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Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)

Summary:

Chapter 8 concerns five forces that drive violence: Predation, Dominance, Revenge, Sadism, and Ideology. Humans are not innately aggressive, except in certain circumstances that trigger violence. So a dark side does exist (the human mind is not a blank slate, as Pinker established in an earlier book), but it’s not an ever-present mounting urge. A Moralization Gap describes how humans, subject to self-serving biases, create competing narratives of perpetrator and victim, depending on point of view, and how perpetrators often feel themselves to be victim; i.e. there’s no such thing as pure evil. For each of the five forces, Pinker identifies what drives them, and social developments in the 20th century have ameliorated them.

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Subtitled “Why Violence Has Declined”
(Viking, Oct. 2011, xxvii + 802pp, including 106pp of notes, references, and index.)

Summaries:

Chapter 6, “The New Peace,” consider three types of organized violence: among groups citing “ancient hatreds,” ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. These too are in decline. The first applies to the world outside the major powers. Genocide arises from stereotyping and Hobbes’ basic trio of motives for conflict: gain, fear, and deterrence. They are often led by Utopian ideologies that figure, for the perfect good, no sacrifice of people is too great: the Bible, Homer, the Puritans, Cromwell, Marx, Hitler. Genocides in the 20th century derived from just three men: Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Terrorism is overblown; actual numbers are quite small. The point is panic, and most terrorist groups fail in their ostensible goals. We’ll never win the “war on terror” anymore than we’ll “rid the world of evil.”

There are four further threats: war with Islam (Muslims missed the Enlightenment somehow); nuclear terrorism (again, less likely than many think); Iran; and climate change.

Chapter 7 describes how violence has been reduced via the various “Rights Revolutions,” which parallel the humanitarian revolution of two centuries earlier. These include civil rights and the decline of lynching and racial pogroms; women’s rights and the decline of rape and battering; children’s rights and the decline of infanticide, spanking, etc.; gay rights and the decriminalization of homosexuality; animal rights and the decline of cruelty to animals. This chapter cites a great many familiar events from the past 50 years, weaving them into cohesive patterns. They show that a moral way of life often requires a rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice, replaced by an ethics of empathy and reason. Progress results in today’s conservatives being more liberal than yesterday’s liberals. What brought them all about? Mobility of ideas and people, and the explosion of book publishing, which debunked ignorance and superstition, and resulted in a sort of intellectual agility that enables people to step outside the parochial constraints of their own birth and station.

Posts on this book: This page with quotes at the bottom; Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5; Post 6; Post 7

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