Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)

 his is long, but it is also an analysis of an even longer book.

Regarding “THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined” by Steven Pinker (2011) part one.

This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read, and it achieved an amazing thing for me personally, it managed to shift my thinking and see the world a bit differently.

I read this book in a post-9/11 world, my nation having feet-on-the-ground in the two longest wars in its history, militarily intervening in a half dozen other countries, and I can see the re-emergence of fascist-leaning extremism and gun-violence increasing on our streets. Beyond these very recent developments, I was more-or-less raised on the cliché that as humanity has increased its material wealth there has not been any corresponding moral advance -- Yet now, I find that assumption eroding a little.

Pinker challenged the assumption by having the audacity to argue that, over-all, we are living the least violent period in human history. His outrageous argument covers the whole of length of the development of the human race, and crosses disciplines as diverse and history, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, criminology, neurology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, literature, etc. Over and over Pinker demonstrates that long-term data trumps anyone’s anecdotes (even his own), and that our perspectives have been warped by romanticizing what happen before we were born and by a media that embraces, “If it bleeds, it leads,” rather than trying to describe trends accurately. From the book, "It is easy to forget, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence."

The books as three primary virtues: it always remains lucid despite its enormous scope, he almost always supports every bold assertion with evidence coming from at least two different directions, and that he takes the time to explain the limitations of each of the many disciplines that he draws his evidence from. Along the way, he does something more important, he explores what a civilization actually is, and what are the mechanics within it that make it succeed, and to a lesser extent, why it can fail.

So how did we get here? How did we rise from tiny groups of naked hunter/gatherers to global civilization of hundreds of billions living in more-often-than-not co-operating Republics, whose life expectancy is three-times longer than as recently as two hundred years ago, where the wealthiest and healthiest mostly live in stable democracies, and we just plain bash each other’s skulls in less than we used to? Across his big book (nearly 700 pages of prose, more than 1,950 endnotes, about 1,100 references, and roughly one graph or graphic for every six pages of text) Pinker follows multiple threads, a list slowly-emerging, hard-earned, inconsistently developing, but still ever progressing, trends that have elevated modern man from barbarian.

According to Pinker, civilization emerges from the historical forces of the Leviathan (Johnathan Hobbes’ term for the centralized power of the state), deuce (or gentle) commerce, and cosmopolitism. Then, from the inside, those societies begin to define themselves by cultivating self-control, empathy, a moral sense, a devotion to reason and femininization (which means both a greater concern in the rights of women and teaching boy children some virtues that were once assumed to be reserved only for women).

Pinker is a humanist, an atheist, and the son of the well-educated bourgeoisie whose career has been devoted to the academic field of experimental psychology; these perspectives clearly influence his world-view. He believes that science is a mechanism for understanding issues that are all too often shrouded in unstated moralities and highly questionable empirical assumptions, ergo, that a scientific understanding of human nature both compatible with, and enabling to, a robust secular morality.

The book has many nice things to about nonviolent, grassroots, progressive political movements like civil rights, feminism, gay liberation and animal rights. Though many of his arguments are rooted in the impact of collective moralities on collective behaviors, he is focused primarily on physical violence, so there are many politicized moralisms he avoids. “Genocide” is a term in law, and a repeated subject in this book, but the more moralistic phrase, “cultural genocide,” does not come up even once.

He is clearly a centrist liberal, but he keeps ideological arguments low-key, though quite amusingly, he expresses the most frustration addressing those within the humanities allow themselves to be influenced by non-evidence-based activism and bogus scientism; this creates a situation that when he really has a bone to pick, it is more likely with those on the left-side of the fence than the right. He forcefully argues that when we were in a more primitive state, we were, well, more primitive. These proved remarkably unpopular sentiments in some circles of those who have benefited the most from the fruits of Western Civilization, so, though this book has received almost over-whelming praise, it’s also been viciously criticized. I’ll address that in part two.

This book is statics heavy, and statistical evidence can be misleading because of the narrowness of what is presented even when the numbers themselves are correct, and the accounting is often based definitions of words that sometimes have slippery meanings, as in those who try to assemble global indexes of “terrorism.” Pinker takes you by the hand though the limitations of his data sets, enlivens them with telling anecdotes, and earns your trust in mist of the complexities.

He will also expand your conceptual vocabulary. Two phrases that prove especially important are “Civilizing Process,” which he borrowed from the title of a book by sociologist Norbert Elias, and the “Civilizing Offensive” which he borrowed from criminology.

Norbert Elias’ magnum opus, “The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations,” was an early version of this book’s argument, presenting the case that as it moved from the Middle Ages to the birth of modernity, Western Europe also pacified the populace; rape, pillaging and murder became less common as centralized governments emerged that more benefited from commerce-based economies (potentially positive-sum, as the wealth of all could increase through trade of surpluses and specialization of production) and away from feudalistic pillaging (zero-sum, where possession of land and control of peasants were the only forms of reliable wealth, so a knight needed to steal the land of a rival, or render it valueless through plunder and murder, to increase his comparative standing). As warriors transitioned into courtiers, they needed the develop self-restraint and proper manners because currying the favor of the King became more profitable that murdering neighboring peasants. Important to Elias was the "Prince of the Humanists," theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam, who is considered the father of modernity; in additional to Erasmus’ important writings on the crisis of the Protestant reformation, he authored a hugely influential etiquette manual in the late Middle Ages. The manual makes for both disgusting and hilarious reading with its long lists of all the things that adult males actually needed to be taught not to do at the dinner table or with their bodies’ waste products.

From Pinker’s summary of Elias, “…beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. … These ideals originated in explicit instructions that cultural arbiters gave to aristocrats and noblemen, allowing them to differentiate themselves from the villains and boors. But they were then absorbed into the socialization of younger and younger children until they became second nature.”

Basically, it is a view where civilization is created top-down, with the aristocracy pacifying themselves first, then those below slowly following suit. Pinker demonstrates that at one time the upper classes were as prone to personal homicide (maybe more so) as the lower classes, but over time, the upper classes stopped killing each other, while the lower classes remained just as violent for far longer. “Civilizing Process did not eliminate violence… [but] it did relegate it to the socioeconomic margins.”

A key reason why the lower classes were last the self-pacify was that (unlike the elites and middle-classes) they were never much entitled to the fruits of the society they existed in. In a real sense the poorest and most segregated remained essentially stateless, living in semi-anarchy as their relationship with authorities and institutions (notably police) was fraught with near-insurmountable distrust and hostility because authorities and institutions primarily served a status quo that the poor were expected to obey without reward. But, of course, the lower classes had their own set of vested interests that made unrestrained violence repulsive, and that’s where the “Civilizing Offensive” comes in. It was often led by women and church groups and is a bottom-up solution that cultivated self-restraint and civilized behavior even among the down-trodden (I bet you never thought of a church social as “offensive” but it is, and more to the point, it’s good at it). Pinker uses the example of the “Boston Miracle” in the 1990s, when community organizers were able to significantly impact the city’s out-of-control homicide rates. He also outlines the similar successes among the Enga tribes of Papua New Guinea, who descended into an orgy or self-destructive criminality after the retreat of colonial rule in 1975, yet showed a stunning turn-around in the first decade of the 2000s.

Though when described that way the logic of this seems undeniable, these ideas are often casually disregarded by most people. Professor Elias, so important to Pinker’s thinking, becomes a telling example of this, as he was a victim of history. Elias’ life’s work, a big book about how humanity was becoming less violent, was published in exactly the wrong place and time, Germany in 1939, a country Elias had already fled because of he was a Jew facing Hitler’s persecutions, World War II was just beginning, and both of his parents would soon die in Auschwitz. Timing made the book’s main conceit suddenly seem a bad joke.

