Book of the week: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

(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