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WillowOne's Positions

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Overview

Pinker's argument that violence of almost every kind, from homicide and war to torture, slavery and cruelty to animals, has declined over the long run of human history, and that this is one of the most important and least noticed facts about our species. The first half marshals the data: archaeological death rates, medieval homicide records, the frequency and lethality of wars, and the twentieth-century "rights revolutions". The second half asks why, and answers with Hobbes' Leviathan, trade, the spread of literacy and reason, and the expanding circle of people we count as people. The "better angels" of the title are the faculties, empathy, self-control, moral sense and reason, that can win out over our "inner demons" when the conditions are right.

Notes

This is the empirical case for a view I hold on other grounds: that morality is a set of tools that pay off, and that the tools have been improving. The decline in violence is real, and it is the strongest argument I know against the idea that moral progress requires a divine lawgiver; the law and the traders and the printing press did the work. Pinker's critics are right that the statistics on war are fragile and that a single bad century could reopen the question, and he is too quick to credit the Enlightenment as a single cause. But the central finding has survived a decade of attempts to knock it down, and the chapter on the "civilising process" is the best account I have read of why a Leviathan turns out to be a good idea.

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