
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012) - gmays
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Better-Angels-of-Our-Nature
======
drzaiusapelord
Homicide rates aren't really reliable metrics for violence, at least in the
US. Here in Chicago, homicides are down a bit, but shootings are up. That's
actually more violence, but the homicide is the only politicized fact. More
shootings and less deaths probably have more to do with surgical outcomes than
any sort of peaceful nature argument. Kids are getting shot left and right
here. Its not getting better.

Humans are basic creatures that engage largely in rational game theory. A
south-side kid with no prospects joining a violent gang is 100% rational.
Shooting a rival for turf makes perfect sense in that socio-economic system.
Under those circumstances violence is the most efficient way to gain
resources, solve disputes, and build social capital. 70% of homicides in
Chicago are never solved, so you don't need to worry about jail time either.

Pinker's stuff is a bit too idealistic for my tastes. He ignores that humans
really just adapt to circumstances. We're only less violent, if we even are,
its because circumstances dictate it so. My milquetoast bureaucratic life has
no room for violence, but if things drastically changed for me, I'd be the one
buying a gun and shooting rival gangbangers. Its just makes sense for me to do
so. I wouldn't necessarily be averse to this. I'd try to maximize my life,
protect my family, and collect resources that best way I personally can.

Thankfully, my parents immigrated to this country and gave me the luxury of
never having to shoot anyone. I'm not a good person. I'm just a person. I can,
and often will be, what circumstances demand if need be. I've never been
tested like a south side kid. I doubt I'd take more a more moral or peaceful
approach under those circumstances. I'm certainly not overly-moral today and I
imagine most people aren't either. Are we all wringing our hands over not
buying fair trade goods? Do we really care who makes our ipads, computers,
etc? Why would I be overly-moral when it comes to violence if I suddenly found
myself in certain situations?

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wodenokoto
Pinker did a TED talk on this book. In the talk he makes a note that the book
does not try to explain why, though he has some ideas as to why the numbers
are declining.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence)

~~~
shas3
> In the talk he makes a note that the book does not try to explain why...

Ummm, the book was published only in 2011. The TED talk is from 2007. Even
without seeing the TED talk, one can claim that your observations don't add
up.

I looked for the dates because in my reading of The Better Angels of Our
Nature, there seems to be plenty and more answering the question of 'why'
violence has declined.

~~~
wodenokoto
You are absolutely right! I watched the talk shortly after reading about the
book and somehow got it confused with being part of the promotion tour.

------
Terr_
Hmm, if the author is right about "better behavior" over centuries, I wonder
how much is due to larger groups, both in terms of raw population and social
adaptations?

To draw upon the words of a fictional AI...

> The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame
> (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware
> systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and
> judgment.

> The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups
> is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization
> not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher
> orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government.

> The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can
> implement same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

~~~
Evgeny
I finished the book recently, it was quite a long read. I can tell that the
author definitely covered a wide variety of possible explanations to the
reduction of violence. Was it exhaustive or not, I can't tell.

The most surprising and unsettling for me was the vivid depiction of the
levels of violence as they existed in the society (or societies) even
relatively recently. I kind of take it for granted that I am fairly physically
secure in my everyday life, my chances to die in a war are vanishingly small,
and chances to be robbed not that much higher. Makes me grateful that I was
not born just a few hundred years ago, and of course that I live in the more
developed part of the world.

~~~
arethuza
"my chances to die in a war are vanishingly small"

Worth noting that a lot of us who were around before '89 didn't think this way
back then.

~~~
hga
They might not have been "vanishingly small" (looks to my right to the Civil
Defense Block Mother sign we put up in the late '60s), but I and most of the
people I knew rated the chances as "small".

~~~
arethuza
I heard air raid sirens go off in Edinburgh (by accident) in what was probably
late '83 and really did get a scare - everyone else round about looked pretty
terrified as well.

Interestingly, that might have been at the same time as Able Archer - a
coincidence I'm sure and not something we learned about until years after.

[NB Recent accounts suggest that we'd never have got the "4 minute" warning
anyway - so had the UK been hit by salvos of Soviet MRBMs and follow up
bombers we'd never have known.]

