Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

The Better Angels of Our Nature is sweeping, is total, and definitive. To understand why this book is great, one must understand that most books are separate. There are philosophy books, there are history books, and there are psychology books, and most of us grope along chains of these books to come to some kind of understanding of human nature. Yet, it is only by the trained and analytical eye, as well as a knack for spotting poetry, that a true work about human nature can come to exist.

I remember when I read "Why We Love" by Helen Fisher. She was an anthropologist explaining her studies on love. Yet, she was more than just an anthropologist, but a sociologist, and a psychologist, and a neurologist and an evolutionary biologist. She provided evidence from brain studies, the studies of fellow mammals, and psychologist- all wound together by global, cultural references- and made a case for romantic love as an integral, biological, genetic part of human nature.

And Pinker has done the same thing for Goodness and Badness. He marshals the evidence in such a wide and deep way- from the number of deaths in war, to which corner of the frontal lobe is lighting up, to how the phrase "strength of will" implies a cultural and literal component to self-control. His evidence is far and wide, and it has to be- his thesis is that violence is going down for a plethora of intermixing and single-off reasons. And he shows this with a war chest of data, statistics, and experimental studies.

As I read the tomb, I would sometimes go and look for criticisms of the book. Most of the criticisms were small, levied at a single tidbit here or there. But could it destroy the thesis in a death by a thousand papercuts? No. Those who criticize the book either look at weird data that just supports the thesis (one study tried to show that states are fighting less because they are farther away instead of being monolithic violent empires... which was the point) or they complain that it uses data at all, while ignoring the plight of the poor. This is the "Don't celebrate just yet!" party and the "Contrarian" party.