The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012)

gatesnotes.com

62 pointsgmays47 comments

Homicide rates aren't really reliable metrics for violence, at least in the US. Here in Chicago, homicides are down a bit, but shootings are up. That's actually more violence, but the homicide is the only politicized fact. More shootings and less deaths probably have more to do with surgical outcomes than any sort of peaceful nature argument. Kids are getting shot left and right here. Its not getting better.

Humans are basic creatures that engage largely in rational game theory. A south-side kid with no prospects joining a violent gang is 100% rational. Shooting a rival for turf makes perfect sense in that socio-economic system. Under those circumstances violence is the most efficient way to gain resources, solve disputes, and build social capital. 70% of homicides in Chicago are never solved, so you don't need to worry about jail time either.

Pinker's stuff is a bit too idealistic for my tastes. He ignores that humans really just adapt to circumstances. We're only less violent, if we even are, its because circumstances dictate it so. My milquetoast bureaucratic life has no room for violence, but if things drastically changed for me, I'd be the one buying a gun and shooting rival gangbangers. Its just makes sense for me to do so. I wouldn't necessarily be averse to this. I'd try to maximize my life, protect my family, and collect resources that best way I personally can.

Thankfully, my parents immigrated to this country and gave me the luxury of never having to shoot anyone. I'm not a good person. I'm just a person. I can, and often will be, what circumstances demand if need be. I've never been tested like a south side kid. I doubt I'd take more a more moral or peaceful approach under those circumstances. I'm certainly not overly-moral today and I imagine most people aren't either. Are we all wringing our hands over not buying fair trade goods? Do we really care who makes our ipads, computers, etc? Why would I be overly-moral when it comes to violence if I suddenly found myself in certain situations?

Pinker did a TED talk on this book. In the talk he makes a note that the book does not try to explain why, though he has some ideas as to why the numbers are declining.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

> In the talk he makes a note that the book does not try to explain why...

Ummm, the book was published only in 2011. The TED talk is from 2007. Even without seeing the TED talk, one can claim that your observations don't add up.

I looked for the dates because in my reading of The Better Angels of Our Nature, there seems to be plenty and more answering the question of 'why' violence has declined.

You are absolutely right! I watched the talk shortly after reading about the book and somehow got it confused with being part of the promotion tour.

Hmm, if the author is right about "better behavior" over centuries, I wonder how much is due to larger groups, both in terms of raw population and social adaptations?

To draw upon the words of a fictional AI...

> The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

> The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government.

> The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

I finished the book recently, it was quite a long read. I can tell that the author definitely covered a wide variety of possible explanations to the reduction of violence. Was it exhaustive or not, I can't tell.

The most surprising and unsettling for me was the vivid depiction of the levels of violence as they existed in the society (or societies) even relatively recently. I kind of take it for granted that I am fairly physically secure in my everyday life, my chances to die in a war are vanishingly small, and chances to be robbed not that much higher. Makes me grateful that I was not born just a few hundred years ago, and of course that I live in the more developed part of the world.

"my chances to die in a war are vanishingly small"

Worth noting that a lot of us who were around before '89 didn't think this way back then.

They might not have been "vanishingly small" (looks to my right to the Civil Defense Block Mother sign we put up in the late '60s), but I and most of the people I knew rated the chances as "small".

I heard air raid sirens go off in Edinburgh (by accident) in what was probably late '83 and really did get a scare - everyone else round about looked pretty terrified as well.

Interestingly, that might have been at the same time as Able Archer - a coincidence I'm sure and not something we learned about until years after.

[NB Recent accounts suggest that we'd never have got the "4 minute" warning anyway - so had the UK been hit by salvos of Soviet MRBMs and follow up bombers we'd never have known.]

The BBC certainly didn't help our state of minds - I still have the mental scars of watching Threads and the particularly grim QED - A Guide To Armageddon.

Ah! About that I'm not a good person to listen to, for I was born, raised, and have retired to a city that's a hair's breath from the USA's "Tornado Alley", and for that reason we are deadly serious about Civil Defense. So during tornado season, every Monday at 10 am if the weather was good, the sirens would sound for testing. And they of course sound when a funnel cloud was sighted, and they saved a lot of people from death or injury (in my case) the 3rd time in my life when it was for real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado and http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/

That said, surviving nuclear war isn't that difficult. Threads was ludicrous propaganda; if your nation is prepared (UK and US no, Switzerland and Israel yes), or if you're lucky and either aren't in the path of serious fallout or can arrange a shelter ... well, one theme of Threads was correct, medium and longer term survival is the trick. But the portrayed bigger environmental effects as well as cancer rates and the like were flat out lies (this based on reading the Wikipedia summary and my 45 years worth of study of nuclear war survival).