The BBC certainly didn't help our state of minds - I still have the mental
scars of watching _Threads_ and the particularly grim _QED - A Guide To
Armageddon_.

~~~
hga
Ah! About that I'm not a good person to listen to, for I was born, raised, and
have retired to a city that's a hair's breath from the USA's "Tornado Alley",
and for that reason we are deadly serious about Civil Defense. So during
tornado season, every Monday at 10 am if the weather was good, the sirens
would sound for testing. And they of course sound when a funnel cloud was
sighted, and they saved a _lot_ of people from death or injury (in my case)
the 3rd time in my life when it was for real:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado)
and [http://www.ancell-
ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/](http://www.ancell-
ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/)

That said, surviving nuclear war isn't _that_ difficult. _Threads_ was
_ludicrous_ propaganda; if your nation is prepared (UK and US no, Switzerland
and Israel yes), or if you're lucky and either aren't in the path of serious
fallout or can arrange a shelter ... well, one theme of _Threads_ was correct,
medium and longer term survival is the trick. But the portrayed bigger
environmental effects as well as cancer rates and the like were flat out lies
(this based on reading the Wikipedia summary and my 45 years worth of study of
nuclear war survival).

Don't know about that _Q.E.D._ episode, but it was unrealistic: while the U.K.
is like many other nations in being a "one bomb nation", that is, taking out
the one central city takes out almost everything and everyone important "at
the top" (compare to the US were D.C. is nothing but government, however much
they like to pretend it's e.g. a cultural center :-), London would get a nice
saturation spread of more efficient sub-megaton warheads :-(.

If your government had really cared, and could afford it (that's the trick, I
suppose, post-WWII and serious socialism), it _could_ have been arranged that
you'd get that 4 minutes warning _and have a blast shelter to get into_. By
the same token, the US could have spent 1/3rds of a year's Cold War "defense"
budget and outfitted enough shelter spaces for every resident, including a
year's worth of food.

But don't worry, sooner or later nuclear weapons will again be used in anger
:-(, and a lot more people and nations will get serious about surviving them.
If you want be prepared today, take a gander at _Nuclear War Survival Skills_
, _the_ book on expedient nuclear war survival:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_Survival_Skills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_Survival_Skills)

(Note you need the real, green cover book to get the correct scale diagrams to
make a Kearny Fallout Meter, not to mention the need for a paper copy if the
lights go out/EMP messes things up, but the free on-line versions will get you
started.)

~~~
arethuza
"Threads was ludicrous propaganda"

Actually, _Threads_ was actually fairly optimistic about the likely scale of a
Soviet attack on the UK:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg)

Also Threads was attempting to show the _actual_ state of preparation of the
UK for nuclear war - so saying that a nuclear war is easy to survive if you
are prepared is a bit silly as the UK (and the US) really weren't that
prepared - that was the point!

~~~
hga
When you add the lies about "life wouldn't be worth living afterwords" it goes
from e.g. being a potential call for action to get prepared into "Better Red
Than Dead" propaganda.

~~~
cbd1984
Actually, the "Life wouldn't be worth living afterwords" was more associated
with the anti-war nuclear disarmament group.

The people who wanted us to be prepared to strike were the ones who thought
war would be survivable and the conditions afterwords tolerable, at least for
some substantial chunk of the population.

Maybe that's all just my perception.

~~~
hga
Nope, not just all your perception (although the "prepared to strike" ones
were split between the "and also protect the population" types, and starting
with JFK and Robert Strange McNamara, the truly MAD ones (Mutual Assured
Destruction, which to take a riff from _Doctor Strangelove_ , would have
worked a lot better if the Soviets accepted it, instead of correctly thinking
it was _profoundly_ immoral)).

The question here, is what side do you think the "Inspired _Nineteen Eighty
Four_!" BBC was on?

------
nakedrobot2
I think the one absolutely inarguable factor would be intelligence. Humans,
through better health, nutrition, and education, have become on the whole
vastly more intelligent and educated, and thus have more choices than
"breaking bones" to resolve disagreements.

~~~
cbd1984
And the decline of child abuse: The most seriously abusive punishments people
thought nothing of a few centuries ago are seriously out of favor today, which
leads to children who weren't raised to think the bigger and stronger
inherently have the right to hurt them, and therefore don't think that once
they're bigger and stronger they have the right to hurt others.

------
bsbechtel
>>The Better Angels of Our Nature explains some ideas that I think should be
widely understood, like the idea that the basis for morality – and the
continued decline of violence – lies in empathy, strengthened by rules, codes
and laws.

