The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

“endogenous”

“exogenous”

six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.

Six Trends (chapters 2 through 7).

the Pacification Process.

the Civilizing Process.

systematic pacifism.

the Humanitarian Revolution.

the Long Peace.

the New Peace.

the Rights Revolutions.

Five Inner Demons (chapter 8)

the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up insid...

Predatory or instrumental violence is simply violence deployed as a practical means to an end.

Dominance is the urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power, whether it takes the form of macho posturing among individuals or contests for supremacy among racial, ethnic, religious, or national groups.

Revenge fuels the moralistic urge toward retribution, punis...

Sadism is pleasure taken in another...

ideology is a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that justifies unlimited violenc...

Four Better Angels (c...

Empathy

Self-control

moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it.

reason allows us to extricate ourselves from our parochial vantage points, to reflect on the ways in which we live our lives, to deduce ways in which we could be better off, and to guide the application of the other better angels of our nature.

in recent history Homo sapiens has literally evolved to become less violent in the biologist’s technical s...

the focus of the book is on transformations that are strictly environmental: changes in historical circumstances that engage a f...

Five Historical Forces (c...

The Leviathan, a state and judiciary with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, can defuse the temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent the self-serving biases that make all parties believe they are on the side of the angels.

Commerce is a positive-sum game in which everybody can win; as technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead, and they are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization.

Feminization is the process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values of women. Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are l...

The forces of cosmopolitanism such as literacy, mobility, and mass media can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expan...

an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs—the escalator of reason—can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others’, and to reframe v...

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s classic book in evolutionary psychology, Homicide,

deliquescing,

impugn

revanchist

subtler, and

eponymous

When a tendency toward violence evolves, it is always strategic. Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. That discernment is especially true of intelligent species, whose large brains make them sensitive to the expected benefits and costs in a particular situation, rather than just to the odds averaged over evolutionary time. The logic of violence as it applies to members of an intelligent species facing other members of that species brings us to Hobbes. In a remarkable passage in Leviathan (1651), he used fewer than a hundred words to lay out an analysis of the incentives for violence that is as good as any today: So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.5

the Hobbesian trap or, in the arena of international relations, the security dilemma.8

the Leviathan, a monarchy or other government authority that embodies the will of the people and has a monopoly on the use of force.

Hobbes’s opposite number was the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who opined that “nothing can be more gentle than [man] in his primitive state.... The example of the savages . . . seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, . . . and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps . . . towards the decrepitness of the species.”9 FIGURE 2–1. The violence triangle Though the philosophies of Hobbes and Rousseau were far more sophisticated than “nasty brutish and short” versus “the noble savage,” their competing stereotypes of life in a state of nature fueled a controversy that remains with us today.

if Hobbes was right, war would be inevitable or even desirable; therefore anyone who favors peace must insist that Hobbes was wrong.

violent competition among men has a long history in our evolutionary lineage.22

That happened when the more powerful chiefdoms used their armed retinues to bring other chiefdoms and tribes under their control, further centralizing their power and supporting niches for specialized classes of artisans and soldiers. The emerging states built strongholds, cities, and other defensible settlements, and they developed writing systems that allowed them to keep records, exact taxes and tributes from their subjects, and codify laws to keep them in line. Petty states with designs on their neighbors’ assets sometimes forced them to become states in defense, and bigger states often swallowed smaller states. Anthropologists have proposed many subtypes and intermediate cases among these kinds of societies, and have noted that there is no cultural escalator that inevitably turns simpler societies into more complex ones.

For all these reasons, it makes no sense to test for historical changes in violence by plotting deaths against a time line from the calendar. If we discover that violence has declined in a given people, it is because their mode of social organization has changed, not because the historical clock has struck a certain hour, and that change can happen at different times, if it happens at all. Nor should we expect a smooth reduction in violence along the continuum from simple, nomadic hunter-gatherers to complex, sedentary hunter-gatherers to farming tribes and chiefdoms to petty states to large states. The major transition we should expect is at the appearance of the first form of social organization that shows signs of design for reducing violence within its borders. That would be the centralized state, the Leviathan. It’s not that any early state was (as Hobbes theorized) a commonwealth vested with power by a social contract that had been negotiated by its citizens. Early states were more like protection rackets, in which powerful Mafiosi extorted resources from the locals and offered them safety from hostile neighbors and from each other.28 Any ensuing reduction in violence benefited the overlords as much as the protectees. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his animals from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding that just shuffle resources or settle scores among them but from his point of view are a dead loss.

It is the sneaky raids, not the noisy battles, that kill in large numbers.34

ambuscade:

Still another tactic is treachery: the men can pretend to make peace with an enemy, invite them to a feast, and at a prearranged signal stab the unsuspecting guests.

Cannibalism has long been treated as the quintessence of primitive savagery, and in reaction many anthropologists used to dismiss reports of cannibalism as blood libels by neighboring tribes. But forensic archaeology has recently shown that cannibalism was widespread in human prehistory. The evidence includes human bones that bear human teethmarks or that had been cracked and cooked like those of animals and thrown out in the kitchen trash.40 Some of the butchered bones date back 800,000 years, to the time when Homo heidelbergensis, a common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, first appears on the evolutionary stage. Traces of human blood proteins have also been found in cooking pots and in ancient human excrement. Cannibalism may have been so common in prehistory as to have affected our evolution: our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases transmitted by cannibalism.41

Hobbes noted that humans in particular have three reasons for quarrel: gain, safety, and credible deterrence. People in nonstate societies fight about all three.43