The Better Angels of Our Nature

Author: Steven Pinker | Published: 2011

Summary

The Better Angels of Our Nature makes one of the most ambitious empirical arguments in recent popular intellectual history: that violence—by virtually every measurable dimension—has declined dramatically over the course of human history, and that we are living in the most peaceful era in human existence. Pinker marshals an extraordinary quantity of data across multiple time scales and forms of violence: rates of death in prehistoric societies vs. states, rates of interstate warfare over centuries, rates of homicide in medieval vs. modern Europe, the abolition of torture and capital punishment as public spectacle, the decline of slavery, the extension of rights to women, children, ethnic minorities, and LGBT people. The book is approximately 800 pages and constitutes an argument of sustained empirical and philosophical rigor.

The second half of the book asks why violence has declined—what forces have pushed downward on human destructiveness across history. Pinker identifies five historical forces (the Leviathan, commerce, feminization, cosmopolitanism, and the escalator of reason) and four psychological mechanisms he calls the “better angels” of human nature (empathy, self-control, moral sense, and reason). The Leviathan—the Hobbesian state monopoly on violence—is the most powerful force in reducing domestic violence; the expansion of trade is credited with reducing interstate conflict (the “capitalist peace”); the feminization of society and the spread of literacy and education have reduced tribal and parochial violence.

The book generated enormous debate. Critics including John Gray attacked the historical methodology, the definitions of violence, and the cherry-picking of metrics. Others challenged the Whig narrative structure, the reliance on state violence statistics that may undercount structural violence (poverty, inequality), and the adequacy of Pinker’s psychological explanation. Despite these criticisms, the core empirical claim—that rates of violent death have declined—has proved robust; the debate is about the explanation and the significance, not the basic trend.

Critical Takeaways

  • The empirical argument: The book’s most durable contribution is its systematic assembly of data on historical rates of violent death—data that genuinely surprised most readers and challenged widespread cultural pessimism about modern violence.
  • The Flynn Effect: Pinker’s use of the Flynn Effect (rising IQ scores over the 20th century) as evidence that abstract reasoning capacity has increased—and that this is correlated with declining violence—is one of the book’s most interesting and contested claims.
  • Criticisms: John Gray’s The Silence of Animals is the most sustained critique, arguing that Pinker’s narrative is a form of secular progress religion that selectively ignores counterevidence (nuclear weapons, potential future catastrophes, state capacity for mass violence).
  • Influence on rationalist culture: The book became a foundational text for the “rationalist” and “progress studies” communities; the debate it generated between optimists and pessimists about modernity remains live.

My Takeaways

  1. The prehistoric violence data—skeletal evidence of violent death rates in pre-state societies—was genuinely surprising and forced me to reconsider Rousseau-influenced assumptions about the peaceful “state of nature.”
  2. The feminist argument—that societies become less violent as women gain power and influence—is both empirically interesting and morally satisfying; it connects a rights argument to a consequentialist one.
  3. Pinker’s “better angels” framing—not that humans have changed but that certain faculties (empathy, reason) have been given more cultural support and institutional expression—is more nuanced than his critics sometimes acknowledge.

Footnotes