There is a reason that I made reason the last of the better angels of our nature. Once a society has a degree of civilization in place, it is reason that offers the greatest degree of hope for further reducing violence. The other angels have been with us for as long as we've been human, but during most of our long existence they have been unable to prevent war, slavery, despotism, institutionalized sadism, and the oppression of women. As important as they are, empathy, self-control, and the moral sense have too few degrees of freedom, and too restricted a range of application, to explain the advances of recent decades and centuries.Not long ago, I was playing the game Table Talk with a group of adults and one of the questions was something like, “If you could live in any time and place, what would it be?” We went around the circle and people gave answers like, “I'd move to Cabo (Mexico) in a heartbeat” or, “I'd love to have been a member of Henry VIII's court”, and when my turn came up, the only answer I could give was, “Assuming I'm still me in this fantasy, there's nowhere I would rather live than right here in Canada, right now. I can't think of a time or place that is safer, healthier, and offers more opportunities for women.” Granting that there are many similarly salubrious locales around the world today, there sure weren't throughout history: Would I rather have lived in ancient Greece, seeing my husband and sons off to endless wars, protecting myself and daughters from foreign invaders? Would I rather have lived in the dungheap of the European Middle Ages, under the heavy yoke of the Church and threat of the Inquisition? Would I rather have lived in a little house on the prairie, toiling dawn to dusk, pumping out a kid per year, praying at least a couple of them would survive to adulthood? Living just about anywhere in the early-to-mid-twentieth century would have been a dangerous and fretful experience – if the wars didn't come to me, my menfolk would have went to the wars; leaving me to negotiate a public sphere I was unprepared for – and even in the context of the game we were playing, I couldn't imagine a time and place that I would rather live in than right here, right now. And I didn't need the supporting stats from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined to garner grudging nods of agreement from both the women and the men I was playing Table Talk with: No matter how pessimistic the nightly news might be, this part of the world just feels safer than ever before. Pinker himself intuited this shift, and this book attempts to explain how we got to today's peaceableness after a long human history of violence, sadism, discourtesy, and disregard for others.
I am sometimes asked, “How do you know there won’t be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?” The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them.In May of this year, in a kind of virtual convocation address, Bill Gates tweeted to college grads, “If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this – the most inspiring book I've ever read”, to which he attached an image of The Better Angels of our Nature. Later, Gates tweeted, “This is the most peaceful time in human history. That matters because if you think the world is getting better, you want to spread the progress to more people and places. It doesn't mean you ignore the serious problems we face. It just means you believe they can be solved.” It was, therefore, on Bill Gates' recommendation that I picked up this book, and having now read it six years post-publication, I also benefit from the learned reactions of previous readers; which I admit I needed because even as I was reading, I wasn't totally buying Pinker's scholarship: I am not surprised to see on Goodreads that the most popular reviews give it either one or five stars. I don't want to retread worn ground, so here are links to what I found to be the best published perspectives on The Better Angels of our Nature:
•Richard Feloni, on the heels of Bill Gates' endorsement, enthusiastically summarised Pinker's thesis in Business Insider.
•John Gray tore apart Pinker's “questionable” conclusions in The Guardian.
•And Elizabeth Kolbert staked out the skeptical middle ground, more or less where I find myself, in The New Yorker.
For all the violence that remains in the world, we are living in an extraordinary age. Perhaps it is a snapshot in a progression to an even greater peace. Perhaps it is a bottoming out to a new normal, with the easy reductions all plucked and additional ones harder and harder to reach. Perhaps it is a lucky confluence of good fortune that will soon unravel. But regardless of how the trends extrapolate into the future, something remarkable has brought us to the present.Anyone who wants to know the specifics of this book can easily follow my links (or otherwise Google around), so all I want to talk about is my experience. For about the first two thirds of The Better Angels of our Nature, Pinker covers the known and conjectured history of the world, summarising everything in graphs and tables; constantly explaining how he created his graphs, what can be ignored in them, what he ignored while compiling them. I had the uneasy feeling that, as I am not a statistician, I would just need to take his word for everything, and that undermined his persuasiveness. The last third concerns the working of the human brain, and Pinker recounts dozens and dozens of social science and neurobiology experiments, and these were even duller in their recounting than the previous graphs. Whenever Pinker was telling a narrative, I was engaged; when he was sharing (questionable) facts, I was bored. And as the font was rather smallish and my mind tended to drift in the duller bits, I clocked myself at reading a paltry 35 pages/hour: at a not totally unreasonable 700 pages before the footnotes, this book still took far too long to read. I was neither completely entertained or enlightened by what I found here.
And yet, I do believe that Pinker made a valiant attempt to explain a phenomenon that most of us intuitively feel to be true. And I do agree with Bill Gates that feeling hopeful about the world leads us to not give up on it. I do think that The Better Angels of our Nature is a worthwhile read, but I would encourage any new readers to also dig into the contrary opinions out there. My weaselly instincts want me to split the difference between the most popular reviews and give this three stars, but the better angels of my nature want me to take a stand, so I'm nudging up to four: this book had more good than not in it.