But by the 1960s sociology, criminology and other disciplines were developing ways of building their assertions on stronger statistical data. In most countries, good crime stats have only been kept since the 1960s (the USA’s first attempts at national crime data only began in the 1930s, and that was minimal) but historians further scoured local records and created small data-sets which, when added up, demonstrated national and international trends. We now have solid estimates of homicide rates in England going all the way back to the Middle Ages, and in the USA to the earliest European colonies. When Elias’ book was finally translated into English in 1969, an argument that was based only on histories, literature and personal accounts of the long dead, suddenly had hard numbers to support them; by then Elias was retired and only had a few years left to live, but finally his life work was redeemed.

Stable societies are less violent, not just stable democracies, but also stable tyrannies. Though a reduction in violence seems inherently just, it is not the same thing as justice. Exploring the rates of violence documented by forensic archeology and quantitative ethnography, and contrasting pre-state societies (wherein the death-by-violence rate among hunter/gathers averaged around 15% of total mortality) to the very earliest centralized governments (the Aztecs where among the most violent state-based societies that every existed, and their death-by-violence rate was less-than 5%) Pinker observes:

“It’s not like any early state was…a commonwealth that was vested with power by a social contract that had been negotiated by its citizens. Early states were more like protection rackets, in which Mafiosi extorted resources from locals and offered them safety…When it came to violence, then, the first Leviathans solved one problem but created another. People were less likely to become victims of homicide or causalities of war, but were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptocrats.”

As Max Weber argued, the state exists by creating, and then enforcing, a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” We all live within the paradox that the violence of the state saves its people from more personal violence. Pinker draws a line between the violence committed by the state, so war and democide (any state-sponsored killing of the unarmed, may it be genocide, mass murder, executions, etc.) and person-to-person homicide (so any killing that the state would deem to as “criminal”) with the shocking observation that during Hitler’s rule, which gave the world both its most devastating war and most grotesque campaign of genocide ever, the police statistics show the homicide rate in Germany actually went down.

After distinguishing between state violence and person-to-person homicide, he then addresses, and rejects, the common assumption that war, with bigger weapons and larger death tolls, have worsened in modern times.

The 20th century had two World Wars and the genocidal monsters of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who were not only contemporaries, but also the absolute rulers of major nation-states. Without trivializing these horrors, Pinker asks us to address the numbers differently, not using absolute head-counts but instead focusing on rates of how many dead per 100,000, basically using the same criteria for war and democide that we do for person-to-person homicides.

Though death tolls of wars in centuries past were unrecorded, historians have achieved broadly-accepted estimates which, when calculated as a proportion of the world’s population at the time, show at least nine atrocities before the 20th century that might have been worse than World War II. Add up all the Crusades, and you have one million dead in world of only 400 million, so proportionally they exceeded the Nazi Holocausts. Similar proportionality applied to the Thirty Years War makes its kill-rate double that of World War I.

Pinker also observes that even if one accepted that the 20th c. was the bloodiest in the whole of human history, that is true only for the first half of it. During the second half, North America, Western and Central Europe were shockingly peaceful, and the wars that proliferated in Asia, Africa and Latin America were smaller and less likely to be inter-state conflicts, like invasions, but generally intra-state uprisings, like civil wars. (He calls this the “Long Peace,” a phrase he apparently didn’t coin.)

Pinker sees us all as children of the Enlightenment movement of the late 17th – early 18th c. He argues that the emergence of the Leviathan and growth of deuce commerce lowered homicide rates, but that was mostly an unintended by-product; with the Enlightenment, people began to consciously develop social and political structures reduce violence and protect individual rights. Though there have been periods since that that violence has radically increased both in terms state and non-state brutalities, the overall trend has been reliably down-ward, and many once-common sins have been mostly extinguished, almost universally, with little chance of them ever coming back. For quite some time we’ve seen very little of burning of heretics, gratuitously gruesome executions, blood sports, legal slavery, debtors’ prisons, foot-binding, eunuchism, and, most recently, very few wars between developed states. Pinker calls this the “humanitarian revolution.” Then he goes farther, predicting continued declines in capital punishment, violence against women, human trafficking, beating and bullying of children, and persecution of homosexuals. International moral shaming-campaigns have already proved an effective weapon in how nations relate to each other and have greatly impacting piracy, whaling, and slavery, and will likely gain more ground on other issues in the future.

We all have innate drives shaping our nature, and even in the worst of times, there is an innate aversion to causing direct bodily harm to a stranger, yet clearly, we overcome that aversion pretty easily. Why can we be so variable?

Here we hit on a key irony in Pinker’s world view. Though a secular liberal, he’s hardest on left-leaning irrationalities in academia because he sees them as teaching the most dangerous errors. From the followers of Karl Marx to Margert Mead he sees a posture of contempt for the achievements of Western Civilization and a naive faith in the perfectibility of man. His has long been a prominent public intellectual, and during his career has consistently argued that humans aren’t blank slates on which ideologically-strident mechanisms can redraw our characters for good or evil (he made that case especially forcefully in his earlier book, “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” (2002)) -- yet isn’t that central to this book’s central thesis?

Not exactly. Pinker argues that human nature is here to stay, and what is inherent is too important to ignore, but it is not as determinative as the other extreme argues either. Pinker is warring against a simplistic nature-vs-nurture dichotomy. Evolution made both our propensities to violence, our “inner demons,” and our capacity for empathy and cooperation, “the better angels of our nature,” inherent parts of us for good reason. This is nature-through-nurture; so yes, our material circumstances and cultural inputs determine whether the demons or the angels have the upper hand, but that doesn’t change the fact that both are utterly necessary. This may seem like hair-splitting, but it is, in fact, a core conceit, because on the left-side of the fence, Pinker rejects both the totalitarianism that Marx, accidentally, encouraged and the anarchism that Mead, openly, endorsed.

The entire book is a rejection of both pedantic progressivism and fatalistic conservatism, but he makes his complaints about the progressives more explicitly, despite his broad issue-by-issue agreement with them. The explanation for this is probably no more complicated than, as an academic, in his cafeteria, there are just more devotees of Marx and Mead there to annoy him than those of Steve Bannon.

So, how we train ourselves, and our society as a whole, has a clear impact on what we do. The doomed Weimar regime in Germany is remembered as tolerant and cosmopolitan, so expressing at least some of the ideals of the Enlightenment, but that view is really based on a subculture, and there were competing subcultures, anti-Enlightenment and obsessed with blood and soil. Hitler emerged from, and ultimately dominated, the latter subcultures, and his side won that round in the never-ending battle for hearts and minds. Some cultures today, and in the past most cultures collectively, held up some inherent vices as public virtues, like xenophobia, or the temptation to subjugate women, or the lust for vengeance, and when vice is encouraged as virtue, vice is far more indulged.

This is where the top-down forces of Civilizing Process start intertwining with the bottom-up forces of the Civilizing Offensive. It is an argument wherein first the state pacifies the people to create stability, and then the people pacify the state through demands based on more sophisticated common moralities; the emergence of a real and enforceable social contract. One does not need to live in a democracy to live under a government shaped by the strength and weaknesses of the common morality; all governments are responsive to it, and only the most totalitarian of states put in the extraordinary effort to completely re-write the common morality to the leader’s will. I think Pinker should’ve lingered longer on the Tudors, six monarchs covering about 130 boldly transformative years of English history, three of whom are still house-hold names. Brutish Henry VII didn’t execute the humanists, though he executed plenty of others including two of his wives, but instead longed to apply their ideals, though that longing didn’t translate much into policy, demonstrated by how he established a new state religion at end of a sword. Later, near the end of the reign of his blood-thirsty daughter, Elizabeth I, the ideals seemed to have finally gained at least a little traction, because even though she did things like burning more than 130 priests at the stake, and was herself threatened for decades with kidnapping and assassination plots, violent uprisings, invasion, and Al-Qaeda-level terrorist conspiracies, never completely outlawed the rival faith of Catholicism and in fact the number executions for religious and/or political crimes were lower during her administration than those of her father or her sister, Mary. Elizabeth was a monarch that listened to her people, and the English now remember her blood-stained rule as “the Golden Age,” because even in the midst of her enthusiastic use of torture chambers, she still moved the Civilizing Process forward while making room for the Offensive by embracing a cosmopolitan culture where populist artists like Shakespeare included in their work blunt challenges to some causally accepted institutions like child marriage and dueling (both criticized in the play “Romeo and Juliette”).

