by Steven Pinker
Reflections of a Believing Reader
I was expecting The Better Angels of our Nature to be an uplifting exploration of the impact of human goodness and even faith on the decline of violence throughout history. Instead, I found that it was a rigorous, academic, secular treatise that impressed me with its intellectual breadth, challenged me religiously, and made me examine my own reactions to the author’s approach. Although Pinker’s approach is thoroughly secular and sometimes emotionally detached, his central argument is profoundly optimistic: humanity has made real and measurable moral progress.
This book has been on my list for several years. I don’t remember why I added it, but it intrigued me. I was drawn to it because of the core principle of decreasing violence. I’ve read many psychology books in the past few years, and this promised to be one that matched the theme of many others I had read. The title “better angels” suggested to me that it would be an exploration into the innate human qualities that drive down violence.
I was initially surprised at the scientific rigor that Pinker brought to bear in the book. It reads like a very long academic paper. I listened to the audiobook, but it was very deep with lots of numbers, statistics, and rigorous scientific methods. He surveys an enormous amount of historical evidence that points to the downward trends in violence especially in the last 1000 years. He did an excellent job openly discussing when there were causal relationships and when there was only correlation or association in the data. He was willing to qualify his conclusion rather than claim more than the evidence supports.
The core thesis of the book is that violence has trended downward in both interpersonal violence and collective violence. He shows drops in murder rates and violent crime, decreases in rape and sexual violence, decreases in abuse and exploitation of vulnerable people, and even improvements in the way we treat animals. He also shows how the frequency and severity of wars have generally trended downward (with major outliers of the World Wars). The decline in collective violence includes declines in wars between nations, civil wars, genocides, and other state-sponsored violence. He specifically references the Long Peace (after the World Wars) and the New Peace (after the end of the Cold War).
Pinker argues that there are several core reasons for the decline in violence. The first is the growth of the “Leviathan”: a state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the power to restrain violence among its citizens. The second is “gentle commerce,” or capitalism, which connects people through the exchange of goods, services, and information and gives them reasons to cooperate. The “feminization” process includes both the increasing status and influence of women and a broader shift toward a less aggressive society. Cosmopolitanism, encouraged by literacy, travel, education, journalism, and mass communication, exposes people to lives and perspectives beyond their immediate communities. Finally, Pinker describes an “escalator of reason”: the consistent application of reason, the recognition of contradictions in how we value different lives, and the gradual expansion of the circle of people whose interests matter to us.
My belief in God is not just cultural or theoretical. It is one of the central convictions of my life, grounded in experiences that I regard as real evidence of His existence and involvement in my life. As a faithful Latter-day Saint, the most difficult portion of the book for me was Pinker’s discussion of the Bible.
Pinker views the Bible, especially the Old Testament, from the perspective of a secular historian. He is not primarily offering a sustained attack on Christianity or on Jesus Christ. But he treats the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as historical evidence of how normal and acceptable violence was in the ancient world. He bluntly calls attention to passages in which God appears to sanction or command violence.
This was particularly uncomfortable for me as I could not simply dismiss his description. Whatever conclusions one draws from it, the Old Testament is profoundly violent. War, execution, conquest, revenge, and divinely sanctioned destruction appear throughout its pages. Hearing Pinker’s perspective on this violence was difficult for me as I tried to reconcile his views with my knowledge of a loving God.
I found myself having to question my own defensiveness about my faith. I found myself asking questions like “Why does this description bother me?” “Is the argument unfair, or just new and foreign to me?” “How do I listen to criticism and intellectually engage without surrendering what I know to be true?” This book made me take a pretty big “humble pill” and try to see things from a very different perspective.
This book was not the “devotional” read that I expected it to be, nor was it a defense of religion. Pinker is intellectually honest in his discussion of the mixed role of religion in the history of violence. Religion has not always been peaceful and has often been quite violent. Despite this, I found the book to be intellectually enlarging, mentally stimulating, and historically informative. It was a challenge to my somewhat simplistic view of humanity’s past and an opportunity to examine my assumptions and emotional reactions. This book is valuable without being comforting and challenging without being destructive.
I would recommend this book for those who are looking for data-heavy intellectual history or are interested in psychology, sociology, or political history. Come to this book willing to engage in a secular framework and ready to have your assumptions challenged.
I didn’t finish The Better Angels of Our Nature with all its arguments reconciled to my faith. But I did finish it with a deeper and more honest sense of history and a greater awareness of the violence that has been in our past. I also came away with a deeper sense of the very positive changes that our species has made in decreasing violence! The progress we have made is staggering.
I continue to believe that religion has a role to play in the continuing decrease of violence. I hope my own faith will help me become part of that influence.
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