Kind of fascinating, but I can't recommend it. We should be more optimistic about the modern world than we are. We should also not make rape jokes or blame political correctness for oppression.

This is a fascinating and informative book, which I should never, ever have given to my Dad as a Christmas present.

Firstly, although father is not adverse to fact dense books, he is a slow and careful reader and this book is a long slog.

Secondly, while this book has an uplifting premise and the word "angels" in the title, it's filled with gore, vileness and gruesome records of atrocity.

Dad, I read this book so that you wouldn't have to.

Pinker expects his readers to be resistant to the idea that violence is on decline (just look at the news!), so he bolsters his position. His argument begins with the idea that far from being angels now, we have forgotten the devils we used to be: murdering children, torturing women, and likely to stab each other over dinner.

It's a history of homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, matricide, and terrorism by suicide. Ugh!

Also, people in the past (use say 1910 as a barometer) were morally stupid, and even, by today's standards, somewhat retarded.

Cold comfort. All this is depressing, as Pinker admits, "After reading eight chapters (the book is 10!) on the horrible things that people have done to each other and the darker parts of human nature that spurred them, you have every right to look forward to a bit of uplift in a chapter on our better angels."

It's accurate to say that the final chapters are "a bit" of an uplift. Pinker says he wrote this book as an answer to the question, "What makes you optimistic?" Judged by this book, he is unlikely to be accused of being a Pollyanna.

He does, however, counter some of our factually mistaken and scientifically unsupported pessimism.

• There's not an inevitable cycle towards war and catastrophe. It's even statistically improbable and there's a trend away from it.
• We're not ruled by a violent bias toward predation, dominance, and vengeance. Human nature also includes peaceful traits, which evolution seems to be selecting for, of compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason.
• Things aren't getting worse. They are getting better. "The forces of modernity — reason, science, humanism, individual rights — has brought us benefits in health, experience, and knowledge as well as a reduction in violence."

The data is coldly reassuring, while Pinker assesses, "The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species."

Pinker cautions against forces that favor violent outcomes such as ideological and utopian thinking and warns us of the dangers of pluralistic ignorance, when people, "...endorse a practice or opinion they deplore because they mistakenly think that everyone else favors it," and punish dissenters.

He suggests forces that favor a pacifying effect: art and literature (fiction, satire, first-person accounts, and reportage); democracy (electing smart and open-minded leaders, establishing policies, norms, and taboos); feminization; and "rights" movements (human, civil, homosexual, women's, and animal and, in general, "...a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation.") as well as, "conditions of democracy, prosperity, decent government, peacekeeping, open economies".

His approach is rational, moderate, and a counterpoint to authors who find that humanity's increasing traits of empathy and compassion are a source of improvement and inspiration.

Rather, Pinker points to our increasing powers of abstract reasoning and understanding of the economic benefits of cooperation. He's quite enthusiastic about this in his way.

Pairs well with: The Expanding Circle by Peter Singer, The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin; The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal; and Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong.

For more info:

The TED talk: Steven Pinker: The surprising decline in violence
Peter Singer's review in The New York Times "Is Violence History?"

Of note: This is a nice vocabulary expanding book: putsches, suzerain, altricial, eschatological, obloquy, parlous, autarkies, atrocitologists, frugivores, prelapsarian, armentarium, equipoise, immiseration, hagiographic, bafflegab

A sobering note: The kind of arguments used today in discussions of abortion, animal rights, stem cell research, and euthanasia were earlier (and horrifically) used to justify infanticide (the merits of which people also used to debate!):

"In 1911 an English physician, Charles Mercier, presented arguments than infanticide should be considered a less heinous crime than the murder of an older child or an adult: 'The victim’s mind is not sufficiently developed to enable it to suffer from the contemplation of approaching suffering or death. It is incapable of feeling fear or terror. Nor is its consciousness sufficiently developed to enable it to suffer pain in appreciable degree. Its loss leaves no gap in any family circle, deprives no children of their breadwinner or their mother, no human being of a friend, helper, or companion.'"

Quotes:
"...as long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." — Oscar Wilde

"...biology and history suggest that all else being equal, a world in which women have more influence will be a world with fewer wars."

"Though nothing can guarantee that virulent ideologies will not infect a country, the vaccine is an open society in which people and ideas move freely and no one is punished for airing dissenting views, including those that seem heretical to polite consensus."

"One could say that for every presidential IQ point, 13,400 fewer people die in battle, though it's more accurate to say that the three smartest postwar presidents, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton, kept the country out of destructive wars."

"But it is just as foolish to let our lurid imaginations determine our sense of probabilities. It may always be something, but there can be fewer of those things, and the things that happen don't have to be as bad. The numbers tell us that war, genocide, and terrorism have declined over the past two decades — not to zero but by a lot."

I've struggled a bit to write this review because I have mixed feelings about The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker.

I started reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined with the attitude that Pinker needed to first convince me violence had declined before getting into explaining why. To be perfectly honest, given the world we currently live in, it's hard to imagine that violence has declined.

While I finished the book convinced that violence has declined, I felt like the explanations for why seemed more hypothetical than proven. Pinker explored violence quite thoroughly beginning his book at the beginning of human existence and moving to modern times in the almost 700 pages of The Better Angels of Our Nature. He explored historical myths as well as historical documents to arrive at his conclusions. He used archaeological finds to disprove mythical battles. He described how the development of etiquette and the creation of government helped quell violence and change our norms about violence. He used a combination of statistics, anecdotal evidence, and archaeological studies to present his case.

