One just rarely meets a book that can fulfill all of your reading-needs at the same time. This book by Steven Pinker is one of them.
I love books that can give brand new insights even to the things that I already know. This book is choke full of brand new insights into very familiar things.
I love information and facts and this book is filled to the brim with new information and facts.
I love writers who have close personal relationship with the information that they do present. Steve Pinker has a very passionate relationship with his data.
I love books that contain Big History, or books that look at the big and to the naked eye often quite invisible big trends that really change our societies and this book is Big History at its best.
I also love writers who use language to convey ideas and not to show off their craftsmanship or knowledge of tall words. Steven Pinker is one of those writers who just wants his reader to understand what he is writing. I just love this rare trait when I meet it in writers.
This is book with its 800 pages is without doubt Steven Pinker's opus magnum. (Thus far, at least...) It draws together many threads from his earlier works. It happens to an extent that a recent reading of his other works makes some parts seem even too familiar.
However, they are necessary parts of the whole, as this book forms a single argument and this argument is for many difficult to accept as it runs against all conventional wisdom. We are bombarded by the media hour after hour, day after day, year after year with images of violence and destruction. Steven Pinker really needs to march all available forces of science to counter this immense trend.
Steve Pinker argues basically for 800 pages that violence in the world has been diminishing for a long time. He uses dozens and dozens of well-documented and well-researched studies to prove his point. If fact, this book is a wonderful tour to the literature that covers all aspects of human aggression.
This book is truly cross-scientific. The boundaries of scientific disciplines are not of importance for Steven Pinker when he is in search for truth. Neurology, psychology, social psychology, sociology are all covered.
Steven Pinker does not limit himself to retelling of the findings of others, but he has the courage to interpret them against a bigger picture. All good science starts with a strong hypothesis. Steve Pinker does show without any doubt that his hypothesis of overall diminishing of violence is not just speculation, but is based on extremely wide and solid set of scientific facts.
I heartily agree with his thesis that an effective and fair rule of law is one of the central factors in diminishing violence. The medieval societies with their honor culture and highly ineffective systems of feudal government just were not at all as safe places for humans as modern democracies, even if their they meted out cruel and brutal punishments indiscriminately.
The main point of course is that the rule of law must be universally accepted in a society and it must be fair and just for it to have an effect on the level of violence. Even the harshest and cruel police-states have failed miserably in achieving similar stages of security as such societies where most members of the society agree on general outlines of government and have the ability to change governments when they fail.
I really think that his central ideas and findings are quite to point, but I beg to differ with him in certain individual findings. For example, I don't just buy it, when he claims that the counter-culture with the overt disrespect for authority and disdain of self-control would have been even the main reason for the rise in violence in the USA from the 60's to 80's.
I think that here the correlations just could go the wrong way, as maybe the rise of a new kind of drug-culture brought about the changes in culture. I think that the very same drug-culture drove millions of people beyond the boundaries of law, where personal violence is all too often the only way to survive.
The turf-wars, drive-by-shootings or random killings were perhaps caused by the physical drug-culture and not the popular culture, which could just have followed the changes in reality a few steps behind.
Overall, Steven Pinker gives much credence to a Civilizing Effect that starts from good table-manners and spreads from the upper classes downwards. I must say that I don't really think that even here the causality could at least partly go the other way round. A rise in living standards just could make people imitate the behavior of the upper classes.
However, what is important, he also very strongly appreciates also the role of humanism that has in my mind been the decisive factor in the process.
I think he forgets to mention how already the early Greek humanists influenced Christians. They in turn had a new kind of attitude towards violence and shedding blood for fun, that was a common pastime in the Roman Empire.
Of course, the Christian totalitarianism did later on lead to burning of witches and heretics. Extremely cruel and bloody criminal punishments were widely used in Christian societies. Hangings were a popular form of public entertainment even in the most pious states.
The philosophers, writers and scientists of the Age Of Enlightenment were carriers of a new kind of humanistic thinking that saw value in every human life. This kind of concepts had been quite foreign before their time.
For me, it is quite odd that Steve Pinker does not use the concept of zeitgeist or the spirit of the time in this marvelous book, even if the changes he is describing in many different phases are just changes in zeitgeist: the way the world was seen was changing.
Another failing in my eyes is his inability to accept the basic fact the thermonuclear weapons themselves in their absolute destructiveness were the reason why we did not have the third world. I think that he tries to tip-toe his way around this problem in a very round-about way.
Of course, accepting that men can develop so fearsome weapons that men cannot use them anymore can sound like accepting these monstrous weapons, but I think that a scientist should be able to face the facts, even if he does not like them.
Humanism was naturally not the only force a plays here. Also the spread of humanistic thinking was aided incredibly by the invention of the printing press and cheap books.
The ensuing rise in the general level of knowledge had its effect, but Steven Pinker believes that the simple ability to be able to look at the minds of other people through novels did much to spread the levels of empathy and sympathy up in a society.
It is of course impossible to give even a rough outline of a book with 800 pages of densely packed information. I can only suggest that you read by yourself. The time used in this book will be well spent, as the reader will have a much clearer picture of very many human developments.
(Originally published in my blog at: [...])
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Chunky great book on the history and development of violence in humanity, although I can see that pinker is not a Christian and disagree on his view on the Bible.
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