The Better Angels of our Nature

Steven Pinker “The Better Angels of our Natures: Why Violence Has Declined” Viking, 2011, 696 pp. plus 41 pgs. of notes.


This is a big book and often hard to read but always worth the effort. The author maintains that all this detail is essential as the very idea that per capita violence really has gone down over the course of history, invites incredulity. “Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times, especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news.” The author gives an exhaustive sampling of the history of violence which is necessary to support the theme that violence has, in fact, dramatically declined. An important device in the book is the display of statistics using a proportionate violence measure: per 100,000 population increments. Otherwise, the sheer numbers of WWI and WWII overwhelm.

Millions of people are alive today because of the civil wars and genocides that did not take place but that would have taken place if the world had remained as it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The conditions that favored this happy outcome—democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies, and the decline of antihuman ideologies—are not, of course, guaranteed to last forever (p.377). It is also interesting to note that there was a thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and modern Europe. However, the author is particularly confident that the gains will be maintained thanks to the technologies that have made ideas increasingly mobile (texting, youtube, Iphones, etc.).

My Notes:

Pg. 40: Behaviorally modern humans, with art, ritual, clothing, complex tools, and the ability to live in different ecosystems, probably evolved 75,000 years ago in Africa before setting out to people the rest of the world.

Pg. 42: Leviathan: a centralized state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Organization of society into a centralized state was critical to a reduction of violence, even though 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. Europe had five thousand independent political units in the 15th century, five hundred at the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17th, two hundred at the time of Napoleon in the early 19th, and fewer than thirty in 1953. This was a consolidation of a genuine Leviathan replacing the anarchy of Europe’s feudal patchwork of baronies and fiefs (p. 74).

Pg. 56: One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare as the infrastructure government (the Leviathan) they had built, collapsed.

Pg. 94: The current black-white difference in homicide rates within the U.S. is stark. Between 1976 and 2005 the average homicide rate for white Americans was 4.8 per 100,000 population, while the average rate for black Americans was 36.9. (Also, southern whites are more violent than northern whites, and southern blacks are more violent than northern blacks).

Pg. 99: Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by possess, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.

Pg. 106: An appreciation of the Civilizing Process in the American West and rural South helps to make sense of the American political landscape today. Many northern and coastal intellectuals are puzzled by the culture of their red state compatriots, with their embrace of guns, capital punishment, small government, evangelical Christianity, ‘family values,’ and sexual propriety. Their opposite numbers are just as baffled by the blue-states timidity toward criminals and foreign enemies, their trust in government, their intellectualized secularism, and their tolerance of licentiousness. This so-called culture war is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court-and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

Pg. 107: Rates of violence did a U-turn in the 1960s in both Europe and the U.S. IN the 1960s the homicide rate in America went through the roof. After a three-decade free fall that spanned the Great Depression, WWII, and the Cold War, Americans multiplied their homicide rate by more than two and a half, from a low of 4.0 per 100,000 people in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980. The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery and theft, and lasted for three decades. The surge in violence affected all the races and both genders but it was most dramatic among black men, whose annual homicide rate had shot up by the mid-1980s to 72 per 100,000. These decades were a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs.

Pg. 121: By the early 1990s, Americans had gotten sick of the muggers, vandals, and drive-by shootings, and the country beefed up the criminal justice system in several ways. The most effective was putting more men behind bars for longer stretches of time. The rate of imprisonment shot up almost fivefold, and today more than two million Americans are in jail, the highest incarceratioin rate on the planet.

Pg. 158: A government, according to the famous characterization by the sociologist Max Weber, is an institution that olds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. All of the first complex states were despotisms.

Pg. 161: As Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” As this is not the case, Locke’s ideal of the separation of powers was written into the design of the new U.S. government because “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The result was the division of government into executive, judicial, and legislative, the federalist system in which authority was divided between the states and the national government, and periodic elections to force the government to give some attention to the wishes of the populace and to transfer power in an orderly and peaceable way. Perhaps most important, the government was given a circumscribed mission statement—to secure the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of its citizens, with their consent-and, in the form of the Bill of Rights, a set of lines it could not cross in its use of violence against them.

Pg. 167: Historians have noted a change in the attitudes to war beginning around 1700. No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Gradually this was changed to ‘I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.’ This might be seen as progress.

Kant outlined three conditions for perpetual peace.
1. States should be democratic (he used the term republican because he associated the word democracy with mob rule; whet he had in mind was a government dedicated to freedom, equality, and the rule of law.)
2. The law of nations shall be founded on a Federation of Free States—a league of Nations, as he also called it. This federation, a kind of international Leviathan, would provide objective, third-party adjudication of disputes.
3. Universal hospitality: people from one country should be free to live in safety in others. The hope is that communication, trade, and other peaceable relations will knit the world’s people into a single community.

Pg. 174: The author maintains that the growth of writing and literacy had a profound impact on the Humanitarian Revolution (e.g. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”), especially in conjunction with the rise of cites. (This dichotomy is visible today in Afghanistan).

