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The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes by [Steven Pinker]

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Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes Kindle Edition

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'The most inspiring book I've ever read' Bill Gates, 2017

'A brilliant, mind-altering book ... Everyone should read this astonishing book' Guardian

'Will change the way you see the world' Daily Mail

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2012

Wasn't the twentieth century the most violent in history? In his extraordinary, epic book Steven Pinker shows us that this is wrong, telling the story of humanity in a completely new and unfamiliar way. From why cities make us safer to how books bring about peace, Pinker weaves together history, philosophy and science to examine why we are less likely to die at another's hand than ever before, how it happened and what it tells us about our very natures.

'May prove to be one of the great books of our time ... he writes like an angel' Economist

'Masterly, a supremely important book ... For anyone interested in human nature, it is engrossing' The New York Times

'Marvellous ... riveting and myth-destroying' New Statesman

'A marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling, written in Pinker's distinctively entertaining and clear personal style ... I was astonished by the extent to which violence has declined in every shape, form and scale' Financial Times

'An outstandingly fruitful read, with fascinating nuggets on almost every page' Sunday Times, Books of the Year

Length: 784 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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One of the most important books I've read - not just this year, but ever ... For me, what's most important about The Better Angels of Our Nature are its insights into how to help achieve positive outcomes. How can we encourage a less violent, more just society, particularly for the poor? Steven Pinker shows us ways we can make those positive trajectories a little more likely. That's a contribution, not just to historical scholarship, but to the world -- Bill Gates

Brilliant, mind-altering...Everyone should read this astonishing book -- David Runciman ― Guardian

A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline -- Peter Singer ― New York Times

[A] sweeping new review of the history of human violence...[Pinker has] the kind of academic superbrain that can translate otherwise impenetrable statistics into a meaningful narrative of human behaviour...impeccable scholarship -- Tony Allen-Mills ― Sunday Times

Written in Pinker's distinctively entertaining and clear personal style...a marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling -- Clive Cookson ― Financial Times

A salutary reality-check...Better Angels is itself a great liberal landmark -- Marek Kohn ― Independent

Pinker's scholarhsip is astounding...flawless...masterful -- Joanna Bourke ― The Times

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2011 ― New York Times --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

One of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today," Steven Pinker is the author of seven books, including How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate both Pulitzer Prize finalists and winners of the William James Book Award. He is an award-winning researcher and teacher, and a frequent contributor to Time and the New York Times. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ASIN : B005HHSYMW
Publisher : Penguin; 1st edition (6 October 2011)
Language : English
File size : 17576 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 784 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 92,887 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 58 in Violence in Society (Kindle Store)
- 177 in Violence in Society (Books)
- 360 in Social History

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David Gilbertson

Great content, difficult read

Reviewed in Australia on 19 May 2020

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I have a reasonable vocabulary (I thought) but there's so many words I don't know in this book. Enervating, invidious, perquisite, irenic, tendentious, abjuring, obloquy, colloquy, ectomorph, calumny, ambuscade, enjoin ... the list goes on and on.

It's very impressive that Mr Pinker knows so many words, but he seems to not understand that using them all is not the best way to communicate a message.

So, while I'm enjoying expanding my vocabulary, I think the book would be better if it dialled back the arcane language and allowed readers to become immersed in the message of the book, which is an excellent one.

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Lorry Bucci

The Better Angels Of Our Nature

Reviewed in Australia on 7 December 2019

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A must-read and it puts its point across in very simple terms. The point is the world is no as sad or bad as expected

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Talia Vandyk

Love it

Reviewed in Australia on 13 August 2020

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Love it
Everyone should read this book

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Ken Buntain

Five Stars

Reviewed in Australia on 1 May 2015

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Agree or disagree, it makes you think!

One person found this helpful

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Alex Angove

An important book and highly recommended, especially if you don't currently agree with the premise.

Reviewed in Australia on 9 October 2017

This is a fantastically-written book, explaining in very simple terms why the common belief (that crops up in every generation) that the world is always getting worse is misguided. Of course, there are ups and downs, and Pinker does not ignore those, but it all comes out in the wash. An important book and highly recommended, especially if you don't currently agree with the premise.

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Muziba

Excellent read!

Reviewed in Australia on 25 July 2014

Loved every reasoning, a reminder of the horrific deeds us humans have been and to some extent still are willing to impose on each other yet the book also lightens up the hope that the better part of our inner self prevails thus securing the better future for our children.

