(Viking, $40)
It’s a common perception that our species is today “more brutal and more bloodthirsty than at any other point in history,” said Leon Neyfakh in The Boston Globe. But what if the opposite were true? In his superbly argued new book, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker lays out the counterintuitive claim that we humans are actually less likely to kill one another than we’ve ever been. Combing through 5,000 years of evidence, from archaeologists’ studies of ancient grave sites to contemporary law-enforcement statistics, Pinker charts a slow but sure decline in violence going back to Neolithic times. In the early stages of the 21st century, he concludes, our “better angels” are actually besting our inner demons.
Pinker’s theory seems to hit a snag when his chronology reaches the 20th century, said James Q. Wilson in The Wall Street Journal. After all, the two world wars and other mass killings took 130 million lives. But to Pinker, what matters is the number killed relative to the era’s total population. The Mongol conquests of the 1300s killed some 40 million—a number that is equivalent to 278 million today. As for why we might have become less violence-prone, Pinker cites a long “civilizing process” dating from when people began living in large groups. As communities grew, people came to accept codes governing everything from table manners to moral conduct, then sanctioned states to enforce the most significant rules. As these systems became more refined, so did we.
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Central to our kinder, gentler natures is our capacity to reason, said Peter Singer in The New York Times. Pinker strongly credits the Enlightenment with shaping the principles that have brought us to our long peace. “Reason does, Pinker holds, point to a particular kind of morality,” one rooted in the understanding that “we live in a world in which others can make a difference to whether we live well or die miserably”: We want others to treat us well, and we agree that in exchange we will not treat them badly. Though an optimist, Pinker isn’t so naïve as to declare our capacity for cruelty defeated. Still, this is a “supremely important book,” one that at its best can help shape policy, or at the very least, may help us appreciate that we’re perhaps not as bad as we think we are
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”