 15, 2017 Amir The Fat Bookworm rated it it was amazing

Shelves: next, cognitive-science, philosophy

Mind-blowing book! I have never read a book about history and statistics that was this interesting. I love how Steven Pinker argues with countless studies and a great logical validity.
This book is a must-read book for anyone interested in sociology, history, politics and environment. This book breaks the long romanticized picture of the past which has been filled with nostalgia and confirmation biases.

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Jul 07, 2013 Fiona rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: i-also-read-nonfiction-occasionally, recommended-to-me, books-i-have-taken-to-dinner

Did this really take two and a half years to read? I see that it did. I picked it up after a new-ish boyfriend press-ganged me into seeing Pinker talking about his new book - this one - in Edinburgh, and thinking that it sounded fascinating and potentially relevant to a PhD I was considering doing. Well, the PhD idea is discarded, and as for the boyfriend, I swapped Pinker for Susanna Clarke and moved in with him. He finished my book first.

The premise of The Better Angels of Our Nature is that t ...more

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Sep 30, 2011 Hadrian added it

Shelves: psychology-and-cognition, nonfiction, society-culture-anthropology-etc, 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.

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Dec 17, 2011 Bettie☯ rated it did not like it

Shelves: fraudio, published-2011, nonfiction, philosophy, summer-2012, tbr-busting-2012, abandoned, emperor-s-new-clothes, twats-in-real-life, wrong-so-wrong

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, how could I possibly force myself to trudge through nearly 900 pages of earnest wrongness. Look at your newspapers to see that there is little decline in violence.

NEXT!!

9th April 2015 ETA: At last, Pinker's Emperor's New Clothes have been rumbled by someone else: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015... ...more

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Dec 07, 2011 Joseph D. Walch rated it it was amazing

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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Nov 23, 2015 Nikki rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, science-fact, history

I better admit up front that I don’t have any intuitive or educated grasp on statistics, and without actually sitting down with the data sets, I haven’t the least idea of whether they’re appropriately chosen, correctly delineated, etc, etc. I do note, though, that Steven Pinker is a respected academic, Penguin are a respected publisher, and I was directed to reading this by another academic. Where he talks about history, he seems to be broadly correct, and his explanation of his graphs and stati I better admit up front that I don’t have any intuitive or educated grasp on statistics, and without actually sitting down with the data sets, I haven’t the least idea of whether they’re appropriately chosen, correctly delineated, etc, etc. I do note, though, that Steven Pinker is a respected academic, Penguin are a respected publisher, and I was directed to reading this by another academic. Where he talks about history, he seems to be broadly correct, and his explanation of his graphs and statistics makes sense to me.

Some aspects gave me serious pause, though, equally. The fact that somehow he manages to endorse all his own views and the views of contemporary Western society as the civilising effect, for example. The fact that he dismisses the issues of hate crimes as decreasing, without much examination. (For example, could the fact that trans* people can now pass much better, due to improved medical procedures for transition, be part of the reduction in transphobic violence?) Colonialism gets a pass because it reduced violence, without looking at the economic problems it can cause, etc, etc. I think sometimes Pinker dismisses serious areas of violence based on fairly spurious data like police reports.

I’m not sure if this is a kneejerk feeling in myself — “colonialism can’t be an unalloyed good!” — or whether it’s an actual issue in the data. The problem with reading pop psychology is that you just have to take the author’s word for it, at times. I did laugh at his overly optimistic depiction of the fall of homophobia, though. Apparently queer people no longer have anything to fear, and there’s no difficulty in coming out! Um. I need to have a word with you, Mr Pinker.

The overall thesis that violence is declining, I’m inclined to accept, on balance. When people immediately cry, “look at the events in Paris recently!”, Pinker would have an answer for them about the origin of that violence (it might’ve taken place in Western Europe, but where does the motivating ideology stem from?), and when people say that crime is clearly on the rise based on reportage, that’s definitely an example of the availability heuristic at work. Also, he is talking specifically about violence, not about crime in general — which surely means that non-violent thefts, white collar crime, etc, are not included in his dataset.

While I’m not ultimately sure how much to believe this, I enjoyed Pinker’s discussion of the issues, his potential explanations of the data, and his deconstruction of the violent bases of things like the Bible and the code of chivalry. It’s a heck of a tome, but fascinating, even if you disagree. There’s a lot of criticism out there, but again, because it’s not my field I’d be taking that as much on faith as I have to take this book, so I’m not heading down that rabbit hole.

Originally posted here. ...more

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Aug 01, 2012 notgettingenough added it

Shelves: haven-t-read-but, sociology

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/realit... 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.

