Darker Angels of Our Nature, The: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence

by Philip Dwyer (editor), Mark Micale (Editor)

In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued that modern history has witnessed a dramatic decline in human violence of every kind, and that in the present we are experiencing the most peaceful time in human history. But what do top historians think about Pinker's reading of the past? Does his argument stand up to historical analysis?

In The Darker Angels of our Nature , seventeen scholars of international stature evaluate Pinker's arguments and find them lacking. Studying the history of violence from Japan and Russia to Native America, Medieval England and the Imperial Middle East, these scholars debunk the myth of non-violent modernity. Asserting that the real story of human violence is richer, more interesting and incomparably more complex than Pinker's sweeping, simplified narrative, this book tests, and bests, 'fake history' with expert knowledge.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Sociology, Social Science, Psychology, Philosophy

410 pages, Hardcover

Published September 9, 2021

Reviews

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2013 Richard Dawkins tweeted endorsing a lecture his friend and fellow New Atheist luminary, Steven Pinker, in which Pinker had expounded on his thesis that violence had reduced in recent centuries thanks to the beneficent effects of nation state monopolies on force, capitalism and commerce and the triumph of science and reason over religion. Dawkins asked rhetorically, with a sneer, "why [did it take] a scientist to write it?" This was a jab at historians, and an example of an odd idea in the circles in which Dawkins and Pinker move that history is simply a matter of plugging in some statistics and - voilà! - definitive answers to complex historical questions appear. Like magic.

Except history is not so simple. And historians would answer Dawkins' question by noting that a historian wouldn't write a book like The Better Angels of Our Nature because it really isn't a very good book. This collection of articles is a more detailed reply from several historians, contrasting how historians actually do things with Pinker's incompetent, tendentious and illusory efforts.

History students are schooled early in their undergraduate studies about not choosing a preferred conclusion and then cherry-picking the evidence to support it. It seems Pinker could have benefited from this basic historiographical lesson, because his book (and large parts of its follow up, Enlightenment Now) is an extended exercise in this basic schoolboy mistake. Pinker is convinced of his ideological ends and so will use any means to get to them. The howlers, blunders and distortions he utilises to show our past was a Hobbesian nightmare of violence, ignorance and superstition while the simplistic forces he lauds are leading us to paradise so long as we stay the course involve a cartoonish denigration of the pre-modern past and a corresponding sugar-coated picture of the present and likely future.

The principle of the "Asymmetry of Nonsense" comes into play here: Pinker's book is long and dense and it would take a multi-volume series by a whole slew of specialists to debunk every one of its many flaws and errors. So this work selects particular periods and topics to give examples of what Pinker gets wrong, both in particular and overall. Pinker's use of highly specific body counts as hard data on the death tolls on various pre-modern wars and non-state violence would immediately raise the eyebrow of any vaguely historically-literate reader, given that we simply have no way of doing more than guessing at these fatalities. What is even more alarming is Pinker's source for this so-called "data" - an website called necrometrics.com by amateur writer Matthew White, the author of something called The Great Big Book of Horrible Things; a work Pinker also uses as some kind of reliable source of figures for his "data". This is laughable stuff. As is Pinker's use of lurid coffee table books on torture devices. Or basic errors, like mistaking medieval manuals for manners aimed at small children as a faithful indication of the behaviour medieval adults. Pinker simply doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

But he does it with supreme confidence and assurance, so many readers (like Dawkins) are convinced his dizzy and wildly optimistic conclusions are solidly based. So little things like the Second World War and the Holocaust are brushed aside and the problems of environmental degradation and global warming are breezily dismissed. "Technology and commerce will find solutions, so don't worry", is effectively Pinker's blithe assurance there. Commerce and capitalism are the solutions to most things, according to Pinker, so it's no wonder that he hobnobs with billionaires and Bill Gates and Elon Musk love his books. Critics, on the other hand (including those mean historians, like the authors of this collection), are simply "woke", post-modern enemies of "the Enlightenment" who are trying to derail the wonderful engines of increasing happiness and wealth. Apparently.

Except, they aren't. They are careful experts who, understandably, have a problem with someone with no idea how history is analysed breezing into some vast and complex questions and answering them with simplistic nonsense. This collection goes some way toward showing why and indicating why Pinker needs to be regarded with great scepticism. Some or even many of his conclusions may actually be right. But the arguments he uses to get to them are very, very wrong.