Almost all the best, and worst, we do exist comfortably within the contract, and the contract is shaped as much by the populous as the Leviathan. From the book, “To understand the role of the moral sense in the decline of violence, we have to solve a number of psychological enigmas [such as] how the moral sense can be so compartmentalized: … [for example] why liberal democracies can practice slavery and colonial oppression.” Slavery in the USA was not only endorsed and protected by the state, but it also went largely unchallenged for most of our first century because most of the populous was okay with.

It is not controversial to say that a collective morality effects collective actions, nor is it controversial to say some collective moralities are better than others (Nazism is a good example of a bad morality). I think I can even say that (given the list of common sins we’ve actually conquered) that the collective morality has improved over time. The controversy seems more related to a break in this emerging line of logic, we refuse to believe that our improving collective morality is still impacting our collective actions. The existence of sin (like the fact that illegal slavery still persists in this country) is offered as proof that the evolving morality has gained no traction; but does this make any sense? Can you claim that there a just as many slaves in the USA today as 1850? Or put your mind back to 1850, when the sin of slavery was seen by so many as virtuous, are you denying that there were other sins were considered aberrations from that norm, and that which was considered an aberration was rarer than that which was considered a virtue?

And so, some more conceptual vocabulary, the contrast between a culture of “honor” and one of “dignity,” both serve the purpose of saving face before the larger community, but each approach that goal differently. In the first, one protects one’s face by letting it be known that no slight will be tolerated, while the second protects face by treating most slights as beneath retaliation and proving one is not impulsive.

“Honor” culture is embedded in the ideas of a martial culture that encourages pre-emptive violence because an act against another is also a demonstration to yet another still, to always have your sword on the ready is to ward off future attacks. Now archaic, but once frequently murderous, foolishnesses like dueling are telling examples of a culture of honor. Far too many wars were either propagandized in terms of honor rather than their actual goals, or often it wasn’t even propaganda, whole nations have been ripped apart of because of, now non-sensical, trivialities. Pinker attributes the incomplete defeat of this culture more to the Civilizing Offensive than Process, as the Leviathan tried, and failed, to control the culture of dueling through the top-down power of legislation, dueling ultimately fell before the bottom-up power of ridicule. And the Leviathan’s own embrace of the same culture was similarly challenged, as Pinker points out the power of popular culture for example, this was the subject of the riotously funny, but still very dark, movie “Duck Soup” (1933), a deeply imbittered assault on the waste of World War One. Though some nations still accept “honor killings” as normal, more and more throughout the world, they are viewed as repugnant, and are the subject of a current international shaming-campaign.

“Dignity” is the culture of the stoic. Though unfortunately unexplored in the book, stoicism reflects a different kind of martial culture, because though its ideas were first laid down by the wealthy merchant, Zeno, it is best known today through the writings of the warrior/emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Here one keeps face by remaining calm in the face of adversity, not flying off the handle, and proving to another that you will not unnecessarily escalate a disagreement, and that comprises are forever possible. Pinker makes the case that commerce doesn’t teach greed nearly so much as it teaches empathy and foresight, because commerce relies on understanding the customers wants and needs, essential skills to triumph in competitive markets. One should not be surprised that the two towering figures in Stoicism are a wealthy merchant who lived modestly and a general with a reputation for mercy towards his adversaries.

Most of us probably find a culture of dignity is more appealing, but it can’t exist in a vacuum. Dignity can be seen as a weakness if the culture of honor overwhelmingly dominates; since it surrenders pre-emptive violence as a defensive strategy, it could actually encourage some attackers. Dignity must be collective, and it is hard-earned, while honor seems to be more our default position. Reading this part of the book, I found myself remembering an old Kenny Rogers’ song, “Coward of the County,” which now doesn’t seem as silly as it once did. In a quick four minutes and twenty seconds Mr. Rogers’ nicely outlined the virtutes, and limitations, of dignity compared to honor culture.

These two cultures are discussed early in the book, then returned to in later chapters that address evolutionary psychology. We resort to violence, or resist it, when one or the other choice seems the better bet. This is why violence can be self-reinforcing – the tit-for-tat of a blood feud of the Hatfields and the McCoys – but non-violence can also be self-reinforcing – as much as we indulge it, violence still sickens us, so a grassroots activist like Martin Luther King, Jr. can remake a nation by consciously embracing the strategy of presenting himself as the symbol of violence’s alternative. Pinker rejects the popular "hydraulic" metaphor, that violence is like a fluid that inexorably wells up in the psyche and has to be discharged or channeled; he says if violence is not needed, not provoked and not admired, it will less commonly be used. There’s a telling quote in the book (which now I can’t relocate), “Savagery is a universal language, but so is decency.”

Pinker grew up in Canada and lives in the USA, and relies one honor vs dignity to explain why the USA remains so much more violent compared to Canada and Western Europe, and why different parts of the USA are so much more violent than others. He ties honor culture to high homicide rates, and notes that the homicide rate in New Orleans (49 per 100,000) was roughly that of Amsterdam 600 years ago. In the USA, homicide rates generally get higher the farther south you go, then once in the south the rates get higher the farther you move away from cosmopolitan urban centers. He then buttresses these assertions not only with the homicide figures, but by describing some fascinating experiments comparing reactions to contrived circumstances from individuals from different parts of the USA; he shows statistical evidence of geographical differences in how people respond to affronts, and which kinds of serious crimes they are more likely to forgive or not.

Homicides for money (like a violent liquor store robbery) are always less common than those that grow out of escalating disagreements (domestic violence or stupid bar fights). When you break-down of motives for murder and organize by geographical region, you see that homicides for money are not more common in the south than the north, the homicide disparity is driven by southerners killing each other for escalating disagreements more often. Pinker attributes this to a lack of faith in the Leviathan, so higher rates of the violence in a culture of honor can also be described as a tradition of “self-help justice.”

Pinker argues that despite their reputation for violence, urban centers all but insist that the population be pacified, simply because of the elevated consequences of violence in a crowded space, and that is the product of a top-down solution of the Civilizing Process; but even when successful (it isn’t always), there is a limit to how far that can go. This brings us into the triumph of the bottom-up solutions of the Civilizing Offensive, which Pinker then attributes to the fact that though the north is safer than the south, in the north, the middle of the country, with more tightly knit communities, are safer that the more impersonal and ever-mutating cities along the coasts; so in the north violence usually decreases as you move away from major urban centers, while in the south, the opposite happens.

Pinker is much impressed with moral philosopher Peter Singer, and draws from Singer’s 1981 book “The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology,” to describe the degree that reason has trumped our tribalism, he describes “expanding circles” of reciprocity in cultures as they mature, the extension of ethical codes to an ever-widening population, recognizing some degree of responsibility for those who we are not blood relatives of, not within our immediate community, and even people we will ever see or meet. Pinker also embraces the animal rights movement, which Singer is credited with all but creating. Of course, Singer has become increasingly controversial because of his views on infanticide and involuntary euthanasia, and Pinker is clearly uncomfortable with those stands, which he addresses, but only in passing.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the book is how it continued to expand on its argument, exploring first the reduction of war deaths and personal homicides through the influence of the Leviathan, then how the Leviathan, in turn, is influenced by those it “held in awe.” Two chapters are devoted the explaining the fundamentals of neurology and evolutionary psychology to address what is truly inherent (our first nature), elsewhere we see how what we are taught modifies that (our second nature) and also how reason allows us to re-examine these and take another level of control (our third nature). In addition to a lively introduction to the debates that raged among Enlightenment philosophers, Pinker also explores the impact of the invention of printing and the emergence of a “Republic of Letters” because, “Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.” Novelists like Daniel DeFoe, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens had real impacts on their eras’ moral and political movements.

