Having been impressed with the author’s earlier book How the Mind Works, I decided to give this one a try. If you do, you will not be disappointed. The book educates, astonishes and repays the effort you put into finishing this large book handsomely.
This book is all about why violence has declined in the world. Steven Pinker (who wrote the excellent How the Mind Works that we reviewed earlier) lays out the arguments about the almost constant decline in violence on earth (at a macro level) from the evolution of man. This may surprise you if you either think that the two World Wars formed the acme of violence in the world or, if like most people, you think that violence is increasing in society but Steven lays out a very cogent argument in favour of his argument.
He first talks about the six trends of human history – various eras where a portion of the decline was noticed; he talks about five inner demons and four better angels. He also talks about five historical forces.
The summarization is just that : an overview of what follows. They are interesting and worth reading, but if you just want the details (which are fascinating and gripping) and want to skip this, you can safely do so, as this is about the rest of the book. You will not lose anything by skipping this intro. In addition, don’t judge the rest of the book by the intro and give up on this book – in case you are not interested in the summation given there. The book is absolutely fascinating.
He starts with the violence seen in almost all of the old human remains unearthed and starts with how pervasive violence must have been to give this overwhelming tilt to almost all findings of those periods.
He then starts with the Bible and shows how violent it has been (the Old Testament that is). You see here echoes of Richard Dawkins’s argument in The God Delusion on the same topic but in a book of a different emphasis. He also talks about violence that was prevalent in Shakespeare and even children’s tales from Brothers Grimm, at a much later date in history.
He talks about the insensitivity of even the early twentieth century ads where spanking a wife and raping were considered humorous.
He then moves on to the inherent nature of violence in humans. He starts with our closest living relatives – genetically speaking – the chimps and their propensity for violence and the genetic advantages that helped promote such calculated violence.
He then traces why city states meant less violence, often mandated by the ruler for his benefit. What follows is a fascinating expose of how primitive societies, even the most peaceful as The Semai of Malaysia or an equally pacific tribe of Indonesia had murder rates that are higher than even the most violent of modern cities – statistics which belie their peaceful reputation.
He also reviews the barbaric practice of witch hunting – in the literal sense, where thousands of women ‘confessed’ under torture that they were indeed witches and then executed. He also talks about human sacrifices including the Indian suttee. He shows why those practices gradually disappeared from the world and gives a number of fascinating anecdotes about the practice when it was prevalent in ancient times. One of his revelations that, once it started accelerating, a whole number of personal scores were settled by accusing an inconvenient woman (and in very few cases, men) of being witches.
He tackles how violence has decreased in area after area – the cruelty of slavery where the owners factord in ‘loss during transit’ into their business model as many slaves died in the galley of the ship during transportation is described well and he traces the abolition of slavery; he even talks about the punishments – imprisonment – for nonrepayment of debt or even forcible possession of the debtor’s property being taken. And how that process was humanized through bankruptcy laws.
He then turns his attention to the officially sanctioned mass murder – also called war – and how that also came to be used very rarely. What made humans appreciate the suffering of other humans and, later, of animals? He credits the creation of mass publishing by Gutenberg and the explosion of literacy. By reading fiction (the dominant subject matter of books at that time) people were able to both put themselves in the story characters’ shoes and also learn about far off lands and how people lived there. The stories taught them to think from the viewpoint of others, and also opened their eyes beyond the parochial concerns of just their immediate surroundings.
The explosion of ideas that followed this development drove most of the humanistic development of social norms.
He then talks of the regression caused by nationalism when killing – this time to defend the nation or preemptively strike to avoid a threat to the nation – was approved again. The nationalistic sentiment, mixed with the ideology that one’s nation is better than other nations, gave rise to fascism and also, replacing the nation with class, communism. This increased the violence level. However, war as a ‘noble purpose’ had lost its allure and thanks to a lot of writers and filmmakers, war was portrayed in all its viciousness and was personalized in books like All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms or movies like The Big Parade.
He explores the taboo surrounding a nuclear strike and the use of chemical weapons in war.
He turns his attention to genocide and delves into the psychology that makes men kill en masse – even women and children – solely because they belong to a group of opposed ideology, ethnicity, religious belief or some other factor.
Next in line is terrorism, and with it, the terrifying possibility of a small nuclear weapon being used in a terrorist attack. With his dispassionate eye, he looks at the data and draws compelling conclusions. I will leave it to you to read the book to learn what those conclusions are and why, The answer does need to go with the reasoning to make any sense, but the answer is definitely surprising.
He takes the ‘Data Analysis’ eye to other crimes like racism, then rape, and then domestic abuse. In each case he shows why the popular intuitive belief that we live in dangerous times is wrong, at least compared to the past ages. He does the same for children’s rights and finally the rights of LGBT groups – that is, a historical view of how far we have come in our changed attitudes.
He then moves on to animal rights and tells how animal cruelty is different from other discriminations in that meat eating and therefore killing innocent animals is not going to go the way of abolition of slavery or women’s rights but will follow a different trajectory. Yes, the animals will be humanely killed.
He also offers a surprising answer to why some cultures are still not ‘progressive’ by Western standards. This is because they resisted the printing press and therefore the transfer of ideas and views about how people very dissimilar to themselves live and think and therefore develop an empathy through exposure to ideas that are bigger than their own locality, community, nation.
Very interesting. I have never met this argument before; I suspect very few have. But it has the ring of truth in it, if you pause to think about it.
He goes on to explore the mindsets that trigger violence. This is the second angle of analysis. He covers gain (hunting, violence to achieve an aim), revenge, and ideology.
After these negative motives, he turns to innate forces which stop people from killing each other senselessly – most of the people, that is. One is empathy. Next comes self-control. He even explores genetic changes in just the last hundred years that may have driven humans to become less aggressive – even though many think that the time frame is too short to effect changes of behaviour noticeable at a societal level.
He concludes with great arguments. If there is one small thing I can nitpick, it is that the conclusion echoes (and summarizes, it is true) some of the same arguments that appear in the meat of the book. Even though it is interesting to read again in a different context, you feel that the book could have been shortened a bit without much loss of value. However, given the immense canvas the author has chosen as his subject matter and given the virtuoso performance in communicating to us and convincing us that violence has indeed gone down in the world, he does a stellar job and so you tend to easily forgive this redundancy.
9/10. Wow! It opens your eyes to so many facets you had not thought about.
== Krishna
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