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michael

The Transient Suppression of the Worst Devils of our Nature—a review of Steven Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature'

Reviewed in Australia on 16 February 2015

This is not a perfect book, but it is unique, and if you skim the first 400 or so pages, the last 300 (of some 700) 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 describe the nature of kin selection (inclusive fitness) which explains much of animal and human social life. He also (like nearly everyone) lacks a clear framework for describing the logical structure of rationality (LSR—John Searle’s preferred term) which I prefer to call the Descriptive Psychology of Higher Order Thought (DPHOT). Mostly the criticisms given by others 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 many 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 to include the global long term consequences of replication of someone’s genes, and having a grasp of the nature of how evolution works (i.e., kin selection) will provide a very different perspective on history, current events, 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 it’s biology that matters. See my recent reviews of Wilson’s ‘The Social Conquest of Earth’ and Nowak and Highfield’s ‘SuperCooperators’ for a brief summary of the vacuity of altruism and the operation of kin selection and the uselessness and superficiality of describing behavior in cultural terms.
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 and conflict suppression by police and military). About 200,000 more people a day (another Las Vegas every 3 days, 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 the next two centuries 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 no point either (yes I'm a fatalist), so I'll just make a few comments as though they were facts. Don't imagine I have a personal stake in promoting one group at the expense of others. I am 73, 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 the worst Enemies of Life on Earth and, taking the broad view of things, women are as violent as men when one considers 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. 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, since they are the reproductive bottleneck. One can take the view that 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 for generations into the future, while an Indian farmer and his may destroy 1 ton. If someone denies it that's fine, and to their descendants I say "Welcome to Hell on Earth"(WTHOE).

The emphasis nowadays is always on Human Rights, but it is clear that if civilization is to stand a chance, 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 random 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 society continues to maintain Human Rights as primary, that's fine and to their 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 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, evolution by natural selection or kin selection (inclusive fitness). 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, democracy, equality, justice, human rights and "helping" of all kinds have global long term dysgenic consequences which will collapse society even if population growth stops. Again if the world refuses to believe it or doesn't want to deal with it that's fine and to their (and everyone’s) descendants we can say "WTHOE".

Beware the utopian scenarios that suggest doomsday can be avoided by judicious application of technologies. As they say you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can't fool mother nature any of the time. 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 (e.g. feral cats alone kill perhaps 100 billion wild animals a year). 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 deliberately and by omission, and no form of life can evolve or exist without these two controls—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 where any thoughts about the world and human behavior must lead an educated person but Pinker says nothing about it. So the first 400 pages of this book can be skipped and the last 300 read as a nice summary of EP (evolutionary psychology) as of 2011. However, as in his other books and nearly universally in the behavioral sciences, there is no clear broad framework for intentionality as pioneered by Wittgenstein, Searle and many others. I have presented such a framework in my many reviews of works by and about these two natural psychological geniuses and will not repeat it here.

8 people found this helpful

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Martin Johnson

Not worth reading ....

Reviewed in Australia on 24 September 2014

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Sadly the author is woefully ignorant of the accepted academic position by Christian and non-Christian scholars on the history of Jesus Christ and Christianity. He offers a cursory glance on Christianity, mocking it as he goes.
If he was able to offer an argument as to why his position should be considered, then OK.
This dribble is not worth reading.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Pat Downes

A book everyone SHOULD read. Uplifting proof that the human race is becoming more kind.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 May 2018

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Just finished this scholarly work.I can read a novel in a couple of days but this took me over a month. Why? At times it is as much fun as reading a text book but it is well worth, taking note of what Pinker is saying, putting the book down, and thinking about the points he makes. This book PROVES we are becoming a more peaceful tolerant species( in spite of what The Daily Mail would have us believe).It is such good news.The first part of the book, using death counts as evidence, proves we are killing each other far less than we used to and in less horrible and violent ways and the second half carefully considers all the reasons why that might be. Factual, very carefully researched and extremely well written, even difficult scientific concepts are made very clear by the use of carefully chosen analogies.A truly important piece of work but also an extremely enjoyable read.

17 people found this helpful

M. Burns

Stop watching the news for a while and read this book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 December 2012

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This book is not an easy read, it is a scholarly piece of work detailing the evidence for the decline in violence and more difficult task of proving its causes. Whilst in places it may be lots of statistics the overall result is a thought provoking and positive message that could do with being widely disseminated.

If you are a regular consumer of news media you could be forgiven for thinking, "what decline in violence?" There seems always to be a war going on somewhere, our towns and cities are crime ridden, aren't they? The answer is yes war has not been and seems unlikely to be eliminated any time soon and violent crime is a daily fact of life in many places in this world.

When you take a cold hard look at the facts rather than the news headlines the conclusion is undeniable that the world is a less violent place today than its ever been. Starting with our hunter/gatherer ancestors where life was truly nasty, brutish and short, travelling forward in time through early civilisations to our modern era of nation states and global commerce there has been a huge decline in the odds of suffering injury and untimely death at the hands of a fellow human. This decline has not been steady or constant but has wavered up at times and down at others, and from place to place, but long term, the decline is very real. Pinker stacks up the evidence in a clear and digestible form, that can seem repetitive but makes the case for the long term decline of violence irrefutable by any reasonable mind.

The big question this book attempts to answer is "what are the causes of this decline?" This is a question that it is vital for us to grasp if we are to ensure that the "long peace" may continue into the future and the world continue to get less violent. That we have come to think that war and other violence is not a smart way to behave is a triumph of reason and rational action that we may take for granted but just a few generations ago many still believed in the honour of war and the necessity of defending one's honour by violently destroying your enemies.

