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Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Paperback – Illustrated, 25 September 2012

by Steven Pinker (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,481 ratings
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"If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this--the most inspiring book I've ever read." --Bill Gates

A provocative history of violence--from the New York Times bestselling author of The Stuff of Thought, The Blank Slate, and Enlightenment Now.

Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.

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  1. Print length
    832 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  4. Publication date
    25 September 2012
  5. Reading age
    18 years and up
  6. Dimensions
    15.24 x 4.57 x 22.86 cm
  7. ISBN-10
    0143122010
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0143122012
  9. See all details
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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Review

"If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this--the most inspiring book I've ever read."
--Bill Gates (May, 2017)

A Mark Zuckerberg "Year of Books" Pick

"My favorite book of the last decade is [Steven] Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature. It is a long but profound look at the reduction in violence and discrimination over time."--Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft

"For anyone interested in human nature, the material is engrossing, and when the going gets heavy, Pinker knows how to lighten it with ironic comments and a touch of humor. . . . A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement."--The New York Times Book Review

"An extraordinary range of research . . . a masterly effort."--The Wall Street Journal

"Better Angels is a monumental achievement. His book should make it much harder for pessimists to cling to their gloomy vision of the future. Whether war is an ancient adaptation or a pernicious cultural infection, we are learning how to overcome it."--Slate

Praise for THE STUFF OF THOUGHT

"The majesty of Pinker's theories is only one side of the story. The other side is the modesty of how he built them. It all makes sense, when you look at it the right way."--The New York Times Book Review

"Packed with information, clear, witty, attractively written."--The New York Review of Books

"Engaging and witty ...Everyone with an interest in language and how it gets to be how it is--that is, everyone interested in how we get to be human and do our human business--should read THE STUFF OF THOUGHT."-- Science


Praise for THE BLANK SLATE

"An extremely good book--clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating."--Colin McGinn, The Washington Post

"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read...also highly persuasive."--Time

About the Author

Steven Pinker is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching, and books, he has been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World Today and Foreign Policy's 100 Global Thinkers.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Illustrated edition (25 September 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 832 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143122010
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143122012
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 4.57 x 22.86 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,481 ratings

About the author

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Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind. His popular and highly praised books include The Stuff of Thought, The Blank Slate, Words and Rules, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. The recipient of several major awards for his teaching, books, and scientific research, Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He also writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and other magazines.

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Top reviews from Australia

Lorry Bucci
5.0 out of 5 stars 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
5.0 out of 5 stars Love it
Reviewed in Australia on 13 August 2020
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Love it
Everyone should read this book
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David Gilbertson
4.0 out of 5 stars 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.
6 people found this helpful
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Ken Buntain
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Australia on 1 May 2015
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Agree or disagree, it makes you think!
2 people found this helpful
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Alex Angove
5.0 out of 5 stars An important book and highly recommended, especially if you don't currently agree with the premise.
Reviewed in Australia on 8 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
5.0 out of 5 stars 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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Martin Johnson
1.0 out of 5 stars Not worth reading ....
Reviewed in Australia on 23 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.
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michael
3.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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erick ferreira
5.0 out of 5 stars ótimo livro
Reviewed in Brazil on 16 July 2020
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Muito bom
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Riccardo
5.0 out of 5 stars Assolutamente da leggere
Reviewed in Italy on 12 September 2019
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Un libro veramente interessante, per mettere in prospettiva il mondo di oggi. Per quanto ci sembra di vivere sempre in crisi e in declino, prima (anche recentemente) si stava molto, molto, molto peggio
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Slendi González
4.0 out of 5 stars Buena calidad
Reviewed in Mexico on 7 December 2017
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Color, textura ... todo el libro es de muy buena calidad... llego muy bien empaquetado y sin detalles... ademas su precio esta súper bien
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buenlimon
5.0 out of 5 stars Sie glauben vielleicht, dass die Welt immer schlechter wird?
Reviewed in Germany on 28 December 2018
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Das wird sie aber nicht. Die Beweisführung ist unglaublich lang und umständlich. Es wird einfach nichts, was irgendwie von Relevanz ist, ausgelassen. Statistiken, kulturelle Forschungsergebnisse, neuere psychologische und soziologische Experimente in einer schier unglaublichen Fülle werden hier vorgelegt und geben uns wirklich zu denken. Was man letztendlich mit diesen ganzen Resultaten anfangen kann, ist schwierig zu sagen. Aber man muss zu Kenntnis nehmen, dass sich die menschliche Psychologie sich in den letzten Jahrhunderten erheblich geändert hat, und zwar in Richtung auf weniger Aggressivität und Gewalt. Der Mensch hat sich überhaupt geändert. Und wie sich der Mensch geändert hat, wird einem nicht nach den ersten 10 Seiten klar, sondern da muss man das ganze Buch durch. Es nützt auch nicht die ersten 3/4 davon zu lesen, denn einige der gewichtigsten Ergebnisse kommen zuletzt im Buch und können nur in dem ihr zugedachten Zusammenhang verstanden werden, wenn man tatsächlich alles vorhergehende genau gelesen und verstanden hat. Das Buch bildet eine harmonische Ganzheit ohne Widersprüche und verändert den Leser, sodass er nicht mehr die Menschen so sieht wie vorher. Dieses Erlebnis kann ich aus ganzem Herzen jedem empfehlen.
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RAS
5.0 out of 5 stars Contre-intuitif
Reviewed in France on 27 April 2018
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Alors qu'on entend que notre époque est de plus en plus violente, faits à l'appui, Steven Pinker montre qu'il n'en est rien et que jamais nous n’avons vécu une période de l'histoire aussi pacifique. Pinker propose de dizaines de statistiques qui montrent que nos ancêtres étaient plus violents, et la palme reviendrait à ces chasseurs-cueilleurs qu'on présente souvent comme des parangons de pacifisme. L’auteur se base sur Hobbes et Norbert Elias pour montrer notamment le rôle pacificateur de l’Etat. En ayant le monopole de la violence légitime, l’Etat va mettre fin au règne de la violence de tous contre tous. Des mécanismes annexes vont bien entendu jouer aussi : le rôle du commerce, de l’empathie, de la lecture, le contrôle croissant de soi bien mis en évidence par Norbert Elias, etc. On a ici un point de vue radicalement positif et optimiste qui s’oppose à la morosité ambiante, mais qui est basé sur une argumentation serrée et des statistiques solides.
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