The Inner Demons of Pinker’s Better Angels
There’s a lot that’s wrong with this popular book
The name Steven Pinker is well known by nearly anyone who has even a passing interest in history, culture, or sociological dynamics. His blockbuster book, The Better Angels of Our Nature came out in 2011 and seemed to hit a sweet spot in the popular imagination by claiming that we are living in the least violent time in human history. The book was controversial right from the start, drawing a lot of praise but also a fair amount of condemnation, much of that from experts in the subject matter areas that Pinker often opined about.
You see, Steven Pinker is a psychologist, he’s not a historian, sociologist, or anthropologist. He’s a guy who fell in love with the idea that The Enlightenment changed the world for the better, and he set out to provide evidence that this was indeed the case. Unfortunately, there are many glaring issues with the way he set about “proving” his premise.
Are warfare and murder truly the best metric for measuring violence in any given society? What about all the other types of non-lethal violence that routinely have taken place in the past few hundred years, including the ones going on today? Pinker’s thesis is that the past was a Hobbesian hell (it wasn’t) and that The Enlightenment brought ever-increasing…