Don't know about that Q.E.D. episode, but it was unrealistic: while the U.K. is like many other nations in being a "one bomb nation", that is, taking out the one central city takes out almost everything and everyone important "at the top" (compare to the US were D.C. is nothing but government, however much they like to pretend it's e.g. a cultural center :-), London would get a nice saturation spread of more efficient sub-megaton warheads :-(.

If your government had really cared, and could afford it (that's the trick, I suppose, post-WWII and serious socialism), it could have been arranged that you'd get that 4 minutes warning and have a blast shelter to get into. By the same token, the US could have spent 1/3rds of a year's Cold War "defense" budget and outfitted enough shelter spaces for every resident, including a year's worth of food.

But don't worry, sooner or later nuclear weapons will again be used in anger :-(, and a lot more people and nations will get serious about surviving them. If you want be prepared today, take a gander at Nuclear War Survival Skills, the book on expedient nuclear war survival: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_Survival_Skills

(Note you need the real, green cover book to get the correct scale diagrams to make a Kearny Fallout Meter, not to mention the need for a paper copy if the lights go out/EMP messes things up, but the free on-line versions will get you started.)

"Threads was ludicrous propaganda"

Actually, Threads was actually fairly optimistic about the likely scale of a Soviet attack on the UK:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg

Also Threads was attempting to show the actual state of preparation of the UK for nuclear war - so saying that a nuclear war is easy to survive if you are prepared is a bit silly as the UK (and the US) really weren't that prepared - that was the point!

When you add the lies about "life wouldn't be worth living afterwords" it goes from e.g. being a potential call for action to get prepared into "Better Red Than Dead" propaganda.

Actually, the "Life wouldn't be worth living afterwords" was more associated with the anti-war nuclear disarmament group.

The people who wanted us to be prepared to strike were the ones who thought war would be survivable and the conditions afterwords tolerable, at least for some substantial chunk of the population.

Maybe that's all just my perception.

Nope, not just all your perception (although the "prepared to strike" ones were split between the "and also protect the population" types, and starting with JFK and Robert Strange McNamara, the truly MAD ones (Mutual Assured Destruction, which to take a riff from Doctor Strangelove, would have worked a lot better if the Soviets accepted it, instead of correctly thinking it was profoundly immoral)).

The question here, is what side do you think the "Inspired Nineteen Eighty Four!" BBC was on?

It was realistic about the initial attacks and aftermath. But the idea that a nuclear winter would send the UK back to the middle ages is ridiculous.

Hell, someone would at least take it over for the arable land.

I agree that the long term effects based on nuclear winter etc. are arguable. But the whole point was that an advanced technological society depends on the connections between people - and most people in the UK would have died in the initial attack or in the immediate aftermath due to simple things like starvation.

Edit: "the idea that a nuclear winter would send the UK back to the middle ages is ridiculous."

A early, probably 1960s, review by the UK government (who actually had plenty experience of the impact of bombing) concluded that the UK would cease to function as a society if we were attacked by three H-bombs - indeed our ambassador to Moscow apparently had a debate with a tipsy Khrushchev on the point....

"the long term effects based on nuclear winter etc. are arguable"

Not really at this point, e.g. the TAPPS study has been thoroughly debunked (details on request), LLNL 3D modeling says at worst a "nuclear fall", which I note would be much on the order of or less severe than many historical volcanic events (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer). All the way down to the life histories of those exposed to radiation by Hiroshima and Nagasaki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...

As for the latter point, would not e.g. the US, reduced to about a Civil War level of population etc., trade tasty technological things, and/or food with the U.K. and any other county easily accessed by ship? The death rate would certainly be a lot higher in the crowded and food importing U.K., but Threads sounds way too dystopic. I'm going by the Wikipedia summary, but it didn't sound like it had even Bronze Age levels of trade with other countries.

One neat thing I've read as of late is that the tin for all the bronze used in the western half or more of the Mediterranean came from Britain. Apparently the Iron Age happened in part because of apparent disruption of that trade, iron weapons of that era weren't as good as the bronze state of the art, but they were cheaper. So e.g. a Roman solider would have an iron sword while his centurion and higher were more likely to have bronze.

I think the one absolutely inarguable factor would be intelligence. Humans, through better health, nutrition, and education, have become on the whole vastly more intelligent and educated, and thus have more choices than "breaking bones" to resolve disagreements.

