The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes [Format Kindle]

This is not a perfect book, but it is unique, and if you skim the first 400 or so pages, the last 300 are a pretty good attempt to apply what's known about behavior to social changes in violence and manners over time. The basic topic is: how does our genetics control and limit social change? Surprisingly he fails to give in any clear way the explanation for this in terms of inclusive fitness which is entailed by neodarwinism Mostly the criticisms given by others (I read them all) are nit-picking and irrelevant and, as Pinker has said, he could not write a coherent book about "bad things", nor could he give every possible reference and point of view, but he should have said at least something about the other ways of abusing and exploiting people and the planet since these are now so much more severe as to render other forms of violence irrelevant.

Extending the concept of violence will provide a very different perspective on what is happening in the world right now and how things are likely to go in the next few hundred years. One might start by noting that the decrease in physical violence over history has been matched (and made possible) by the constantly increasing merciless rape of the planet (i.e., by people's destruction of their own descendants future). Pinker (like most people most of the time) is often distracted by the superficialities of culture when its biology that matters.

This is the classic nature/nurture issue and nature trumps nurture --infinitely. What really matters is the violence done to the earth by the relentless increase in population and resource destruction (due to medicine and technology) About 200,000 more people a day (another Los Angeles every three weeks), the 12 tons or so of topsoil going into the sea/person/year etc. mean that unless some miracle happens the biosphere and civilization will largely collapse in this century and there will be starvation, misery and violence of every kind on a staggering scale. People's manners, opinions and tendencies to commit violent acts are of no relevance unless they can do something to avoid this catastrophe, and I don't see how that is going to happen. There is no space for arguments, and probably no point either (yes I'm fatalist), so I'll just make a few comments as though they were facts. Don't imagine I have a personal stake. I am 71, have no descendants and no close relatives and do not identify with any political, national or religious group and regard the ones I belong to by default as just as repulsive as all the rest.

Parents are all Enemies of Life on Earth and women are at least as violent as men. The fact that women's violence (like most of that done by men) is largely done in slow motion, at a distance in time and space and mostly carried out by proxy -by their descendants and by men --does not ameliorate it. Increasingly women bear children regardless of whether they have a mate and the effect of stopping one woman from breeding is on average much greater than stopping one man. In my view most people and their offspring richly deserve whatever misery comes their way and (with rare exceptions) the rich and famous are the worst offenders. Meryl Streep or Bill Gates and each of their kids may destroy 50 tons of topsoil each per year, while an Indian farmer may destroy 1 ton. If you deny it or don't want to deal with it that's fine, and to your descendants I say "Welcome to Hell on Earth"(WTHOE).

Human Responsibilities must replace Human Rights. Nobody gets rights without being a responsible citizen and the first thing this means is minimal environmental destruction . The most basic responsibility is no children unless your society asks you to produce them. A society or a world that lets people breed at will and supports their progeny will always be exploited by selfish genes until it collapses (or reaches a point where life is so horrific it's not worth living). If you want to maintain Human Rights as primary, that's fine and to your descendants one can say with confidence "WTHOE".

"Helping" has to be seen from a global long term perspective. Almost all "help" that's given by individuals, organizations or countries harms others and the world in the long run and must only be given after a very careful consideration. If you want to hand out money, food, medicine, etc., you need to ask what the long term environmental consequences are. If you want to please everyone all the time, that's fine and again to your descendants I say "WTHOE".

Dysgenics: endless trillions of creatures beginning with bacteria-like forms over 3 billion years ago have died to create us and all current life and this is called eugenics. We all have "bad genes" but some are worse than others. It is estimated that up to 50% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion due to "bad genes". Civilization is dysgenic. This problem is currently trivial compared to overpopulation but getting worse by the day. Medicine, welfare and "helping" of all kinds have dysgenic consequences which will collapse society even if population growth stops. Again if you don't believe it or don't want to deal with it that's fine and to your descendants we can say " WTHOE".