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Jul 09, 2017 Damien rated it it was amazing

In reviewing The Better Angels of our Nature, I find myself struggling to avoid the absolutes that Pinker so deftly dodges in this epic study of the history of violence in humankinds history. This book is possibly the best structured arguement I have read (even if it does result in a book that you clearly need to pick up with both hands so as to not inflict spinal damage on yourself) and leaves you with a fresh perspective on things that you took as given in so many ways.

To even begin to try and In reviewing The Better Angels of our Nature, I find myself struggling to avoid the absolutes that Pinker so deftly dodges in this epic study of the history of violence in humankinds history. This book is possibly the best structured arguement I have read (even if it does result in a book that you clearly need to pick up with both hands so as to not inflict spinal damage on yourself) and leaves you with a fresh perspective on things that you took as given in so many ways.

To even begin to try and summarise the journey that Pinker takes us on here would be to do it a disservice. No stone is left unturned as Pinker takes us through a detailed statistical analysis of the levels of violence through the ages. On top of this we are given a detailed analysis of, not just the volumes of violence that are clearly shown to have reduce over time and colminate in what is often now referred to as 'The Long Peace', but also the shift in the social norms that humans have towards the tolerance of violence - from 'good' families enjoying a public execution in public squares for entertainment to the 'rights movement' of the twentieth century that sort to ensure protection of not just women, children and homosexuals but even the protection of the rights of animals. The last few hundred pages then shift to a neurological and psychological study of what causes humans to act violently and how and why this might be trending down.

Overall, Pinker leaves us with a positive view of the future and of how much progress we have made already. He suggests that 'the good old days' that we often pine for may not have been so good as we might like to paint them and that, for all the criticism we may dole out to it, that modernity has in many ways made our life considerably better.

The Better Angels of our Nature is a staggering piece of reasearch in both its breadth and depth. I am sure that this research may be challenged by opposing views but, given the level of research on display here, it would have to be a very solid counterpoint to enter the debate. And it's this point in itself that may support Pinker - the fact that we can have this level of open discussion is evidence in itself of how far we have come. ...more

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Mar 28, 2015 Charles rated it liked it

This is a sprawling mess of a book. Flashes of arguably brilliant insight alternate with meandering musings. Fascinating narrow conclusions are drawn from carefully parsed evidence—and then sweeping conclusions are drawn from highly dubious evidence. Historical insights are used incisively in an argument—then the next argument is undermined by total historical illiteracy. At the end, the reader is left uncertain whether he has read 800 pages of genius, 800 pages of authoritative-sounding-but-mea ...more

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Jun 25, 2012 Joakim Wendell rated it did not like it

An interesting idea, but Pinker fails to deliver a convincing argument. The subject of the book is violence, and Pinker argues that 1) violence has declined historically, and 2) that the decline is due to a number of factors. His five factors are a) strong states, 2) commerce, 3) feminization, 4) cosmopolitanism and 5) reason. There are several glaring problems with his thesis. First, he never defines "violence", a rather big problem since the book is about violence. From his examples, I infer t ...more

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Oct 15, 2011 Thomas Edmund rated it it was amazing

Ok small confession to make. I was hoping to purchase this piece on the day it became available, power through it, and be one of the first to post a review on Amazon.

This was before seeing the thing...

But after pumping through the ~700 pages I feel its worth the size. Pinker dives through history, philosophy, psychology and politics to identify the apparent causes for the 'decline in violence.'

I would describe reading the book as a combo of history, psychology and professional polemic. Obviously ...more

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Nov 04, 2011 Jan rated it it was amazing

Stunning book! Probably the most fascinating nonfiction I've ever found!
In recorded form, this was 36+ hours long, but it was divided into sections that seemed like full books in themselves.
What a work of scholarship! In order to demonstrate the shift toward greater kindness and less violence in the world, Steven Pinker first examined, thoroughly, the many forms that cruelty has taken since our earliest primate ancestors. He then summarized the relevant studies in the sciences and social science ...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Gwern rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

This was really really good, as in, maybe the best book I've read that year. Time and again, I was shocked to find subjects treated of keen interest to me, or which read like Pinker had taken some of my essays but done them way better (on terrorism, on the expanding circle, etc.); even so, I was surprised to learn new things (resource problems don't correlate well with violence?).

I initially thought I might excerpt some parts of it for an essay or article, but as the quotes kept piling up, I rea ...more

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About Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

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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 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. ...more

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

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

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“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.” — 87 likes

“The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.” — 57 likes

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