And the decline of child abuse: The most seriously abusive punishments people thought nothing of a few centuries ago are seriously out of favor today, which leads to children who weren't raised to think the bigger and stronger inherently have the right to hurt them, and therefore don't think that once they're bigger and stronger they have the right to hurt others.

>>The Better Angels of Our Nature explains some ideas that I think should be widely understood, like the idea that the basis for morality – and the continued decline of violence – lies in empathy, strengthened by rules, codes and laws.

This statement contradicts itself. Laws, at the end of the day, can only be enforced by the threat of eventual violence. You can't force someone to be empathetic or moral, they need to choose to be that way through their own understanding of the world, their place in it, and what they view as right and wrong.

I'd say it's your comment that is somehow contradictory. Most people are law-abiding citizens not because they fear the threat of eventual violence, but because of their moral & empathy. Laws are just a framework around it to negate deviations from this stable state, but it's usually not the amount of violence you can unleash that will really convince people to follow laws they don't perceive as legitimate.

So you're saying that 1) laws aren't necessary for moral/empathetic people (the vast majority of citizens), and 2) for those who aren't moral/empathetic (those who deviate from this stable state), the laws don't work anyways?

I'd say that laws are the framework and moral/empathic people follow them just because they're there. They serve as Schelling points and make it easier for everyone to predict the behaviour of everyone else. People like having constraints and tend to get lost without them. I doubt most law-abiding citizen think consciously about the threat of violence; it's just there to increase the costs of defecting.

I'm saying that it's not laws that are making the majority of citizens behave correctly, and the law enforcement mitigates the effect of those who don't.

I just had a radical thought (it seems radical to me anyway) -- many of the people I meet not only don't chafe at the laws, they even see them as limiting morality. They wish they enforced a better society. These people aren't activists for the most part -- they don't agitate for change -- but they would support it if it came along.

For example, they would support laws and initiatives that increase spending on education, spread wealth more fairly, allow freer mixing among countries, put stricter limits on violence & environmental degradation.

These are all things that would carry us further down the path that Pinker has observed that we are already following.

However, it's not all that radical in light of the thesis of "Better Angels" -- it must be part of what is propelling the human race in that direction. Do we have an instinct to want things to be better or something?

It creates social pressure for society to improve.

No. You're missing out a whole third group, the people who aren't very moral/empathetic but who do fear reprisals, for whom laws are effective enough to prevent seriously antisocial behavior.

They're the petty thieves of the world, the ones who don't see the problem in taking the last two of something even when others have had none, but who wouldn't punch someone because they're afraid of getting arrested and sent to jail. Think Larry Ellison.

Besides, for the people who don't care, we have prisons. The laws might not work for them but the walls do.

You can't force them, but you can definitively "nudge" them, creating the conditions to change the values in a certain direction. For example, assuming that daily interaction increases empathy with people that are foreign to you, a law that promotes the development of mixed neighbors (be it mixing ethnicities, income levels, number of children, etc) might increase that empathy without resorting to any violence.

Not all laws are enforced by the police and courts.

People learn to be empathetic and moral via cultural norms. Laws create cultural norms.

A law forces me to behave, yes, but it also makes everyone else behave, and that makes a _completely_ different world for me. One where I can trust people in general to, e.g., not murder me.

Pinker frequently points back to Hobbes' Leviathan as a turning point in understanding violence and human societies - that man's "state of nature" is brutish and violent and that a strong "leviathan" government is central to taming the brutish impulses. There's some irony there, but it's no coincidence that the great civilizations of history are by and large marked by sophisticated, powerful governments.

Lately, the U.S. Government's 'state of nature' has been perpetual war. I can't account for every great civilization of history, but I know a majority collapsed due to spreading themselves too thin, trying to control additional territory using 'brutish and violent' tactics to gain additional power. I've read parts of Leviathan, and keep in mind his writing is merely 17th century observations of the world from a man who grew up in a bourgeois society in England. There is a very good chance his observations of men in their 'state of nature' are his observations of oppressed commoners in England during this time...those who grew up on the fringes of society and had to steal and resort to violence out of desperation to survive.

"A History of Violence" was the title of a long article (book?) I read by Pinker online sometime ago. I can't find the site anymore, just reviews of a book by the same name. It's worth a read. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

It might be that one factor is the decline in importance of manual labour.

Guys who are proud of their physical strength, which also gives them status and respect, may be more likely to resolve their differences through violence.

Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature has been pretty thoroughly debunked here:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-...

It's hard to take that article seriously when it's surrounded by anti-vaccine stuff[1] and various conspiracy theories[2][3][4].