Pinker believes that reason, though stuck in third place among our guiding natures, has a more powerful effect on us than it is usually credited with. He describes the utterly bizarre, but still undeniable, “Flynn effect” (named after philosopher James Flynn, who discovered it), wherein I.Q. scores demonstrably increase over time. A person whose IQ score is 100 today, would’ve, in fact, scored 130 back in 1910. So yes, in some ways we’re getting smarter, and over a remarkably fast time-frame; the general view is that this too-fast-for-evolution adaptation is a product of living in a more symbol-rich environment. Pinker argues that there is also a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence.”

One of the more important aspects of Pinker’s book is that it does not only addresses the triumph of the Civilizing Processes and Offensives, but times when they lose ground. Though clearly a fan of classic rock, he devotes many pages to the disruptions of the early 1960s through late 1980s when the whole of the Western world (USA, Canada, and Western Europe) degenerated into greater criminality, and Asia, Latin America, and Africa saw eruptions of new wars -- though it must be said that the criminality didn’t ever get as bad as a century prior, and the wars outside of Europe never came near the violence of WWI and WWII inside of Europe. So, what “de-civilized” us? Shocking for a liberal, Pinker blames the leftist counter-culture for the former, and the end of the pacifying influence of colonial oppression for the latter.

Pinker sees the counter-culture as "a glorification of dissoluteness shaded into an indulgence of violence." That era’s interpterion of Marxism insisted class distinctions were a justification for violent conflict, fed a lack of respect for an older generation, the sexual revolution and its rejection of marriage led to increasingly out-of-control young men and contributed to poverty, and the posturing assumption that wage labor was a form of slavery led a romanization of outlaws and a return of honor culture.

But that counter-culture faded and there is no longer talk of the desirability of violent class conflict, the lack of any need for monogamous commitments, or the bourgeois nature of work. It was not only a re-emergence of conservative-leaning law-and-order agenda (top-down) but also how that difficult era’s activism had notable success in redefined priorities (bottom-up), and though many of the redefined priorities were conservative, Pinker gives special note to the greater embrace of the power of the Leviathan by its old enemies within Progressivism. Grass-roots civil rights activists and feminists taking to the streets chanting, “I am a man,” or “Take back the night,” turned hate and sex crimes and domestic violence into law enforcement priorities in recent decades, but go back in time just a farther and these sins were not only tolerated, they were often encouraged. (Not in the book, but NYPD’s Special Victims Unit, inspiration for the long-running TV show, was not created until 1976.)

Regarding “THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined” by Steven Pinker (2011) part two.

As stated above, the book was overwhelmingly praised, but not without its critics. A book so large, presenting an argument with so many moving parts, will inevitably fail in some aspects. As I was researching the book’s critics in preparation for this essay, I noticed critics fell into two camps: modest critics who could neither embrace his argument in total, nor his optimism, but still admired Pinker’s breathe of research, seriousness and imagination; and harsh critics who denied almost everything he had say and accused him of fraud. It is notable that the modest critics were often aware of the harsher one’s ad tended to come down harder on the harsher critics than they did Pinker himself.

I should say that I had a number of problems with the book myself.

Theologian David Bentley Hart was dismissive of Pinker because, "one encounters the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt." This is unfair, at least for the first half of the book, wherein Pinker carefully lays down his argument as to the decline of violence being, in fact, real, and lays out the reasons why, but I’ll grant that as the book progresses, his optimism gets a little out-of-hand.

On the first page Pinker admits that the decline in violence over the course of history was uneven, and its continuation is not guaranteed. He reminds us of this again and again, but then comes two sentences on page 361, and thereafter his rigor starts to slip a little, he seemingly stops advancing his argument, but moves into a defensive mode regarding that which had come before. “I am sometimes asked, ‘How do you know that there won’t be a war tomorrow (or genocide, or act of terrorism) that will refute your entire thesis?’ The question misses the point of this book.” Afterwards, not always, but often enough to be notable, his faith becomes almost gushing. He doesn’t buttress all his points from more than one line of evidence. He gets a bit glib when answering obvious objections as he moves along.

Pinker’s dismissal of the role of the “Nuclear Peace” (pacification of nations because of the threat of the use of nuclear weapons) in securing the “Long Peace” puts him in the extreme minority among prominent thinkers. As Winston Churchill observed in 1955, “It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”

The book is filled with examples of “proxy wars” but he never explores the subject in depth, there-by over-looking a significant sign of the “Nuclear Peace.” The USA and USSR intervened in Asia, Africa, and Latin America largely because neither Great Power dared to take on the other directly, but still felt compelled to fight with each other somehow. As invasions became less common, but civil wars still kept erupting, the Great Powers used smaller nations’ civil wars (sometimes even triggering those civil wars) for their own purposes, like in Korea and Vietnam, and given the current conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, this tactic still continues. These proxy wars blur his categories of inter- and intra-state conflicts. This is probably inevitable, science always requires categories to achieve any understanding, yet reality seems ever defiant of them, this a constant obstacle inescapable in many scientific disciplines. Similar complaints can be leveled about how he distinguishes hunter/gathers, early agriculturists, and early states.

Ross Duelat, addressing a slightly different point, made this case well, “Pinker is similarly dismissive of what you might call the ‘benevolent hegemon’ theory of global peace, writing that there were ‘never any signs of a Pax Americana or the Pax Britannica: the years when one of these countries was the world’s dominant military power were no more peaceful than the years in which it was just one power among many.’ But his own chart showing the decline of great power conflict seems to track pretty well with the rise of first Great Britain and then the United States: It depicts a gradual decline in warfare that’s broken by irruptions of violence when first France and then Germany challenges the Anglosphere’s hegemony.”

I would add that the denial of a “Nuclear Peace,” “Pax Americana” and “Pax Britannica” is inconsistent with his case for a “Civilizing Process” and his repeated examples of a “Decivilizing Process” erupting when as an authoritarian/imperialist/colonial oppressor withdraws.

I also found he’s too dismissive of the risk of environmental degradation and resource depletion to all we’ve achieved over millennia; he insists that war depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity. But the lack of potable water and failing crops do cause wars (the Syrian Civil War being an on-going example, bad governance didn’t destroy that nation until a multi-year drought hit), and deforestation does bring civilizations to their knees (as it did on Easter Island, and it had a huge, negative, impact on loyalty for the Crown held by the residents of Manhattan Island during the American Revolution). As Global Warming makes all three a global threat, our children may very well turn their backs on the angels because the demons offer a better chance for survival.

This oversight is especially glaring because early in the book he talked about how the transformative transition from hunter/gathering to agriculture and then to early states likely evolved in response Malthusian population pressures, yet later blithely ignores that the re-emergence of those pressures in a different form would create their own transformations.

Pinker also doesn’t seem to have much fear that terrorism, the future use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, or both at the same time, could turn everything upside down very quickly. I don’t agree.

The logic of terrorism (in this book they are only the non-state actors, not Leviathans using terroristic tactics) was spelled out in William Pierce’s 1978 racist and terrorist propaganda novel, "The Turner Diaries," which inspired no less than three separate murderous conspiracies, notably the Oklahoma City Bombing:

“…one of the major purposes of political terror…is to force the authorities to take reprisals and to become more repressive, thus alienating a portion of the population and generating sympathy for the terrorists. And the other purpose is to create unrest by destroying the population's sense of security and their belief in the invincibility of the government.”