Yet, the more I read, the more my college corrections statistics professor's words haunted me. He always warned our class to be careful when writing papers not to allow our biases and our desires to prove our points to affect the weight we gave the studies we used as evidence.

Pinker seems less objective in some areas of The Better Angels of Our Nature than in other sections. He seemed to excuse violence against some people while unequivocally condemning it against others. This bias felt incredibly out of place in a book on why violence has declined.

For example, when talking about things like the FBI's crime report and other such studies on crime, Pinker never mentions the effect of police discretion and biased court results on crime rates or how the statistics for individual areas are sometimes skewed by reporting or not reporting data. My assumption is he believes the numbers wouldn't be enough to skew the overall results, and a simple paragraph could have addressed that issue. Maybe even just a few sentences; however, if those sentences existed I couldn't find them.

His inconsistent handling of anecdotal evidence and research surveys deemed certain groups of people more credible than others without giving a clear reason why.

As I read The Better Angels of Our Nature, I found myself wanting it to be better than it was yet I still think it's a book worth reading. Pinker obviously studied violence in great depth. He explains the statistics in an easy to understand, straightforward method, and he tells the story of violence quite well. He makes violence the main character, for better or worse, in a story that is ongoing and relevant and important. In fact, Pinker tells the story so well and brings up such important points, facts, and conclusions, that I am tempted to dismiss the things that bothered me about the book. Yet, I can't do that in good conscience. Pinker drives home the fact that violence is much less acceptable than it used to be for a variety of reasons and that unacceptability has come about as humans have developed civilization and sought out ways to live together more peacefully. The Better Angels of Our Nature left me hopeful that we can continue to rise above violence and find nonviolent solutions in spite of my skepticism about certain sections of the book.

A refreshingly optimistic and convincing synthesis. While there are plenty of threads which seem slightly iffy, Pinker's ultimate argument is powerful. The pages and pages (and pages) of graphs and interpreted statistics from a cornucopia of sources overwhelmingly make the counterintuitive case that violence really has declined across the board. And some of the driving forces of the change Pinker posits are very surprising.

I loved his straightforward accessible prose, peppered with pop culture anecdotes (including quite amusing stories from centuries past), and his methodical structuring which left you certain exactly where in his thesis you stood with every topic and every page. Already ordered another Pinker book, for the next time I feel like a pop-philosophy/sociology kick.

In reviewing The Better Angels of our Nature, I find myself struggling to avoid the absolutes that Pinker so deftly dodges in this epic study of the history of violence in humankinds history. This book is possibly the best structured arguement I have read (even if it does result in a book that you clearly need to pick up with both hands so as to not inflict spinal damage on yourself) and leaves you with a fresh perspective on things that you took as given in so many ways.

To even begin to try and summarise the journey that Pinker takes us on here would be to do it a disservice. No stone is left unturned as Pinker takes us through a detailed statistical analysis of the levels of violence through the ages. On top of this we are given a detailed analysis of, not just the volumes of violence that are clearly shown to have reduce over time and colminate in what is often now referred to as 'The Long Peace', but also the shift in the social norms that humans have towards the tolerance of violence - from 'good' families enjoying a public execution in public squares for entertainment to the 'rights movement' of the twentieth century that sort to ensure protection of not just women, children and homosexuals but even the protection of the rights of animals. The last few hundred pages then shift to a neurological and psychological study of what causes humans to act violently and how and why this might be trending down.

Overall, Pinker leaves us with a positive view of the future and of how much progress we have made already. He suggests that 'the good old days' that we often pine for may not have been so good as we might like to paint them and that, for all the criticism we may dole out to it, that modernity has in many ways made our life considerably better.

The Better Angels of our Nature is a staggering piece of reasearch in both its breadth and depth. I am sure that this research may be challenged by opposing views but, given the level of research on display here, it would have to be a very solid counterpoint to enter the debate. And it's this point in itself that may support Pinker - the fact that we can have this level of open discussion is evidence in itself of how far we have come.

3.5 Audio. On the whole, it's pretty uplifting. The first half of the book was amazing and the rest was OK. Too long - seriously, you could read only the first few chapters to satisfy most of your interest if you don't know much beforehand. The book has lots of statistics and relevant sources referenced, but he seems to have received a lot of criticism as well, so I don't know... Sometimes it seems that people are expecting an argument developed to perfection where there is only a flawed society making confused baby steps of progress to base it on. I mean... he isn't saying that there's no violence left in the world nor that it comes down to one single thing like horrible, horrible capitalism (or communism or woman-brains or atheism sth). Anyway, I wasn't too triggered, the author made it pretty clear that it's mostly conjecture. Still, I think that when read as a very general guide to trends in violence, everything holds up quite well. But it should be half as long.

The part that interested me the most concerned the rise of self control, "appropriate" behaviour and codes of public conduct together with more empathy.

“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. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.”

***

“Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and modern Europe. Recall that according to Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process, the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce did more than just tilt the incentive structure away from plunder. It also inculcated an ethic of self-control that made continence and propriety second nature. People refrained from stabbing each other at the dinner table and amputating each other’s noses at the same time as they refrained from urinating in closets, copulating in public, passing gas at the dinner table, and gnawing on bones and returning them to the serving dish. A culture of honor, in which men were respected for lashing out against insults, became a culture of dignity, in which men were respected for controlling their impulses.”

Stop being nostalgic for the 'good old days', start being grateful that nobody wants to flog you in the village square anymore

No, the world is not getting worse, it is getting better. Very well argued, again, by Pinker. And since news media, social media and "common wisdom" seems to think otherwise, his books are highly necessary. Although: He is so good at it, that it would have been interesting to read a book of his, in which he solely dedicates to circumstances that undecidedly are worsening.