The Better Angels of our Nature

In 1984 I read with great interest and pleasure Steven Pinker's book,  The Language Instinct. Pinker presented evidence that language is an instinct unique to humans. He described and discussed how and why humans differ qualitatively in communication skills from other highly developed species. For instance we possess the ability to communicate emotions and abstract concepts – pleasure, distress, danger, esthetic satisfaction, love, etc –more efficiently and in more dimensions than any other kind of living creature. We comprehend speech, emotive poetry and prose, mathematical symbols, music, visual and performing arts, religious imagery, philosophical discourse, and much more. The Language Instinct displayed the breadth and depth of scholarship that have distinguished all of Pinker’s books. He is a renaissance man, a polymath, a rigorous scientist capable of presenting ideas and information from a wide range of scholarly disciplines to support his arguments. Pinker is Canadian, a graduate of McGill University in Montreal, and holds an endowed chair at Harvard. He is probably best described as an evolutionary psychologist. In a series of brilliant, beautifully written and richly referenced books, he has explored several aspects of how the human mind works, approaching this tantalizing question from a historical, developmental, and evolutionary perspective.  Now, several books and 18 years after The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker has delivered The Better Angels of our Nature, a masterly work of major importance to all scholars who are interested in the human condition. The first fundamental fact presented in this important book is the abundant evidence that violence has declined dramatically over the past several hundred years. Pinker presents evidence on all forms of violence – interpersonal, domestic, criminal, state-administered, war-related, etc. At first glance evidence for a decline in violence seems false and the very notion seems counter-intuitive. Surely the industrial scale of death, permanent disability, material, economic and cultural loss caused by violence in the global, regional and local wars of the 20^th century far exceeds comparable events in all previous centuries. Over 100 million people died in the wars and genocides in the first half of the 20^th century, the number permanently maimed or disabled was several times larger. The scale of the slaughter continued throughout the second half of the 20^th century and in the first decade of the 21^st century.  Surely this exceeds any previous blood baths. No, not so if expressed as rates or proportions rather than only in absolute numbers, which is how such data are almost always displayed. There is room for argument about the basis for the rates and proportions: for instance, what denominator should be used for death rates in the two “world” wars of the first half of the 20^th century? What should be the denominators for the genocides: the Armenian genocide of 1915, Stalin's genocide of the Ukrainians in the 1930s, the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews of Europe, the Rwandan genocide and the "ethnic cleansing" conducted by the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia? What about the uncomfortable relationship of religion and violence? Faith-based and culturally based violence still flare up occasionally, for instance in conflicts between Christians and Moslems in Nigeria, in acid attacks on women by men they have spurned in Pakistan and Bangladesh, stoning to death of adulterers in Afghanistan, etc, lynching (often preceded by castration and horrific torture) in backward regions of the USA, etc. until about the 1950s and family murder-suicides here in Canada and elsewhere? Yes, all these occurred and some still do, but the numbers are tiny, rates are miniscule, compared to death rates in the Thirty Years War, medieval witch burnings, torture by the Spanish inquisition, and other old-time atrocities.  State-administered violence, e.g. executions, flogging, use of stocks and pillory, were formerly public spectacles, but began to disappear behind closed doors, then to diminish in number and now have disappeared in all civilized societies, persist only in a few backward US states and nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China. Culturally related interpersonal violence, notably slavery and child labour, have virtually disappeared except in isolated settings. Although human trafficking still exists, the numbers, let alone rates, are tiny compared for instance to the African slave trade which carried an estimated 36 million Africans to the Americas until the slave trade was finally abolished in the middle of the 19th century. Pinker demonstrates to my satisfaction that all the existing forms of violence are numerically small when accurately presented in the form of rates or proportions as they always should be if we seek to make valid comparisons. Raw numbers may look dramatic but are often misleading.

Pinker goes on to present his reasoned arguments about why violence has declined. Part of the reason for the widespread perception that violence is pervasive and increasing rather than decreasing  is the publicity we give it in the media  -“ If it bleeds, it leads” as a noted journalist once said. Moreover, and more important, the media present the evidence in a way that makes us feel sorry for the victims. Pinker’s hypothesis is that violence has declined largely because of this rise of empathy. 

Why has empathy risen?  Pinker may be less persuasive on this question, which is exceedingly complex. It has a lot to do with values, for instance with the way we identify with, feel empathy for Shakespeare’s “good” women (Portia, Cordelia) rather than the “bad” ones (Lady Macbeth, Regan, Goneril). The rise of literacy and perhaps of cultural sensibility therefore presumably has something to do with the observed fact of declining violence. I'm less satisfied than I'd like to be about Pinker's explanation of reasons for the decline of violence.He's right, I'm sure, as far as he goes. I am not convinced that he goes deeply enough.

I believe, however, that differing values among seemingly very similar members of modern organized societies are more difficult to explain than in this rather simplistic way. The fact that values differ is unarguable. An obvious value difference is demonstrated in political preferences. People who believe in social justice and equity, that all people in society deserve an equal chance, people who believe humans and other living creatures are interdependent, are predominantly liberal, left-leaning politically. People who believe that  some are inherently superior to others, and who believe humans have an inherent right to exploit nature’s bounty  for their own benefit, are ‘conservative’ (in the political, not ecological sense of this word!) and are usually right-leaning politically. There has lately been a little discussion and description in scientific circles of the relationship (if any) between brain function and political preferences and convictions. I hope for more work at this interesting frontier of knowledge. It would be a fascinating and challenging topic for Steven Pinker’s next book.