I tried reading the actual content, but the unnecessary verbiage and hostility forced me to skim it. The counterarguments I did read are mostly FUD. For example: How can we know that people in prehistoric tribes were likely to die from violence? Well, there's an entire field of forensic anthropology that's up to the task. Pinker's just citing the experts.

The claim that Pinker misconstrued numbers particularly annoyed me. If we want to compare violence across societies, we need to compare homicide rates, not the absolute numbers. Pinker rightly acknowledges this, but the authors of this article claim only absolute numbers matter.

And throughout the piece, the authors try to push their own agenda. Something about modern society corrupting humankind. It quickly grows tiresome to read.

I'm sure there's a decent critique of Pinker's book somewhere, but your link isn't it.

1. http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-australias-vaccine-mafia...

2. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-walls-are-crumbling-down-ar...

3. http://www.globalresearch.ca/just-as-isil-gets-exposed-as-a-...

4. http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-killings-terrorism-or-fal...

I second this.

Whenever this book comes up there are comments about it being debunked and Pinker cherry-picking sources, but I have yet to find a serious scholarly critique.

I would seriously love to read a view from, say, a professional historian as to pinker's methods.

If anyone knows a good non-wingnut counterpoint please tell.

The wikipedia article[1] of the book contains several quotes with references to negative criticism that look fairly credible to me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature...

Thanks for this. The article has grown since I last checked dome years ago. The quote about non-combatant deaths struck me as particularly interesting. I look forward to reading further on the subject.

Edit: Disregard, it seems as though the book does take a scientific approach.

From the comments I am reading here I am gathering that Pinker's work is exploratory and not scientific (keep in mind that I have not read it myself). If that is the case then there are no grounds for a counterpoint.

Exploratory works can be used as a framework on which to build points and counterpoints, but attempting to disprove them is a fundamental error.

All it comes down to is this default argumentative state that the internet seems to have.

I've read the book and would not call it exploratory at all--it is lengthy and exhaustive. I found myself skimming over additional supporting data in many cases.

I'm most interested in accusations that he cherry-picked his sources or data, and I haven't seen any of these backed up. (Other than rambling rants like the above "criticism" which says that adjusting for world population is "massaging the numbers".)

Edit: typos

That article is a serious scholarly critique, did you read it?

The article was originally published elsewhere (the original is linked), it has no relation to any other articles on that site.

I don't see any unnecessary verbiage, certainly none that would interfere with reading the article. Not having even read the article makes your handwavey dismissal of the it all the more specious.

The authors are not affiliated with the site, the website just hosts a mirror of the text. The anti-vac nonsense is nonsense, no argument there.

The authors have a perspective that's much different from Pinker's, but it's no more ideological. Much of the critique is about the framing and assumptions made by Pinker -- which they strongly disagree with -- not so much about the facts themselves. You can create any kind of narrative by "citing the experts", but of course not every narrative is equally valid.

It's not true that the authors claim modern society is corrupting mankind. However, they are contemptuous of much of western foreign policy and they don't hide that. If you don't like their writing style that's fine, but that doesn't address the substance of the arguments.

It's also not true that the authors claim only the absolute numbers matter, and relative homicide rates do not. But they do object to treating the death toll of WW2 relative to the world population because they think the horror of WW2 doesn't logically depend on de population of india and china (and for the other reasons given in the article).

Thanks for highlighting this, it was an interesting read if a little long. For those without much time probably the most interesting part is "Massaging the Numbers: Pinker’s Non-Proofs of Long-Term Violence Reduction".

This great article debunks a lot, but also acknowledges some important underlying points:

"Pinker has no serious evidence for ..., even though his sources’ evidence for the decline in homicide rates in European countries over many centuries is solid."

And some points in the article are also highly questionable:

"Perhaps most important, the absolute numbers of people who die because of armed conflicts are a first-order measure of the true human cost of violence, and we should never permit the moral gravity of this loss and suffering to be relativized by the juggling of numbers until they all match the same global population in any given year."

This would mean that we can never compare the past with the present...

Is murder only half as bad today compared to 100 years ago because now a murder only gets rid of 1/7billionth of the world population? In one sense, yes. In another sense, no, obviously not. Pointing out that this is dubious moral arithmetic is in my opinion completely fair, and the entire thesis of the decline of violence rests on the treatment of violence in this sense.

A lot of the murder decline over the last 60 years is fake. Improved trauma care means people don't die from wounds that were lethal not long ago. The violent assault rate has not actually gone down that much.

If that is true WHY is there such a serious decline from 1980s and early 1990s to today in the States?

Also why is there tremendous amount of police killings in the 1920s-1930s is so far above from what they were in the 1950s, 2000s+?

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