This is often referred to as “acceleration,” as in engaging in extreme acts that will accelerate the downfall of a corrupt society. In the novel, this was achieved through nuclear weapons. In the real world, terrorists have already started using nerve gasses (Aum Shinrikyo), bioweapons (Rajneesh Movement), attempted to obtain nuclear dirty-bombs (Al-Queda), and there are legitimate fears that full-blown nukes will be provided to them by either corrupt Russians (a nation that Pinker admits is “decivilizing”), Pakistanis (the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, bragged about doing something much like that already), or North Koreans (a country that most likely got there nuclear weapons technologies from Mr. Khan).

Remember boys and girls, it only takes one mushroom cloud to ruin your whole day.

Pinker does made a compelling case that despite the impact of 9/11, incidents of terrorism (world-wide but especially in the West) have actually been in decline for decades, though he does admit it has gotten worse in specific places, like the above-mentioned Pakistan. But the very hugeness of that one act radically altered, and I say damaged, American democracy; it has made us a far more xenophobic people, and led to the already mentioned two longest wars in American history, both pf which were inter-state invasions, a type of warfare that had been in decline (since 9/11 we also invaded Haiti, though no one seems to remember that). 9/11 proved that size can trump quantity.

I should also add that in the few short years since the book was published, the world-wide decline in terrorism has continued. But even in that good news, there’s a threat, as the downward turn is mostly driven by Jihadism’s (only partial and likely temporary) retreat, and that over-all decline disguises an actual increase in the more Western-orientated far-right/neo-Nazi/white-nationalist terrorism. As my main concern is my own nation and society, that is a dark trend indeed. The often-spouted rhetoric of a foreign ideology successfully bringing about the “Islamification of America” was never more than the paranoid fantasies of xenophobic bigots, but even a small increase in the activity and acceptance of a specifically Western decivilizing philosophy speaks of a cancer in our soul. Need I remind you that it’s a cancer we’ve seen before?

(Note: every single act of fatal terrorism committed in the USA during 2018 was committed by someone who belongs under the umbrella of far-right/neo-Nazi/white-nationalist.)

This brings up dark thoughts, the USA is both the most ethnically diverse and also the most violent of the wealthy democracies, the defining system of government in the contemporary West. The pacification of Europe and North America came after not only consolidation into our now-familiar nation-states, but also the near-or-total extermination of the competitors for the same land. We’ve built a civilization that is wealthy and reasonably peaceable, but it stands on a mountain of corpses. Moreover, most Western nations are ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogeneous, and most of the world’s hot-spot have far more diverse populations than, let’s say, Sweden. Are we less violent because we’ve learned cooperation, or because we’ve erased our competition? Does the violence of the Leviathan not only pacify its populace, but pacify its own future through sins politely forgotten by the later generations who reaped the benefits?

Those are thoughts too dark to integrate as they too explicitly echo the long-term vision of the Nazis. After executing 200 Jews new Minsk in August 1941, the highly articulate, mass murdering, but still doting father, Henrich Himmler stated, “It is the curse of a great man to step over corpses.”

This maybe the ultimate test of which defines us more, our angels or our demons. Western Europe had many centuries of ethnic and religious cleansings that didn’t end until Hitler’s death, and it didn’t really need to concern itself much with large-scale integration until the quite recently. One of the consequences of this recent integration is the increasing popularity of nativist, far-right, and neo-Nazi political parties.

In the USA, the majority demographic, white people, are inevitably losing that majority status. Probably by 2045 we will no longer be the majority, only the largest of the minorities, and white life-expectancy has started to drop for the first time in this nation’s history. Meanwhile, the Hispanics are an increasingly large percentage of the population through higher birthrates and both legal and illegal immigration, and have a much better life expectancy. There are many cartoons showing the pre-colonial Native Americans looking at arriving Pilgrims and grumbling complaints using todays anti-immigrant rhetoric, but for the white-nationalists these aren’t jokes but prophecies. During their deadly Charlottesville rallies, they chanted about their fears, “The [they said ‘Jews,’ but you can insert any group] will not replace us.”

Also, the WMD threat doesn’t wholly belong to the terrorists. In the late 1980s, the nuclear weapons arms race and nuclear brinkmanship among Leviathan’s abruptly ceased almost everywhere. But in the few short years since this book’s publication, both the arms races and brinksmanship have returned regarding the interactions among the USA, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Pinker seems to give the Enlightenment, which was very important, more credit than it deserves, and this seems to be related to his disregard for religion. Though he credits the role of churches in the Civilizing Offensive and Jesus’ teachings for providing a powerful philosophical platform for the rejection of revenge as a virtue, he mostly associates religion with tyranny and intolerance. The "greatest damage, comes from religious beliefs that downgrade the lives of flesh-and-blood people, such as the faith that suffering in this world will be rewarded in the next.... [T]he belief that one may escape from an eternity in hell only by accepting Jesus as a savior makes it a moral imperative to coerce people into accepting that belief."

Ahem… First, atheism is a new-ish culture, and Pinker seems to be over-looking that for most of human history, religion and the Leviathan were near indistinguishable, so as the cruelly pacifying Leviathan began to, itself, be pacified, so was religion. Moreover, religious activism did most of the heavy-lifting of both the Civilizing Processes and Offences that unfolded over the millennia before emergence of the Enlightenment, and even during the Enlightenment, atheism was rare, as those thinkers were more apt to embrace the less punitive God of an open-ended Deism.

Pinker also fails to credit the fact that our secular moralities are rooted in religious thought, specifically prominent thinkers who embraced ecumenicalism as a key spiritual virtue. Though Pinker gives pages to Erasmus’ etiquette manual, he never mentions that Erasmus’ international reputation was first built on his arguments for religious reform and tolerance in the context of the Protestant Reformation, then unpopular ideas within his Catholic faith. Similarly, the book contains no references to Francis of Assisi, Bartolome De Las Casas, William Wilberforce, Bruno Bettelheim or Bishop Desmond Tutu (though in fairness, he does make room for Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King). Spiritual ecumenicalism made political secularism inevitable because any faith-based stand that denies legitimacy to religious oppressions and wars must also curb militant expressions of theocracy.

I think Pinker trapped himself into thinking of religion from a single angle, but that angle’s vices are not exclusive to religion, while not being able to see another angle revealing equally potent virtues. Before moving onto the next paragraph, do an experiment on yourself. Close your eyes and make two lists in your head, one will be of the three most evil historical figures of the 20th c, and the other of the three greatest moral heroes of that same century.

There is almost no way your lists could match with mine, but I suspect they aren’t that much different either. For me, the evilest are Hitler, Stalin and Mao. The greatest moral heroes are Dr. King, Bishop Tutu and Gandhi.

Among the bad guys, Stalin and Mao were atheists. Hitler is often referred to as one, but that isn’t even close to accurate; though privately he rejected Christianity, he publicly courted Christian followers and never abandoned supernatural beliefs (Hitler flirted with a perverse version of paganism). Among the good guys, King and Tutu were both preacher men by profession and though Gandhi’s profession was lawyer, he embraced the preacher man’s life-style and role as a reflection of his deep religious faith. But what really separated the two lists was not secularism vs religion, but that the bad guys created cult movements (so, quasi-religions) around nationalism and their own narcissistic personalities, while the good guys embraced ecumenicalism and secular strategies as the best expression of their Baptist, Catholic and Hindu beliefs.

Pinker’s harshest critics accuse him of cherry-picking his numbers (this is especially true of his data regarding pre-state societies), but after reading over their specifics I find myself mostly unimpressed with that argument. But there’s another problem, citied more by his more modest critics than his harsher ones, that the numbers might be cherry-picking themselves.