[Fares · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had already read the better Angels of our nature by Steven Pinker a while back. And this book was recommended to me by a friend who found Steven Pinker‘s book a bad one, and he recommended that this book as a much better one. I have also read the several (12?) peer-reviewed articles published in the historical reflections journal in 2018 issue 1 of volume 44. But I have discovered that a lot of the criticism within this book as well as those peer-reviewed articles contained about 30% of good content that is evidence based and reasonable, while the rest was ad hominem attacks as well as misunderstandings of Pinker’s arguments. The authors of this book as well as those articles completely ignored the full-fledged history of humanity, and focused only on the pre-modern history in the middle ages in Europe as compared to now. They also criticized using deaths as measure of violence, but argued that heart disease and obesity could be more direct measures of it! The book and articles did indeed contain many great arguments and good critiques of Pinker’s book, but they were sandwiched between much animosity that was unexplainable. Hence, why I rated it as low.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steven Pinker used to write books about evolutionary psychology. Pinker is not an evolutionary psychologist, he is a linguistic psychologist--think Noam Chomsky. The evolutionary psychologists were critical of his writings, like The Blank Slate. So Pinker decided he would write a scientific treatise on violence in history. His theses, violence has decreased because of reason, capitalism, and democracy. Clever businessmen, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, proclaim the gospel of Pinker. This only proves these two do not engage in much critical thinking.

There are plenty of essays pointing out the many problems with Pinker's last two best sellers, The Better Angles of Our Nature, and Enlightment Now. My own brief review of Better Angels is critical of Pinker's poor methodology and short-sightedness. Apparently, historians have been spending lots of time at gatherings discussing Pinker's assault on history. Almost ten years after Better Angles they have published a response.

These are academics which a rich knowledge of violence, so some of the writing might be a slog. In general, it is well written. This is a collection of responses from a number of historians.

The two editors, Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale, divide the book into four themes: Interpretations, Periods, Places, and Themes. Authors in the Interpretation section evaluate the data, criticize his one-sided perspective, the restrictions on his literature used, sloppy methodology, and use of statistics. Certainly elements I criticized. The next two sections provided a deeper examination of specific time periods and geographies painting a much more detailed picture than Pinker did in using these examples.

The final section really examines Pinker's narrow definition of violence. They expand on his side comments showing that Pinker didn't really try. Dwyer comments in his summarizing ending that had Pinker walked the past two buildings at Harvard, from his office in the Department of Psychology down to the History building two of the authors in this book could have helped him. This is amusing in identifying Pinker's audacity as a historian. Pinker's responses generally have been dismissive, and out-of-step with current political and social trends. His appreciative audience appears to be white, well-to-do men.

I have two issues with the book. One of the last chapters considers the history of emotion. At this point, a historian and a psychologist talk past each other. Making points that are only relevant to their specific field. This chapter is certainly the weakest. My second issue is a list presented in the final chapter by Dwyer. His first point is that Pinker's definition is too narrow. While I agree with the assessment, Dwyer ignores, or is ignorant, of the positivistic reductionism psychologists are trained to reduce their study to the smallest measurable operational definition. I agree that Pinker probably was too restrictive in defining violence in order to buoy his argument, and the other aspects historian presented should have been included. But Pinker's reductionism is a valid approach, even if this leads him wide open to criticism.

I would have enjoyed reading Darker Angels before I read Better Angels as it would have been easier to pick apart Pinker's examples. Still, I feel better informed, even if I can't say there is evidence that we have become a more civilized people--the current news stories prevent me from believing this is the case.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deserves to be more widely read. Subjects Pinker to detailed, withering critique. Very little of his “edifice” remains once they’re through. Slightly marred, for me, by an unfathomable ascription of telos to Marxism ( that’s been exhaustively debunked )

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this passage from the final chapter sufficiently explains the misrepresentations within Pinker's book that this book set out to correct:

If the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker had made an effort to learn about how professional students of history actually work, he would have known [how historians work]. On the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Pinker teaches, the Department of Psychology is within easy walking distance of the Department of History. A short stroll from William James Hall on Kirkland Street to the university’s main Widener Library passes directly by Robinson Hall, which houses Harvard’s eminent history faculty, including two contributors to this volume. It seems not to have occurred to Pinker to stop in and consult his institutional colleagues about an entire field of knowledge in which he’d had no training, even as he was engaged in writing two large-scale books that claimed to identify and analyse important historical developments.

