“The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” by Steven Pinker

This book is an enormous defense of the thesis that we live in the most peaceful times of world history. Pinker defends this eloquently, using a mixture of statistics, sociology, psychology, and history. Nearly every page has a graph on it of some measure of violence, or a related statistic. Of course they’re all sufficiently explained and a good number are even enlarged on the following pages to show more detail. Numbers don’t explain all of history though, so every chapter also has a section dedicated to historical narrative to make sense of the data and show what was going on within people’s heads at the time.

To merely say that Pinker has done his research doesn’t quite do it justice. Pinker has analyzed a vast amount of data and synthesized it together in a way that makes logical sense. He has also identified several themes and recurring ideas throughout history affecting violence, and why they have not always prevailed. The amount of thought put into this book is incredible!

Having said that, this was published in 2011. I wish I could see how Pinker would react to events of the present day. For example, in the section dedicated to terrorism, Pinker mainly discusses Al Qaeda and why they have failed. ISIS hasn’t reared its ugly head yet and shown that it has figured out how to successfully recruit and brainwash people. It has managed what Al Qaeda could not. Then there’s the Trump presidency. Hate crimes have been increasing in frequency since the election, and mass shootings have been getting deadlier and deadlier. I can’t help but wonder how he would analyze these occurrences and make sense of them.

If I had to guess, I’d say that they at least follow most of Pinker’s ideas about what drives violence down. Trade and cooperation limit violence between countries because they benefit from each other, and Trump clearly is not willing to cooperate with anyone. His witch hunts about fake journalism and immigrants and whatever have been sowing mistrust among his citizens and causing rifts that then lead to violence. His brags about his violence towards women have led to white fuckboys feeling empowered to physically assault women and minorities.

But does this mean that violence is still declining? I think so. I haven’t thoroughly analyzed the statistics, but this one year doesn’t cancel out the hundreds of decline. And the fact that many people are now speaking out against violence and calling out perpetrators of sexual assault I think indicates this.

The fact is that when you look at the whole of human history, things have gotten much better. We no longer witness torture and hangings every day, or live in fear of enemy raids. That doesn’t mean that we cannot improve further, far from it, but it is good to have a little perspective when discussing our current climate.