Throughout the book there are unavoidable definitional problems, which he acknowledges, but never fully addresses. He provides multiple lists from multiple sources of past atrocities, and though the lists don’t fully agree with each other, they do demonstrate the same general trends. But he then uses these lists for one-to-one comparisons that are inevitably controversial. For example: the comparison of the 30 Years War to World War One -- but the 30 Years War wasn’t a single conflict, historians bundled together several wars for convenience, meanwhile WWI is understood as a single conflict that covered a much shorter timeframe. In all likelihood, in the future, WWI and WWII will be combined by historians for the same reason as the 30 Years Wars were, extending its duration from slightly more than two to almost eleven years, and dragging in several ugly conflicts from the interwar years, raising total number of civilian and military dead to something much higher than 150 million. I don’t think this destroys Pinker’s argument, but it suggests that the kind of objective and empirical data that he worked so hard to establish may be forever illusive.

A similar complaint can be leveled against comparing the Mongol Invasions to either, or both, World Wars, because the former unfolded across almost a century. But the counter-argument here is obvious: the Mongols best weapon was the bow and arrow and their best transportation was the horse, while in the 20th c. our best weapons were advanced artillery, massive bombs, automatic weapons, and poison gas, and the best transportation were massive ships, trains, planes and automobiles. It is little wonder why it took the Mongols longer to kill at a comparable rate.

Or, maybe not…

One of Pinker’s key sources, mathematician and pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson expressed skepticism about the reality of the “Long Peace” even while living in it (Pinker doesn’t hide this). In his 1960 book, “Statistics of Deadly Quarrels” he concluded that the difference between war and peace in modern times compared to the past was because we moderns expressed them in terms of, “long periods of increasing peace, punctuated by large upward leaps of violence.” Richardson seemed to have accepted the “hydraulic” metaphor that Pinker rejects.

Of course, there are those that dislike the fact that Pinker converted absolute war-dead numbers to rates measured against then-global populations. I mostly reject this argument, because it was often put it in terms of emotionally-laden moralisms that deliberately mis-state Pinker’s case. A telling example comes from David Bentley Hart:

“Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum… So Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.”

Well, actually, it means a lot if you are thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now, just like it matters that, right now, the streets of New York City are statistically safer the smaller city of Washington DC. Hart is unclear as to why rate-measurements are bad except for abstract suggestion that converting to rates reduces the value of the individual and offers no clear alternatives. Worse, he this does to condemn a book that explores the evolution of the idea that individuals have an autonomous value, creating “The Humanitarian Revolution” and “The Rights Revolutions” (titles given to two of the book’s chapters) that increased the value of an individual’s life in eyes of the often-detached Leviathan.

Similarly, Robert Epstein turns his nose up at the methodology, “By this logic, when we reach a world population of nine billion in 2050, Pinker will conceivably be satisfied if a mere two million people are killed in war that year.” But that’s still a radically lower percentage of the world population than died in WWII, begging the question, why isn’t it logical?

Epstein never address this, he just moves onto his next complaint, namely that historical comparisons are meaningless, “The biggest problem with the book, though, is its overreliance on history, which, like the light on a caboose, shows us only where we are not going.”

But other critics, offering a similar argument but attacking from a different angle, made a better case. Anthropologists Rahul Oka and Mark Golitko argue that the decreasing death rate over history is less evidence of decreased violence but an artifact of increased population, or a “scaling effect.” In a tribe of 100 it would be perfectly reasonable to have 25 warriors, and the death of anyone of those warriors would represent a full one percent of the population; but in a population of 100 million, though the size of the army will be larger, but won’t scale-up to 25 million soldiers, so in a military action today, we never have a quarter of a population ready to die on the battlefield, so of course the rate of death will inevitably drop even though the numbers of dead will keep increasing.

But does that really hurt Pinker’s case much? He’s arguing for the pacifying influence of the Leviathan, so since organized armies, which spare a population from “all against all” warfare, are a product of that Leviathan, what exactly is the problem?

Well, according to John Arquilla, professor at the United States Naval Postgraduate School, problem is that this “scaling up” effect has accelerated, because global populations are not only increasing, they are increasing at ever-faster rates. We are no longer comparing pre-state tribalism to modern republics, but modern republics to (again) modern republics, often the very same modern republic, just a few decades later. “As to Pinker’s battle-death ratios, they are somewhat skewed by the fact that overall populations have exploded since 1940; so even a very deadly war can be masked by a ‘per 100,000 of population’ stat.”

Pinker was also challenged on his refutation of the that belief that civilian deaths during the 20th c. far outweighed those of soldiers (Arquilla is also among these). As this argument went back-and-forth between Pinker and his critics, all that was clear to me is that they relied on different methodologies of accounting and trusted different historians. Pinker made his case well, but I’m forced to side with his critics here based on something neither side of the argument mentioned.

The great influenza epidemic of 1918 was spread by the movement of armies and refugees, so all of its victims should be considered WWI’s collateral damage, but they are never counted as such. Estimates place the epidemic’s death toll at around 50 million, and that increases the conventionally counted battlefield and civilian deaths of that war by a factor of four.

Pinker believes in science and adores its methodologies and demand for rigor. The “soft” sciences (psychology, sociology, and anthropology, etc.) are especially vulnerable to “confirmation bias,” and his own discipline, experimental psychology, is an attempt to clean up that problem. He is merciless to those he views as sloppy, lazy, and dishonest for ideological reasons (he uses the derisive phrases like “anthropologists of peace” and “peace and harmony mafia”) but confirmation bias haunts even those who act with seeming rigor, perhaps because in the soft sciences, its harder to tell what rigor actually is. Since science is science, it is ok to be wrong if you at least did your job right, and he does show compassion towards those who showed proper rigor but still reached disastrously wrong conclusions.

He takes us through how criminology’s “super-predator” theory, which inspired pointlessly cruel public policy, was reached, and then demonstrated how completely wrong it was, but without mocking it advocates like political scientist James Q. Wilson. Pinker instead shows support for the work Wilson is better known for, his crime-control theory commonly called “broken windows.” Decades later, “broken windows” is still strongly endorsed across the political spectrum and I just happen to be a resident of one of the cities that benefited from its application.

Some of Pinker’s more resentful critics saw a right-wing bias in his favoritism to scientists who actually do the work of science, and dishonestly claimed he supported both “super-predator” theory and the policies of mass-incarceration it helped trigger, even though Pinker went on for many pages arguing the exact opposite. They then picked out two passing references to Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, who fell into disrepute because of their book “The Bell Curve,” which tried to use IQ scores to buttress racialist public policy, but neither reference embraced that thesis and, in other writings, Pinker has been a “Bell Curve” critic.

(It should be pointed out that, not here but in other writings, Pinker does express some controversial positions regarding IQ heritability and consequentialism, but he was also addressing much smaller groups that the whole of Black people and outlined the evidentiary problems in establishing both causalities and consequences.)

Those who condemn him for a biased selection of sources are among his most absurd critics, seemingly deliberately ignoring that fact that his sources represent a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Often these complaints sounded like whining that Pinker read a different set of books than the critic, while the critic’s sources were clearly narrower and more ideologically strident than his. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson raged about Pinker’s reliance on political scientist Rudolph Rummel, who coined “democide” and is one of the leading figures in “democratic peace theory” (basically that democracies engage in war and democide less than other forms of government), because Rummel is politically conservative and said rude things about Barack Obama. Yet, in the same article they deny that wars since 1945 had fewer causalities, insisted all of them were caused by capitalism, that communism had no expansionist policies post-1945 and shares no responsibility for the proxy wars it engaged in with the capitalist powers.

John Gray had similar complaints, “The formation of democratic nation-states was one of the principal drivers of violence of the last century, involving ethnic cleansing in inter-war Europe, post-colonial states and the post-communist Balkans.”

Well, either he used the phrase “inter-war” incorrectly (it usually means the decades between WWI and WWII), or he’s just plain wrong about the supposed ethnic cleaning (which was significant during the wars, not in the era in between). Also, democracy didn’t cause the violence in post-colonial Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Balkans, but the retreat of the oppressive but pacifying Leviathans of colonialism and the Soviet state. This has happened repeatedly throughout history, like how the Fall of Rome led to the European Dark Ages.

