Review of Steven Pinker,
The Better Angels of our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined
Viking (2011)
Herbert Gintis
Steven Pinker has always been a brilliant and insightful author, ably bridging the gap between
behavioral science research and the audience of intelligent laypersons. The Better Angels of Our
Nature, however, is by far his most ambitious and successful book---a book destined for
greatness. Like most great books, the message is simple and clear, and the author spends most of
his time and energy defending and elaborating on a few key points. Immensely knowledgeable in
all the behavioral sciences, and possessing considerable statistical skills, Pinker ranges over a
huge swath of modern research, virtually every page overflowing with factual information.
The last book that I read that I admired almost as much as this was Jared Diamond's Germs,
Guns and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997). I loved Diamond's book even though I
had some reservations concerning the validity of his explanation of the distribution of poverty
and wealth in the modern world. I have even more reservations concerning Pinker's explanation
of the dramatic decline of violence in modern society, but this does not diminish the value of his
contributions in my eyes (and it certainly should not in yours, dear potential reader).
Pinker begins by tracing six major turning points in human history (he calls them, rather
inaccurately, "trends"). First was the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary and agricultural
living some 10,000 years ago (yes, it was that recently!). The second was the transition from
feudalism to modern society in the Middle Ages, which initiated a five hundred year "Civilizing
Process" (to use the words of the great sociologist Norbert Elias) leading to a ten to fifty-fold
reduction in the amount of violence in society. The third was the European Enlightenment and
the Age of Reason that this unleashed, leading to the virtual elimination of socially sanction
forms of violence (e.g., torture, public hangings, dueling, witch burnings, cruelty to animals).
The fourth transition was the end of international war among the great powers after World War
II, and the fifth was the decline in civil wars, genocides, and repression by autocrats since the
end of the Cold War. Pinker's final transition is the widespread expression of faith in human
rights embodied in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Pinker ascribes the decline of violence to "four better angels," that form part of the psychological
repertoire of Homo sapiens. These are empathy, self-control, a moral sense, and the faculty of
reason. A fair fraction of the book is devoted to showing that we in fact have these "better
angels," using modern behavioral game theory and experimental psychology and economics. The
rather quaint notion, fashionable until just a couple of decades ago, that humans are basically
selfish and uncaring except for close kin, and that humans have a natural and irrepressible
instinct for aggression and mayhem, is eloquently and effectively contradicted by contemporary
social science research.
The better angels of our human nature do not operate, however, in a social vacuum. Rather,
Pinker asserts, there are five historical forces that have led to the triumph of empathy, selfcontrol, a moral sense, and the faculty of reason over the equally powerful human thirst to
exploit and dominate other groups, and to take revenge against those who have offended us with
no sense of self-control, temperance, or forgiveness. The first of these historical forces he calls
"Leviathan" (following Hobbes)---the rise of the state and judiciary that enforces a monopoly of
coercion, and funnels disputes between individuals and groups through the judicial apparatus.
The second is commerce, the globalization of which starting in the sixteen century, which
changes international relations into a positive sum game that is crippled by war. The third
historical force is feminization, through which the interests and values of women are increasing
respected and generalized to both sexes. The fourth is cosmopolitanism, including literacy,
mobility, and mass media, which lead people increasingly to understand the mind-sets and
desires of others unlike themselves, and to expand their circle of sympathy to larger and larger
groupings of individuals. The fifth, says Pinker, is the "escalator of reason," through which
people can learn from the past the futility of acting out their primitive urges, and rather turn to
peaceful solutions to their problems.
Perhaps the most surprising, and welcome, aspect of Pinker's new work is that it is implicitly a
devastating nail-in-the-coffin critique of the brand of evolutionary psychology with which Pinker
has identified for many years. The brand of evolutionary psychology initiated by Lida Cosmides
and John Tooby began with with a high-precision and effective attack on mainstream psychology
and sociology, which they called the Standard Social Sciences Model (SSSM). According to the
SSSM, the human mind is a blank slate at birth (nota bene: the title of one of Pinker's books was
The Blank Slate), and individual psychological characteristics are determined purely by the
dominant culture in which the individual is raised. "Human nature," as Karl Marx proclaimed in
the Theses on Feuerbach, "is the sum of social relations" (Marxism and mainstream social theory
agreed on this central tenet). Thus, in a culture that approves of violence there will be lots of
violence, which in a culture that approves of pacific relations, there will be peace. In a society
that recognizes differences between the sexes, there will be exhibited exactly those differences so
recognized. And so on.
