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Abstract
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In the closing months of 2011, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes.1 Weighing in at over eight hundred closely printed pages, Pinker's book advances a bold, revisionist thesis: despite the relentless deluge of violent, sensationalist stories in the pervasive electronic media of our day, Pinker proposes, violence in the human world, in nearly every form, has in fact declined dramatically. Over the past several thousand years, and particularly since the eighteenth century, homicides, criminal assaults, war casualties, domestic violence, child abuse, animal abuse, capital punishment, lynching, and rape have all been steadily diminishing in frequency.
This might at first seem illogical given that an estimated 160-180 million people were killed as a direct result of war and genocide--consider World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia--but Pinker argues that killing as a per capita estimate was much higher in previous centuries. Indeed, it appears to have been higher the further one goes back in time, so that nonstate societies in earlier centuries had death rates of anywhere between 0 and 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent, while the total number of overall deaths in the twentieth century represents an overall death rate of only 3 percent. To buttress this original argument, the author assembled countless statistical "data sets" and over a hundred charts and graphs.
With a thesis so novel and counterintuitive, presented in a tone of such self-assurance, Pinker's book attracted a great deal of attention upon its appearance several years ago. In the United States and United Kingdom, the initial coverage included lengthy discussions in venues such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, the American Scholar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator, Slate, the Huffington Post, Scientific American, Foreign Policy, and the Daily Telegraph. A number of publications ran follow-up articles. The current Wikipedia entry for Pinker's tome, which canvasses both praise for and criticism of the book, quotes from 30 reviews.2 In these early assessments, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, scientists, foreign policy experts, philosophers, and popular science writers, as well as public intellectuals, all had their say. Curiously, very few academic historians were included in this first wave of critical reviewers...
Language: en |