> I've read a lot of the discussions regarding Pinker's work in both books (but particularly his position in Better Angels), and I've always found his position to be slightly disconcerting.
I really think that this is one occasion where you should base your opinion on what an author has written rather than on what discussions the author's work has engendered.
> Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time.
No. Pinker makes a specific argument (he does not attempt to make the argument) that contrary to popular opinion the world is not in fact going to hell in a handcart but rather the lot of the average person is improving over time when measuring social factors against times gone by. He takes a number of metrics and plots them over the course of centuries and millennia. What he is _attempting_ to do is convince us.
> Violence is not a first order phenomenon at a social scale - it's presence is predicated upon the existence of other key criteria, largely the existence of conflict within or between societies.
To be honest, I'm not sure that what you're saying makes sense sociologically speaking. And anyway, it's probably neither hear nor there for our purposes if violence is a first-order or second-order phenomenon (whatever that would mean) in the context of social systems. What matters is if we agree that certain types of violence are decent metrics for measuring the human condition over time. We could take suicide, state conflicts, civil unrest, incarceration rates, state torture, severity of punishment, and on and on. And in fact this is what Pinker does. And for practically every form of human-on-human misery you can think of the stats show that violence is decreasing. If you agree that this is a good proxy for the human condition then you then agree that society is getting 'better'.
> Better Angels indicates that violence has gone down, but does not sufficiently set out the basis to indicate that conflict is being better managed over time. If anything, it indicates that conflicts are being 'won' as the winners are increasingly able to ignore the plight of the losers.
? No. It does not indicate, it demonstrates that many many forms of violence have decreased. It does not show that "conflict is being better managed" over time (how would one measure that?) and it certainly does not need to use whatever that as a proxy for its main demonstration. That's your assertion, not Pinker's. It is up to you to convince us of that. (I am not convinced.) And even if you did it does not invalidate Pinker's claims!
> On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. In short, the courts are simply too expensive for normal people to avail themselves of, outside specialty practices like family or traffic issues. The result being that the majority of people do not actually have the ability to enforce their legal rights. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it.
I agree with everything you say here (though you have no stats to back it up I do believe that it would be possible to demonstrate some of your assertions here) but the fact that it is increasingly difficult for the average person to enforce their rights is no counter-argument to the claims in Better Angels. You do realise that Pinker is talking about practices like being hung, drawn and quartered and being burnt at the stake and any number of unimaginable horrors which we no longer do, don't you?
> We can pretend things are getting better but absent thinking about what 'better' means maybe the lid on the boiling pot is just getting heavier faster than the heat is being turned up.
No. To make a claim is not to pretend. Pinker _has_ thought about how you can measure 'better'. The funny thing is, it actually seems like people want the world to be getting worse for some perverse reason. I cannot otherwise explain the ridiculous arguments (including by the likes of Taleb) against Better Angels.