BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE - STEVEN PINKER

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Allow me to coin a new phrase for a phenomena I encounter not infrequently: The Napoleon Dynamite Predicament. Basically, it occurs when there is a new, popular object (book, movie, TV show, Broadway Musical) that, as soon as I hear about it, I’m sure is not for me. After a trailer, or a 15 second explanation, I’m totally convinced I will hate this thing and loose some respect for the people who are insisting on how good it is and how much I’ll like it. Then, after careful avoidance, I do encounter the object and have exactly the experience I thought I’d have, namely, I hate it. Then people don’t think you gave it a fair chance since you had a bad attitude going in and you’re mad at them for insisting you engage with something you know you’ll dislike. It’s a whole cycle and the reason I won’t watch Hamilton. Anyway, that brings us to BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, a book I remember being very popular when it came out a few years ago. I heard about the premise, who wrote it, and who was effusively praising it and I filled it right under, “not for me.” However, fate has intervened. One of the positives of this nightmare quarantine season is that I’m much more in touch with some buddies of mine from High School who I now Zoom every other week or so. Recently, one of them was espousing a lot of ideology I consider crypto-Western chauvinist, borderline racist and historically ill-informed. We discussed a few of these and his love of BAooN kept coming up and was, to my eyes anyway, clearly the source of this thinking. I decided to read it so we could discuss it and I could try to get my friend into some smarter shit. I got teased at 2 used bookstores trying to buy this thing, which, now, having read it, is totally understandable. I’m sure you’ve heard of the premise of this book, violence is down, the world is better now than ever, but it turned out I had a few misunderstandings about what the book is about. I thought it was about how much more violence there was in early human history and how, since the end of WWII, there’s been a huge decline in violence around the world. Well, it turns out that he doesn’t spend very long on the early history stuff and he claims violence has been falling, rapidly and steadily, since the mid 18th century, a date he’s chosen since he credits the Enlightenment with these developments. I’m pretty into early human history so I was pretty excited to engage with a provocative thesis but Pinker finks out. By “violence” he means “murder” and by “early history” he means these 20 studies of contemporary Hunter/Gatherer tribes. He extrapolated a murder-rate from these studies and, lo and behold, they’re higher than the modern West. Case closed. This highlights the main problem with the book, he never defines anything. He never says what “violence” is and when he needs to place it on the chart, he replaces violence with a stat for murder and handwaves away any objections by saying that Murder is correlated with other forms of violent crime. Obviously, this misses the whole picture. Pinker almost realizes this himself when he, briefly, talks about slavery and how it “often” involved violence. That’s a very silly idea, the entire arrangement is violent. The slave is under violent control every minute they are a slave, not just when/if they’re murdered by their master. Same with being a colony (as you can probably guess, there’s a lot of colonialism apologia in this) or minority member of an aparthied society (which is how he can claim that South Africa underwent a period of “decivilization”in the early 90s. If you’re wondering, of course he doesn’t define “civilization”), or any subaltern group, Pinker doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity to investigate what that would be like and how “violence” forms these relationships. To him, violence is murder, and only murders that are captured in statistics so something like literal continents of genocide don’t factor in. The war stuff is equally silly. He defines war in a way to say there were only 4 after WWII since it only counts if two major powers are fighting each other and it also doesn’t count if they use proxies. Certainly he’s “right” by this metric but it is mostly about how the nature of war has changed, not that there is less of it. Maybe there is, but he certainly doesn’t prove it in this book. The whole paints a very wrong picture of world history where everybody everywhere is in a state of Hobbesian chaos until some time in the middle 18th century when wise Europeans invent the Enlightenment. Slowly, through the power of the ideas and their rationality alone, the world has pacified and despite a blip in the early/mid part of the 20th century, this mindset has permeated the world and placed us on a “rational elevator” to greater peace and prosperity. Silly whig history nonsense. There’s a bizarre but predictable, I suppose, subplot wherein Pinker tries to prove that Marxism is not only not an Enlightenment project and is responsible for most 20th century genocides, it’s also, at least in part, behind anti-communist purges, like in, say, Indonesia. This is coupled with long sections about how “Market Pricing” is the highest level of moral and logical thinking. Amazing. I wrote 13 pages in response to this, so if anyone who is reading this (no one reads this) thinks this is a smart and good book full of fascinating ideas, please reach out to me to chat before you embarrass yourself. I’ll be nice, I swear. I’ll leave you with an image that stayed with me the whole time I read this. Pinker, like so many of our fake-smart quasi-scientist pseudo-celebrities, was caught up in the whole Epstein thing. He had many dinners with the man (who he, in a cowardly manner, denounced only afterwards) and actually helped Dershowitz (leveraging his status as a Harvard Prof) get Epstein off in his original 2008 trial. There is some ambiguity as to exactly how connected Pinker was but I couldn’t help but imagine him, on a plane headed to Little St. James, sitting next to an underage sex slave. She’s looking out the window, she's scared but he can’t tell. He’s breathlessly telling her how much better the world is now. “Violence is down! People are so much smarter and more rational than they were. Can you imagine how’d they’d’ve treated you a few centuries ago? My god, what a time to be alive.” He babbles jubilantly as she stares out the window while the plane begins to descend. 1 better angel.