The SSSM would be a mixed blessing if it were true. On the one hand, we could engineer culture
to produces people who are kind, considerate, and helpful to one another. On the other hand, a
totalitarian state could produce people who willingly follow the dictates of Big Brother,
inevitably rat on the deviations of their friends and family members from the Socially Desirable
Behavior, and live on hay and cider while their masters dined on caviar and Champagne (Yves
Montand one sang "Il faut une chasuble d'or pour chanter Beni Createur. Nous en tissons, grands
de l'Eglise, et nous, pauvres canuts, n'ont pas de chemises.")
However, the SSSM is surely not true, as we have learned from the work of Cosmides and
Tooby, followed by a few decades of behavioral economic and psychology. Just a Marx's
materialism is Hegel's idealism "stood on its head," so Cosmides and Tooby's evolutionary
psychology is the SSSM stood on its head: genes are everything and culture is a palsied
epiphenomenon, the instantaneous representation of the human gene pool.
However, Pinker's explanation of the remarkable decline in violence that hallmarks human
prehistory and history has an explanation in which genes and culture interact in a rather balanced
manner (this is called "gene-culture coevolution"). Humans have empathy and a moral sense not
because these virtues are impressed upon us as blank slates, but because we evolved in such a
manner that those with empathy and a moral sense had more offspring that the sociopaths, and
they passed the genes that precondition empathy and morality on to their offspring. Culture is
thus not an epiphenomenon that is completely subservient so social structure, but a driving force
in the transformation of social structure.
The problem with Pinker's argument is that it leaves us with a sense of post hoc propter hoc.
Humans became nicer in many different ways at once over the years (the Civilizing Process) and
we really cannot say why it came out the way it did. I think Pinker's stress on the role of the state
in reducing violence is undoubtedly correct, but why did the growth of state power not lead to
the sort of totalitarian despotism that was so feared in the early twentieth century, and so hoped
for by the Communists, Nazi, and Fascist states of the world? Why has cosmopolitanism led to
the spread of liberating information technologies, rather than highly efficient despotic control of
information by an authoritarian state?
One could answer that the human drive for freedom and dignity, a legacy from our huntergatherer past, accounts for the control of the means of coercion by the mass of citizens (note that
in a fully efficient coercive state, there is no violence at all--although there might be some
ineluctable "reeducation")? I think the answer probably lies in the nature technology.
The egalitarian nature of simple hunter-gatherer societies was predicated on the existence of
lethal weapons, making it impossible, in an age before property, for an individual to control the
group through force, because anyone can kill anyone else, catching him by surprise, at low
persona cost. With the advent of sedentary and agricultural communities, private property
permitted a ruling class to control the masses by force, and primitive egalitarianism was
completely eclipsed in the human world. Only with the development of the handgun and bored
rifle in the eighteenth and later centuries prevented the hegemony of a ruling class of mounted
warriors. The age of democracy was at the same time the age of foot soldiers and the infantrybased army.
In thinking about Pinker's argument, I am led to think that he understates the role of information
technology in the decline of violence. When my Jewish ancestors were murdered in Polish
pogroms, their tormenters were told that Jews sacrificed Christians on their Holy Days, and their
unleavened bread was an admixture of wheat and Christian blood. My mother-in-law recounted
to me the following story. As a young bride, she took the bus every Saturday to visit her husband
where he was stationed. After a couple of weeks, she became friendly with another young bride
in the same situation, and thereafter they sat together passing the time talking during the trip.
One day my mother-in-law mentioned that she was Jewish. Her friend, completely horrified,
pushed her away in disgust, and asked her where her horns were, which her priest had assured
her all Jewish women had under the kerchiefs. My point is that now you just can't get away with
manipulating people into believing such falsehoods because there is no power so despotic as to
be able to shields its people from the truth.