Gray claims Pinker failed to even define violence (he did) and continues his post-modern gibberish with:

“What do we achieve by placing our morality and values onto the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Victorians, Byzantines, Mayans etc? Is it attempting to compare the incomparable? … what would it mean to be a violent Roman compared to a violent Victorian? And how can we begin to compare this to a violent modern man? To each historical period there must be a corresponding understanding and comprehension of exactly what it meant to be violent. If we look back at history through a modern lens we are destined to find horrific images at every turn: we see the alien, the depraved.”

It should be obvious what insights are gleamed by counting the dead, and the cause of death. And Pinker explicitly makes the case that where violence is more normalized, the world-view is radically different. The title of his first chapter is “A Foreign Country” (as in L.P. Hartley’s famous quote, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”) and, to a large degree, the whole of the book is about this idea. Gray seems to be accusing Pinker of insensitive cultural chauvinism, but since physical violence is the main subject, then Gray’s also making the case that the international shaming campaign against honor killings is similarly insensitive, maybe even “cultural genocide.”

Gray again, “For while certain types of aggression may have decreased, have we not created new forms and pathways for violence in lieu? These forms may often go beyond the realm of physicality; we need to be subtle and sensitive to these transitions, for we can be violent without causing direct physical pain.”

Though Pinker is explicit that he is talking about physical violence as his central subject, he devotes a lot of pages to non-violent oppression of minority ethnic groups, religions, women and children, because he argues that improvements on those fronts also reduce physical violence.

Pinker was also and accused of calling colonial oppression a good thing. Well, he didn’t, he called it a pacifier, but made it clear pacification and justice are two different things. Also, Pinker doesn’t ignore the atrocities of colonialism, the book is peppered with them. A more reasonable complaint is that he didn’t tackle colonialism as a distinct subject because he praises the economics of deuce (gentle) commerce as transformative, but not all commerce is gentle. Imperialism/colonialism are examples of “aggressive commerce,” purely exploitive, war-mongering and very important in history.

Related to this, critics have accused Pinker of being only interested in the fate and comfort of people in the West. Well, yes, he focuses mostly on the USA and Western Europe (he gives less time to the Canada of his birth), obviously he knows these cultures better and the type of data sets he relies on are more abundant and accurate in the West, but it’s not like he ignores the rest of the world. Moreover, the critics who make the biggest deal about it reveal their own, myopic, Western (really anti-Western) perspective. One of Pinker’s critics, Elizabeth Kolbert, seems to think only white people engaged in imperialism/colonialism. She complained that the savagery of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico is ignored (it wasn’t, I can show her a few pages where it is addressed). Worse, she ignores that the Spanish were not the only conquering horde with feet-on-the-ground in Mexico at the time; the Aztecs were also conquerors and exploiters, and, in fact, far worse than the Spanish, with their raids on weaker neighbors, kidnapping them as the raw material in their massive orgies of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Cortez’s tiny band overthrew Montezuma in no small part because he was able to make allies among those the Aztecs oppressed.

Related to this, Pinker was accused of racism and Islamophobia for his inappropriate addressing facts that can’t be denied: In the USA blacks are disproportionately both the perpetrator and prey of violent crime. In the world’s fifty Muslim-majority countries, militant theocracy, inter- and intra-state war, terrorism, and human rights abuses are disproportionally executed. Pinker attacks these loaded topics head-on and does not fall back on racial or religious stereotyping, but instead builds a lucid case for the reasons why – reasons I won’t summarize now, because I already did across the entire length of this essay.

Other, more modest critics, question the whole of the new-ish field of evolutionary psychology which Pinker embraces and point out that one chapter leans on neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s concept of a “rage circuit” in our brains without clarifying that it is not broadly accepted by others in that field.

Clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell makes a sophisticated case that Pinker’s integration of ideas never achieves a golden thread connecting all his disparate pacifications:

“Humanitarian advances do not necessarily lead to more peaceful and understanding relations among states. Nor does more self-control in one individual lead to more self-control across groups of individuals. To his credit, Pinker realizes this is a problem, but his attempts to overcome it through social psychology are less than entirely successful. Pinker explains the decline of homicide and the decline of slavery quite differently, and the decline in war, coming later than the other markers of progress, may be even more distinct. Indeed, the two chapters on this subject do not build upon his previous arguments nor do they provide a foundation for later ones.”

I don’t really agree, but yes, at times, especially later in the book, Pinker does sometimes seem less like he’s laying down his argument brick-by-brick and more like he’s putting his fingers in cracks in his dike, and every once in a while, he doesn’t enough fingers. Bell singled out an occasion where Pinker made a statement that, at its core, was correct, but was presented in the form of outrageous over-statement:

“By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not their parents. That tells us that children are socialized by their peer group rather than their families: it takes a village to raise a child.”

Bell responded not by harping on the over-statement, but demonstrating it:

“…the appearance of mental disorders on this list only makes sense if you throw out years of research on how childhood treatment can alter the risk of mental illness, along with, as it happens, adult aggression and violence.”

And then, responding to one of Pinker’s more eye-brow raising assertions:

“Self-control is partly correlated with intelligence (with a coefficient of about 0.23 on a scale of -1 to 1) … Intelligence itself is highly correlated with crime—duller people commit more violent crimes and are more likely to be the victims of a violent crime.”

Given Pinker’s focus on physical violence, this maybe true. My background is in law enforcement, and we consider most criminals stupid, but we see smarter ones all the time – but smarter criminals seem to be drawn to very damaging, yet still non-violent, criminality (fraud, bribery, money laundering, etc.). If smarter criminals commit smarter crimes, is IQ scores really demonstrable of the “escalator of reason”? Or as Bell states:

“I found equally unconvincing Pinker’s argument about how violence declines as IQ levels rise and how this reflects the moderating effect of reason on aggression. Intelligence can equally be applied to justifying nonsense as to debunking it, and problem solving is not the same as evidence-based skepticism.”

This becomes especially important when addressing “Extraordinary Common Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (I stole that from the title of a famous book by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841). Political violence is often a product of irrational, conspiratorial, delusions, and there plenty of empirical data demonstrating these delusions are accepted as much by the smart as the stupid.

Anyway, I mostly endorse Pinker’s conclusions despite the problems I’ve outlined; as stated above, when given an argument with so many moving parts, it was inevitable that it would fail in some aspects. I’ll got even farther: I’d include the failures as part of the reason for my endorsement of the book. It’s breadth and depth of research is undeniable no matter where you find flaws, and you’d be hard pressed to find a book this serious that is also as readable and so wide in scope. Pinker reveals himself in this sentence, "Optimism requires a touch of arrogance," and good for him. He’s expanded the conversation, as even many of his critics admit, and I see no irresponsibility in the manner in which he did it. What ever you think of his conclusions, you will learn from this book, and you will be arguing with yourself and others about its contents for years, maybe even decades, to come.

In closing, I offer you three more quotes from the book:

“If, fifty years ago, someone had predicted that the Soviet Union would dissolve peacefully, that the Europeans would adopt a common currency, and that a reunified Germany would terrify no one, that person would have been viewed as a kook. After spending five hundred years fighting more or less incessantly, the nations of Western Europe have not taken up arms against one another since 1945.”

“You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity [i.e., a NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear war] would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear holocaust. The cities of the world were not vaporized; the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris that blacked out the sun and sent Homo sapiens the way of the dinosaurs. Not only that, but a reunited Germany did not turn into the fourth Reich, democracy did not go the way of monarchy, and the great powers and developed nations did not fall into a third world war but rather a long peace, which keeps getting longer.”