Consequently, Pinker’s central argument about the progressive pacification of our species, and its related contention that the present is the most peaceful time in human history, are beset with a host of problems. Here is a brief summary of the deficiencies that the contributors to this volume have pinpointed in his work:

1. An overly narrow definition of violence as recorded statistical deaths from civilian and military causes.
2. Exaggeration of violence in certain past eras, to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the modern age.
3. A radical disregard for geo-chronological context.
4. The citation of raw quantitative data to impart a spurious pseudo-scientific quality to his presentation.
5. A tendency, in one topic after another, to ignore or dismiss copious quantities of counterevidence.
6. Failure to engage with the most important and respected scholarship on many subjects.
7. Exclusion of entire categories of violence that would complicate, if not contradict, his thesis, such as violence against indigenous people, colonial violence, prison violence, environmental violence and violence against animals.
8. Privileging of Western Europe and North America over the histories of Latin America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere in a work that aspires to explain behaviour worldwide.
9. Minimalization of the horrors of the twentieth century, including the First and the Second World War, the Holocaust, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
10. Failure to recognize the legacies of mass violence that endure long after the traumatic events have run their course.
11. Dismissal of newer forms of violence, and newly uncovered forms of past violence, such as the sexual abuse of children, wartime sexual violence, international human trafficking and cyber-violence.
12. Systematic unwillingness to acknowledge and examine the ideological orientations underlying his thinking and writing.

To this catalogue must be added Pinker’s disturbing response to the reception his books have received. His reflexive, resentful dismissal of any critical comments seems to be combined with a complete incapacity for self-correction.

When evaluated by experts in field after field, Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now have been found untrustworthy. Empirical, methodological, interpretative and argumentative problems confound Pinker’s two forays into history. As Linda Fibiger above is the first to point out, Pinker’s claims are not taken seriously by historians in any specialized field of study. His work does violence to history.

(Chapter 18 - Pinker and contemporary historical consciousness by Mark S. Micale)

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

second extended critique I've read of Stephen Pinker's books, primarily because he's the intellectual the most annoying people I've ever spoken to about social life and human history tend to invoke. this book is a series of essays which I understand arose out of an issue of Historical Reflections in which historians of imperialism, archaeology, ideas took on arguments made in Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.

As with all essay collections some are better than others, the best ones hone in on points of detail and don't let go such as Pinker's attempts to extrapolate 'data' from papers written on skeletal remains varying wildly in space and time out into homicide rates across all of pre-history, or his *laughable* sources on medieval society.

Another approach taken here seems to regard Pinker as a plucky undergraduate as though the author was carefully talking him through some of the overtones his broad sweeps have brought him to, how violence differs across cultures, how the Enlightenment needs to be read in the context of gendered and racial hierarchies, how our understanding of the social role of public executions has actually moved on over the past few decades to become a highly contested area of study, none of which is untrue but is perhaps guilty of assuming Pinker to be a good-faith actor. (There's sometimes a touchy-feely, smaller-is-better structure of feeling at work here, a feature of some left-liberal writing over the past few years that hasn't really countenanced itself yet).

One thinks of his hugely revealing assertion that the sixties in the US was a de-civilising phase in human history from which we're back on course thanks to accelerated rates of incarceration. That the idea of civilising versus decivilising processes - itself probably questionable - is derived from the work of a Jewish scholar seeking to understand Nazism puts this reprehensible stuff in even sharper context. If Pinker was a guy who wanted to understand social complexity he would not be writing these books.

This is why I think Herman and Peterson's 'Reality Denial' is the better text. Though its been a long time since I read it my recollection is that its far more clear-eyed.

[Nico Bruin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Occasionally valid critiques of Pinker buried beneath a mountain of shit.
Ad hominem, appeals to authority, seemingly deliberate misinterpretation, the darker angels is a great exercise in spotting fallacious arguments.
There are certainly many valid critiques one can make of Pinker's better angels (which I read concurrently), but only a handful of these are found herein.
Mostly, this is an allergic political reaction by the authors to someone who falls afoul of their activist narratives.
I have so far only really given 1 star when something is utterly worthless, so I won't do that here, but 1.5 would fit a bit better.

[Stasha Neagu]

Related reading to Mat Ridley's How Innovation Works (The Rational Optimist)