Pg. 193: The population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion, which is about two and a half times the population in 1800, four and a half times that in 1600, seven times that in 1300, and fifteen times that of 1 CE. So the death count of a war in 1600, for instance, would have to be multiplied by 4.5 for us to compare its destructiveness to those in the middle of the 20th century. So when one adjusts for population size, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. In the United States, 37,000 military personnel died in the Korean War, and 58,000 died in Vietnam; no other war came close. Yet an average of 17,000 people are murdered in the U.S. every year, adding up to almost a million deaths since 1950.

Pg. 272: Since 1964 as many countries have given up nuclear weapons as have acquired them. While Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea currently have a nuclear capability, South Africa dismantled its stash shortly before the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1989, and Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus said no thanks to the arsenals they inherited from the breakup of the Soviet Union. At various times Algeria, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Romania, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia have pursued nuclear weapons but then thought the better of it.

Pg. 279: Quite apart from any contribution that democracy might make to international peace, it is a form of government that inflicts the minimum of violence on its own citizens, so the rise of democracy itself must be counted as another milestone in the historical decline of violence.
Pg. 328: As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology. Divisive ideologies include Christianity during the Crusades and the Wars of Religion; revolutionary romanticism during the French Revolution including Napoleon; nationalism during the genocides in Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans; Nazism in the Holocaust; and Marxism during the purges, expulsions, and terror-famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Pg. 344: Other than 9/11, the number of people killed by terrorists on American soil during these thirty-eight years was 340 and the number killed after after 9/11—the date that inaugurated the so-called Age of Terror—was 11.

Pg. 364: Why did Islam blow its technological lead and fail to have an Age of Reason, Enlightenment, and a Humanitarian Revolution? It appears the answer is the historical lack of separation between mosque and state. Only recently have any Islamic states had the concept of a distinction between the secular and the sacred. With every potential intellectual contribution filtered through religious spectacles, opportunities for absorbing and combining new ideas were lost.

Pg. 421: A preference for sons should arise only in a market with distorted property rights, one in which parents, in effect, own their sons but not their daughters. (When a son marries, the woman comes to live in the community of the husband—often after paying a huge dowry).

Pg. 450: As late as 1969, homosexuality was illegal in every state but Illinois. But in 1969 a raid of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, set off three days of rioting in protest and galvanized gay communities throughout the country to work to repeal laws that criminalized homosexuality. By 2003 the Supreme Court overturned an antisodomy statute in Texas and ruled that all such laws were unconstitutional.

Pg. 479: Martin Luther King appreciated that Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance was not a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teachings of Jesus. Instead it was a set of hardheaded tactics to prevail over and adversary by outwitting him rather than trying to annihilate him. A taboo on violence, King inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure and mayhem. It preserves morale and focus among followers when the movement suffers early defeats. TV and cameras certainly aid these movements.

Pg. 510: Psychopaths make up 1 to 3 percent of the male population. Psychopaths are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals, and commit half the serious crimes. They also perpetrate nonviolent crimes like bilking elderly couples out of their life savings and running a business with ruthless disregard for the welfare of the workforce or stakeholders. Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. Violence, in fact, is a problem of too much self- esteem, particularly when it is unearned (p. 520).

Pg. 636: In developed Western countries, including the U.S. there is a trend toward social liberalism; i.e., a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights. Though both liberals and conservatives may deny that any such a trend has taken place, consider the fact that no mainstream conservative politician today would invoke tradition, authority, cohesion, or religion to justify racial segregation, keeping women out of the workforce, or criminalizing homosexuality, arguments they made just a few decades ago.

Pg. 650: The Flynn Effect describes the increasing IQ in thirty countries, including some of the developing world and has been going ever since IQ test were given en masse around the time of WWI. Because of this inflation, an average of three IQ points (a fifth of a standard deviation) per decade, periodic norming of the test is required to bring back 100 as the average. Flynn ascribes the IQ inflation to the rising reasoning ability to postscientific (as opposed to prescientific) thinking. Consider a typical question from the Similarities section of an IQ test: “What do dogs and rabbits have in common?” The answer, obvious to us, is that they are both mammals. An American in 1900 would have been just as likely to say, “You use dogs to hunt rabbits.” The difference is that today we spontaneously classify the world with the categories of science, but not so long ago the “correct” answer would seem abstruse and irrelevant.

Pg. 681: Leviathan effects lay behind the Pacification and Civilizing Processes. When bands, tribes, and chiefdoms came under the control of the first states, the suppression of raiding and feuding reduced their rates of violent death fivefold. And when the fiefs of Europe coalesced into kingdoms and sovereign states, the consolidation of law enforcement eventually brought down the homicide rate another thirtyfold. Pockets of anarchy that lay beyond the reach of gocernment retained their violent cultures of honor.

Pg. 687 Traditional gynecide, joined in the 1980s by the female-abortion industry, resulted in a large excess of males into the population structures of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, and parts of India. These surpluses of men bode poorly for the immediate prospects of peace and democracy in those regions.