The conclusions that Pinker arrives at seem entirely plausible. The decline in violence seems inextricably linked with a rise in education, the sharing of information, the ability to read and be transported into the lives of others, and the sympathy this engenders. The resulting rise in enlightened reasoning overtaking received dogma as a better way to organise ourselves. Democracy for all its faults does seem a force for peace. Democracies that function passably well don't go to war with each other. The positive changes in western culture in just my own life time have been quite remarkable. The universal declaration of human rights, the civil rights movement, the rise of women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, the downfall of communism and other ideologies and despots that diminished the rights of the individual. Glance a little further back into the past and things our ancestors gave little thought to, slavery, wife beating, child beating, torture, witch burning, infanticide, now fill us with horror. It is unthinkable that we could now accept such things as a part of civilised life in the 21st century.

It is no accident that the most peaceful and safe places to live in the modern world are those places with a well educated populace governed by a functioning democracy, policed by an impartial justice system, with open access to information. Conversely the least safe places in the world lack some or all of the above.

The ideas that were yesteryears liberal radicalism, women's rights for instance, have now become so mainstream that even the most conservative have embraced the inevitable and sometimes even claim it as their own idea.

The feminisation of world is also a force for peace. Violence is by no means exclusively male but it is overwhelmingly so. Most violence is perpetrated by young men. A fact that is beginning to haunt those parts of the world that have used modern methods (and old fashioned infanticide) to preferentially select for male offspring. The resulting large groups of young adult males, without the prospect of marriage and its calming influence on male testosterone fuelled behaviour, is the cause of much criminally or ideologically driven violence. The countries where violence within the family and wider communities is rife also happen to be the countries where women's rights and their influence is weakest.

The lesson I think I have learned from reading The Better Angels Of Our Nature is that whilst the future is by no means assured to be less violent than the past, we now have a fairly clear idea of how to steer ourselves in that direction. This is to embrace science and reason, reject ideology and dogma. We need functioning democracies, we need shared commerce and resources, we need impartial justice, we need open information and free discussion. None of those things can happen unless all the people are sufficiently educated to be able not only to read, write and do arithmetic but to be capable of abstract reasoning. We have to be able to walk a mile in another man's (or woman's) shoes.

Over a century ago Charles Darwin summed it up in The Descent Of Man.
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to men of all nations and races.

35 people found this helpful

StephenDS

An eye-opener of a book you should read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2019

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How do levels of violence, conflict and war in present times compare with the past? Modern communications, with 24 hour and super fast social media coverage give the impression of a modern world replete with savagery, and so it is in many ways. But this book uses modern scientific studies of wars, conflicts and violence through the ages to show that the past is not only another country, it is one that would truly horrify us if we lived there. And that's the point. Today, we find violence repellent, even our wars have become less horrific. Our better natures are firmly on the side of making the world a better place, and this book tells us, using well based, credible evidence, that we are moving in the right direction. It's a long book because the author is conscientious about giving the evidence, but it is a book you should read.

RR Waller

Is Humanity maturing?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 April 2020

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Steven Pinker is a reliable intellectual; one may not agree with his points of view but he is certain to engage the mind and prompt discussion. Initially best known as a linguist with interested in language evolution and ways in which the mind uses language, this is in a different league.

Set against the backdrop of conflicts in Syria, Iran and other places, he argues that humanity is becoming less violent, less prone to settle disagreements with weapons. Looking at a vast expanse of history, contingent on one’s outlook on life, he argues convincingly. Well worth a read and recommended.

A. Listener

Can't recommend this enough...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 October 2013

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Whilst reading many positive reviews on the book, I was expecting it to be a good read, but I don't think I was expecting something quite as informative as this gem of a book has turned out to be.

It's become such a cliché these days, to say 'this is the best book I've read...'etcetera, But for me, it really does fall true for 'Better Angels Of Our Nature'. It is the most informative and interesting non-fiction book I can remember reading. I feel like I've learned so much just from one book.

It covers not just the various acts of violence over human history, but the change in attitudes such as human rights movements, and the evolution of 'etiquette' social behaviour, table manners and such, too. As well as the possible reasons 'why'. All this from our primitive past of hunter gatherer tribes, to modern day states and super-states.

You might be expecting (considering the subject) an heavy, dry, academic tone from the author, but Pinker writes with such eloquence, he draws you in and arouses genuine interest. I didn't find the book a particularly heavy book. I'd actually read just about half of the book in one sitting, and the second half, a day later. Given the fact that this book covers so much, I do feel I'll need to read it a couple of times though to benefit from the full wealth of knowledge it offers.

I bought this book, along with a couple of other of Pinker's books, a few of weeks ago. But with the size and subject of this book, I put off reading it for a while. Thinking it was going to be heavily academic, and needed to be in the right mood for it to take my interest. I needn't have though. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to reading more of Pinker's collection, including 'Blank Slate', which I bought along with this one.

If someone was to ask me to recommend them just one book - this would be that book. Can't recommend it enough.

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