Beware the utopian scenarios that suggest doomsday can be avoided by judicious application of technologies. You can't fool mother nature. I leave you with just one example. Famous scientist Raymond Kurzweil proposed nanobots as the saviors of humankind. They would make anything we needed and clean every mess. They would even make ever better versions of themselves. They would keep us as pets. But think of how many people treat their pets, and pets are overpopulating and destroying and becoming dysgenic almost as fast as humans. Pets only exist because we destroy the earth to feed them and we have spay and neuter clinics and euthanize the sick and unwanted ones. We practice rigorous population control and eugenics on them and no form of life can evolve or exist without these--not even bots. And what's to stop nanobots from evolving? Any change that facilitated reproduction would automatically be selected for and any behavior that wasted time or energy (i.e., taking care of humans) would be heavily selected against. What would stop the bots program from mutating into a homicidal form and exploiting all earth's resources causing global collapse? There is no free lunch for bots either and to them too we can confidently say "WTHOE".

This is not a full review but only an account of the weaknesses and errors a reader slightly educated in history or anthropology is likely to find.

Having read all previous Pinker's books, I think this is the worst. Digressing from what is his main area of expertise, he comes to make a cornucopia of mistakes and inaccuracies that should be duly pointed out. Unfortunately, these are quite a lot so that a review of this kind does not suffice. Anyway, here is a brief summary (I'll go through chapters).

The first and second chapters are about the ancient times, the dangerous past. There is a big lacuna in statistics here. Neither does Pinker uses comprehensive sources regarding hunter-gatherers societies (the figures he shows concerns only few societies), nor can we ever know about the past. As we find a great variability in terms of violence and social change in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, we cannot think that 'primitive' societies remained the same for millennia; so we cannot take the Yanomamo as our living ancestors. Indeed the warlike Yanomamo the only non-state society Pinker writes about. This was a famous case reported by Chagnon that has been heavily criticised by many academics (in a 500 page book on the subject Brian Ferguson argues that they became increasingly aggressive because of continuous Western intrusions). Actually, Pinker also mentions the !Kung San, writing about how violent they were with the European colonists (but who would be peaceful towards a sanguinary invader?). As anthropologists normally know, the ways and frequency in which violence is carried out in non-state societies varies dramatically cross-culturally. Pinker does not show statistics about markedly peaceful and egalitarian societies like the Piaroa , Birhor, Doukhobors, Lepchas, Fipa, Semai, Fore, Yanadi ,Kadar, Mbuti or Paliyans to name but a few, or other perhaps less egalitarians but equally peaceful groups like the Hutterites, Brethrens, Quakers, Mennonites or Moravians. All these do not fall within the author's view of human nature.
Also, it is argued that the state was developed because people decided that law was better than war. Actually the state in all cases did not originate through such acute reflections but with the sheer use of violence. In 'Society against the state' and 'the archaeology of violence', Pierre Clastres showed that non-state societies were organized in ways to prevent abuses of power. Violence was mainly levelled against people who wanted to impose one's force over others or against those who refrained from sharing resources. As primatologist de Waal pointed out, the same thing happens with chimpanzees. I think that this offers interesting ethical insights. I guess that everybody would rather condemn to death 10 rapists or impostors than 5 innocents. Well, one could make the case that in recent times the situation has overturned. It is normally people deemed to be innocent by the majority who get killed (Giorgio Agamben also makes this point). Such reflections of course do not figure in Pinker's statistics. Liquidating the issue of non-state societies in a few pages with scanty data, he then goes on writing about the civilizing process. The shrewd reader, though, would recognize the fact that we are no longer talking about 'human nature' on the whole.

Chapter 3. This is about the civilizing process. Pinker uses Elias' well-known book to illustrate the causes of the decline of violence in relative numbers in last centuries, highlighting how a change in more decorous manners by the upper class has helped such transformation. I don't know how he has interpreted the book but surely Elias talks a lot more about how our everyday life has become emotionally constrained by such new mannerisms than he does about violence. David Graeber, in his book 'Possibilities' uses Elias in the exact opposite way Pinker does. Also, it is evident from the reading of it that such manners and behaviours were created by the upper class in order to take the distance from the lower class, rather than being sagaciously formulated as to diminish violence.
Other inaccuracies: 'African American have often been more violent because factually stateless'. There's a serious neglect of history. Read, for example, Bourgois' 'in search of respect: selling crack in El Barrio'; he gives an idea about how this kind of violence actually harks back to colonial history.