“The forces of modernity -- reason, science, humanism, individual rights -- have not, of course, pushed steadily in one direction; nor will they ever bring about a utopia or end the frictions and hurts that come with being human. But on top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence.”

across groups of individuals. To his credit, Pinker realizes this is a problem, but his attempts to overcome it through social psychology are less than entirely successful. Pinker explains the decline of homicide and the decline of slavery quite differently, and the decline in war, coming later than the other markers of progress, may be even more distinct. Indeed, the two chapters on this subject do not build upon his previous arguments nor do they provide a foundation for later ones.”

I don’t really agree, but yes, at times, especially later in the book, Pinker does sometimes seem less like he’s laying down his argument brick-by-brick and more like he’s putting his fingers in cracks in his dike, and every once in a while, he doesn’t enough fingers. Bell singled out an occasion where Pinker made a statement that, at its core, was correct, but was presented in the form of outrageous over-statement:

“By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not their parents. That tells us that children are socialized by their peer group rather than their families: it takes a village to raise a child.”

Bell responded not by harping on the over-statement, but demonstrating it:

“…the appearance of mental disorders on this list only makes sense if you throw out years of research on how childhood treatment can alter the risk of mental illness, along with, as it happens, adult aggression and violence.”

And then, responding to one of Pinker’s more eye-brow raising assertions:

“Self-control is partly correlated with intelligence (with a coefficient of about 0.23 on a scale of -1 to 1) … Intelligence itself is highly correlated with crime—duller people commit more violent crimes and are more likely to be the victims of a violent crime.”

Given Pinker’s focus on physical violence, this maybe true. My background is in law enforcement, and we consider most criminals stupid, but we see smarter ones all the time – but smarter criminals seem to be drawn to very damaging, yet still non-violent, criminality (fraud, bribery, money laundering, etc.). If smarter criminals commit smarter crimes, is IQ scores really demonstrable of the “escalator of reason”? Or as Bell states:

“I found equally unconvincing Pinker’s argument about how violence declines as IQ levels rise and how this reflects the moderating effect of reason on aggression. Intelligence can equally be applied to justifying nonsense as to debunking it, and problem solving is not the same as evidence-based skepticism.”

This becomes especially important when addressing “Extraordinary Common Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (I stole that from the title of a famous book by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841). Political violence is often a product of irrational, conspiratorial, delusions, and there plenty of empirical data demonstrating these delusions are accepted as much by the smart as the stupid.

Anyway, I mostly endorse Pinker’s conclusions despite the problems I’ve outlined; as stated above, when given an argument with so many moving parts, it was inevitable that it would fail in some aspects. I’ll got even farther: I’d include the failures as part of the reason for my endorsement of the book. It’s breadth and depth of research is undeniable no matter where you find flaws, and you’d be hard pressed to find a book this serious that is also as readable and so wide in scope. Pinker reveals himself in this sentence, "Optimism requires a touch of arrogance," and good for him. He’s expanded the conversation, as even many of his critics admit, and I see no irresponsibility in the manner in which he did it. What ever you think of his conclusions, you will learn from this book, and you will be arguing with yourself and others about its contents for years, maybe even decades, to come.

In closing, I offer you three more quotes from the book:

“If, fifty years ago, someone had predicted that the Soviet Union would dissolve peacefully, that the Europeans would adopt a common currency, and that a reunified Germany would terrify no one, that person would have been viewed as a kook. After spending five hundred years fighting more or less incessantly, the nations of Western Europe have not taken up arms against one another since 1945.”

“You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity [i.e., a NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear war] would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear holocaust. The cities of the world were not vaporized; the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris that blacked out the sun and sent Homo sapiens the way of the dinosaurs. Not only that, but a reunited Germany did not turn into the fourth Reich, democracy did not go the way of monarchy, and the great powers and developed nations did not fall into a third world war but rather a long peace, which keeps getting longer.”

“The forces of modernity -- reason, science, humanism, individual rights -- have not, of course, pushed steadily in one direction; nor will they ever bring about a utopia or end the frictions and hurts that come with being human. But on top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence.”

across groups of individuals. To his credit, Pinker realizes this is a problem, but his attempts to overcome it through social psychology are less than entirely successful. Pinker explains the decline of homicide and the decline of slavery quite differently, and the decline in war, coming later than the other markers of progress, may be even more distinct. Indeed, the two chapters on this subject do not build upon his previous arguments nor do they provide a foundation for later ones.”

I don’t really agree, but yes, at times, especially later in the book, Pinker does sometimes seem less like he’s laying down his argument brick-by-brick and more like he’s putting his fingers in cracks in his dike, and every once in a while, he doesn’t enough fingers. Bell singled out an occasion where Pinker made a statement that, at its core, was correct, but was presented in the form of outrageous over-statement:

“By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not their parents. That tells us that children are socialized by their peer group rather than their families: it takes a village to raise a child.”

Bell responded not by harping on the over-statement, but demonstrating it:

“…the appearance of mental disorders on this list only makes sense if you throw out years of research on how childhood treatment can alter the risk of mental illness, along with, as it happens, adult aggression and violence.”

And then, responding to one of Pinker’s more eye-brow raising assertions:

“Self-control is partly correlated with intelligence (with a coefficient of about 0.23 on a scale of -1 to 1) … Intelligence itself is highly correlated with crime—duller people commit more violent crimes and are more likely to be the victims of a violent crime.”

Given Pinker’s focus on physical violence, this maybe true. My background is in law enforcement, and we consider most criminals stupid, but we see smarter ones all the time – but smarter criminals seem to be drawn to very damaging, yet still non-violent, criminality (fraud, bribery, money laundering, etc.). If smarter criminals commit smarter crimes, is IQ scores really demonstrable of the “escalator of reason”? Or as Bell states:

“I found equally unconvincing Pinker’s argument about how violence declines as IQ levels rise and how this reflects the moderating effect of reason on aggression. Intelligence can equally be applied to justifying nonsense as to debunking it, and problem solving is not the same as evidence-based skepticism.”

This becomes especially important when addressing “Extraordinary Common Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (I stole that from the title of a famous book by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841). Political violence is often a product of irrational, conspiratorial, delusions, and there plenty of empirical data demonstrating these delusions are accepted as much by the smart as the stupid.

Anyway, I mostly endorse Pinker’s conclusions despite the problems I’ve outlined; as stated above, when given an argument with so many moving parts, it was inevitable that it would fail in some aspects. I’ll got even farther: I’d include the failures as part of the reason for my endorsement of the book. It’s breadth and depth of research is undeniable no matter where you find flaws, and you’d be hard pressed to find a book this serious that is also as readable and so wide in scope. Pinker reveals himself in this sentence, "Optimism requires a touch of arrogance," and good for him. He’s expanded the conversation, as even many of his critics admit, and I see no irresponsibility in the manner in which he did it. What ever you think of his conclusions, you will learn from this book, and you will be arguing with yourself and others about its contents for years, maybe even decades, to come.

In closing, I offer you three more quotes from the book:

“If, fifty years ago, someone had predicted that the Soviet Union would dissolve peacefully, that the Europeans would adopt a common currency, and that a reunified Germany would terrify no one, that person would have been viewed as a kook. After spending five hundred years fighting more or less incessantly, the nations of Western Europe have not taken up arms against one another since 1945.”

“You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity [i.e., a NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear war] would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear holocaust. The cities of the world were not vaporized; the atmosphere was not poisoned by radioactive fallout or choked with debris that blacked out the sun and sent Homo sapiens the way of the dinosaurs. Not only that, but a reunited Germany did not turn into the fourth Reich, democracy did not go the way of monarchy, and the great powers and developed nations did not fall into a third world war but rather a long peace, which keeps getting longer.”

“The forces of modernity -- reason, science, humanism, individual rights -- have not, of course, pushed steadily in one direction; nor will they ever bring about a utopia or end the frictions and hurts that come with being human. But on top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence.”