This statement contradicts itself. Laws, at the end of the day, can only be
enforced by the threat of eventual violence. You can't force someone to be
empathetic or moral, they need to choose to be that way through their own
understanding of the world, their place in it, and what they view as right and
wrong.

~~~
rjaco31
I'd say it's your comment that is somehow contradictory. Most people are law-
abiding citizens not because they fear the threat of eventual violence, but
because of their moral & empathy. Laws are just a framework around it to
negate deviations from this stable state, but it's usually not the amount of
violence you can unleash that will really convince people to follow laws they
don't perceive as legitimate.

~~~
bsbechtel
So you're saying that 1) laws aren't necessary for moral/empathetic people
(the vast majority of citizens), and 2) for those who aren't moral/empathetic
(those who deviate from this stable state), the laws don't work anyways?

~~~
rjaco31
I'm saying that it's not laws that are making the majority of citizens behave
correctly, and the law enforcement mitigates the effect of those who don't.

~~~
neolefty
I just had a radical thought (it seems radical to me anyway) -- many of the
people I meet not only don't chafe at the laws, they even see them as limiting
morality. They wish they enforced a better society. These people aren't
activists for the most part -- they don't agitate for change -- but they would
support it if it came along.

For example, they would support laws and initiatives that increase spending on
education, spread wealth more fairly, allow freer mixing among countries, put
stricter limits on violence & environmental degradation.

These are all things that would carry us further down the path that Pinker has
observed that we are already following.

However, it's not all that radical in light of the thesis of "Better Angels"
\-- it must be part of what is propelling the human race in that direction. Do
we have an instinct to want things to be better or something?

It creates social pressure for society to improve.

------
lostlogin
"A History of Violence" was the title of a long article (book?) I read by
Pinker online sometime ago. I can't find the site anymore, just reviews of a
book by the same name. It's worth a read.
[http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html)

------
james1071
It might be that one factor is the decline in importance of manual labour.

Guys who are proud of their physical strength, which also gives them status
and respect, may be more likely to resolve their differences through violence.

------
gizmo
Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature has been pretty thoroughly debunked here:

[http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-
for-...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-
imperial-violence/32066)

~~~
chroma
It's hard to take that article seriously when it's surrounded by anti-vaccine
stuff[1] and various conspiracy theories[2][3][4].

I tried reading the actual content, but the unnecessary verbiage and hostility
forced me to skim it. The counterarguments I did read are mostly FUD. For
example: How can we know that people in prehistoric tribes were likely to die
from violence? Well, there's an entire field of forensic anthropology that's
up to the task. Pinker's just citing the experts.

The claim that Pinker misconstrued numbers particularly annoyed me. If we want
to compare violence across societies, we need to compare homicide rates, not
the absolute numbers. Pinker rightly acknowledges this, but the authors of
this article claim only absolute numbers matter.

And throughout the piece, the authors try to push their own agenda. Something
about modern society corrupting humankind. It quickly grows tiresome to read.

I'm sure there's a decent critique of Pinker's book somewhere, but your link
isn't it.

1\. [http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-australias-vaccine-
mafia...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-australias-vaccine-mafia-
desperately-trying-to-silence-dr-sherri-tenpenny-a-brilliant-scientific-
researcher/5424417)

2\. [http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-walls-are-crumbling-down-
ar...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-walls-are-crumbling-down-around-the-
official-911-story-why/5394984)

3\. [http://www.globalresearch.ca/just-as-isil-gets-exposed-
as-a-...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/just-as-isil-gets-exposed-as-a-fake-us-
enemy-a-wag-the-dog-terrorist-attack-in-paris/5423523)

4\. [http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-killings-terrorism-or-
fal...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-killings-terrorism-or-false-
flag/5423473)

~~~
wanderingstan
I second this.

Whenever this book comes up there are comments about it being debunked and
Pinker cherry-picking sources, but I have yet to find a serious scholarly
critique.

I would seriously love to read a view from, say, a professional historian as
to pinker's methods.

If anyone knows a good non-wingnut counterpoint please tell.

~~~
BasLeijdekkers
The wikipedia article[1] of the book contains several quotes with references
to negative criticism that look fairly credible to me.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature#Negative)

~~~
wanderingstan
Thanks for this. The article has grown since I last checked dome years ago.
The quote about non-combatant deaths struck me as particularly interesting. I
look forward to reading further on the subject.