Chapter 4. The chapter dedicated to the humanitarian revolution. Starts off with a few sensationalistic accounts on how terrible torture used to be. While highlighting very well this change (abolition of torture, etc'), I think he fails to take into account how things like 'sacrifice' and 'sorcery' were experienced and conceptualized by the people practicing them. His view is markedly positivist (of the like of James Frazier), an analytical framework that has been disproved by every academic working on the subject since at least the 1920s. Also, many have pointed out that with the abolition of torture, violence hasn't vanished into thin air, but has taken other forms. Foucault notably argued that public display of violence has transformed in private forms of oppression (from his 'discipline and punishment'). Accordingly, Pinker praises Bentham for his commitment against torture but forgets that the same man designed the 'panopticon'.
Anyway, I think that the greatest blunder of this chapter is his idea of 'gentle commerce' (?). I am quite well-read about history of economics but I'm sure I've never encountered such a term. With 'gentle commerce', I'd imagine two merchants on a camel or a horse meeting at a crossroad, exchanging a couple of bows, a smile, and a kilo of dates for some bananas, before trotting back home. Of course, such thing has never existed. Human history has witnessed so many types of exchange and economic systems (from gift to planned to market economy; although barter economy is somewhat of a myth, as David Graeber has shown in his last book on debt), each of them implying a different sort of violence according to the specific historical circumstances. If for 'gentle commerce', Pinker means 'capitalism' in general (although there have been so many variants), well, some people (Karl Polanyi for example) have argued that it was such 'gentle commerce' the cause lying behind the rise of fascism, the various nationalisms and the first world war. Not to say anything about the deleterious effects on the rest of the world, but, of course, this is not violence, nor it can make statistics.
Pinker also claims that African poverty is due to the failure of African governments. This is so superficial I don't even want to start talk about it. Reading Chomsky on the 'structural adjustments' policies of the IMF will do. I guess that the author has never heard of the 'world system theories' of people like Wallerstein or Gunder Frank who cogently argued that, due to its inner logic, capitalism always implies the development of only few areas to the detriment of the others. 'Gentle commerce', whatever that means, is hardly a cause for the decline of violence and, given the current situation, it's likely to increase it in the future.

Chapter 5 and 6. These are about the 'long peace' and the 'new peace' accounting for the period from WW2. Same unsuitable interpretations of economic history (page 287 is just scandalous). For the author, the uprisings in Iraq were due to anarchy and not to US legacy which is of course debatable. Also, there is a big misrepresentation of anarchism and Marxism. Unlike what he says, the first is nowadays very far from romantic utopianism but engaged in practical activism (see OWS, completely based on anarchist principles); the second does no longer believe in a teleological course of history (something that it has abandoned for about a century, Pinker has missed it).
There are frequent references about the eruption of violence in some collapsed states in Africa like Somalia, and it is claimed that this is due to anarchy. In fact, the reality is far more complicated (see authors like James Ferguson or Caroline Nordstrom for a close account of what's going on there). Violence attributed to anarchy is only brought up when we actually hear about such guerrilla warfare. There are so many places with no formal government where people do not start killing each other. Rural Madagascar is an example (Graeber in his book 'Possibilities').
End chapter 5: 'the motto of capitalism being 'make money, not war'' (?).

Chapter 7. In the overall better presented chapter on the rights revolution, Pinker, while praising such achievements, leaves out some important aspects. For example, 'human rights abuses' are only evoked when governments are seen as trespassing on some victim's person or possession (rape, killing), but they are never evoked when they eliminate price supports on basic foodstuff, even if it leads to malnutrition or famine. Both the man who gets shot and the man who starves die. Arguably, dying of starvation or of diseases related to malnutrition is even worse. For Pinker, only the first is violence. If we allow the second to be considered violence too, then the statistics would reverse.
Plus, he forgets to point out that all these were achieved through grass-root protest (not through the divine clemency of the state), the kind of protest that, according to him, leads to chaos and violence in other occasions.
Also, his claim that women in primitive societies are 'property' of men is false (read Strathern's 'gender of the gift' for a discussion on the topic).
The fact that punishment on children in hunter-gatherers societies does not exist is given only a line (how does that figure in the decline of violence?).
Says that the rate of impulsive violence of yesterday's adults was far higher than today's (where is the data?). Lire la suite ›