This is for the March book club of the BC Humanists, and is simply a collection of links to things related to Steven Pinker’s excellent book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’.
First of all, here is a summary of all salient arguments and the most original and interesting data Pinker adduces to support his conclusions that we are spectacularly less violent now than we ever have been before, and that this decrease in violence is due to the growth of the state, the expansion of market networks, and the spread of Enlightenment values. If you need a refresher for this long book (or if you didn’t read it but still want to come to the club), this is your first stop.
Here is a review of the book from the marvelous Peter Singer, and a follow-up blog post by a NY Times writer, both with some mild but poignant criticisms.
Here are some harsher reviews, including one I think is a bit besides the point with its critique, and a brief jab at Pinker’s methodology for his statistical analyses.
Here is an interview of Pinker by Sam Harris - whom I find endlessly sophomoric and irritating, but who is perfectly fine here, largely due to restricting his questions to short prompts that allow in none of his personal character. Another interview of Pinker, a bit more speculative.
For people interested in reading a bit more on the relationship between institutions of power in society, such as the state, and violence, you could check out one or two of my previous blogposts on the subject, the former being very on-topic and the latter being more about theories explaining why people carry out political violence..
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I have read on critique of Pinker’s numbers that were actually somewhat convincing, aside from anthropologists I know really pointing out the problems in some of his tribal demarcations, he doesn’t really take into account the acceleration of violence in spurts. The marginal revolution piece gets at it, but that seems more than a passing jab if one thinks through the implications of the work.
By the way, even though I am of a dirty continental philosophy in training, and more dialectically ambivalent the Englightenment than you seem to be, you have an excellent blog and it is quite informative.
I’d be very interested to read that critique, if you can find the source information for me. My general understanding is that while Pinker’s numbers can be criticised for oversimplification, there aren’t any credible attacks upon the overall arguments for which he adduces those numbers as support: namely, that anarchic, tribal societies have far higher rates of homicide than societies with strong and pervasive state-like institutions.
I’m very glad you have enjoyed my blog, since I post a lot of stuff that is amateurish and largely just my own introspection made public. Dirty continental philosopher or not, I’d be delighted to discuss the Enlightenment with you. I will say that I have a self-consciously ideal-typical model of it, though, and not just to avoid pesky empirical disconfirmations
On the homicide rates, I have seen one and only good rebuttal, which doesn’t deny the truth of the claim in all cases, but was pretty clear that statistics from hunter-gather societies just aren’t known, and some of the modern tribes he treats as hunter-gatherers aren’t. I will dig up the critiques somewhere around here.
I tend to dislike Pinker’s work to be honest–I thought his “Blank Slate” book was one long strawman argument actually–but this looks pretty sound like his work on language and the mind is.