I recently read an interview with one Steven Pinker, whose appealing mixture of optimism and possible delusion sat well with me. Below is a commentary on his latest literary offering.
'In The Better Angels of Our Nature, the celebrated evolutionary psychologist, Harvard professor and bestselling author Steven Pinker argues that we – the human race – are becoming progressively less violent. To the consumer of 24-hour news, steeped in images of conflict and war, that may sound plain wrong. But Pinker supports his case with a wealth of data.
Drawing on the work of the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, Pinker recently concluded that the chance of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors meeting a bloody end was somewhere between 15% and 60%. In the 20th century, which included two world wars and the mass killers Stalin and Hitler, the likelihood of a European or American dying a violent death was less than 1%.
In the book, a series of lists spells out the 'Five Inner Demons' that often cause us to act in evil ways towards each other:
- Predatory or Instrumental Violence
- Dominance
- Revenge
- Sadism
- Ideology
These are countered by the 'Four Better Angels' of human nature:
- Empathy
- Self-Control
- Moral Sense
- Reason
Pinker shows that, with notable exceptions, the long-term trend for murder and violence has been going down since humans first developed agriculture 10,000 years ago. And it has dropped steeply since the Middle Ages. Oxford in the 1300s, he tells us, was 110 times more murderous than it is today.
Nowadays, the notion that life is measurably improving – and there can be no more profound improvement than not being killed or tortured – is about as unfashionable in educated circles as the conviction that western culture is in any sense civilising. However, Pinker challenges several enduring 'truths'. It's not true, he says, that man in primitive societies, being at one with his environment, was less inclined towards violent struggle. Nor was the church-focused village a more peaceful environment than the model that replaced it, the impersonalised cities of the Industrial Revolution. In short, the book is a corrective to the widely held belief that humanity is locked into some sort of moral decline.
Born in Montreal in 1954, Pinker grew up in a middle-class, secular, Jewish household. At the age of 13, he declared himself an atheist and an anarchist, but dropped the anarchism a couple of years later after witnessing the effects of a police strike in Montreal. The strife and chaos he saw apparently changed his perception of human nature. "I was a Rousseauian then." he later recalled. "Now I'm a Hobbesian."
Rousseau believed that modern society corrupted human nature, whereas for Hobbes modern society was a necessary protection from human nature. It's Pinker's contention that without the pacifying influence of a commonly recognised state, we are prone to make life the nasty, brutish and short experience that Hobbes described.
This is the problem with defining human nature: it can seem like a post-facto explanation of social phenomena that are essentially historical accidents. At its most crude, it becomes teleological, ascribing a pattern and an ultimate end to random events. Yet it's also fair to say that a reluctance to suffer and die is part of the human condition and it's only natural that we should seek ways of limiting suffering and death.
It's this vision of our common humanity, what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature", that animates Pinker's latest work.'
Let's hope he's onto something.
