“A good book bears fruit by begetting other books; its fame expands from century to century, and its reading constitutes an entire era in the lives of readers,” said Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century. In the 21st century, the speed of information dissemination is even higher thanks, of course, to the Internet and social networks. Especially if the founder of the largest international social network, which has more than a billion registered users from all over the globe, gets down to business - Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg continues his “A Year of Books”, and we, in turn, continue to follow this with interest.
After reading The End of Power by Moises Naim, Zuckerberg moved on to Steven Pinker's The Best of Us angels our nature"), The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (2011).
Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American scientist, one of the world's leading experts in the field of psycholinguistics. He has taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His scientific research is devoted to the problems of language and cognition, and he has worked extensively on the issues of language acquisition in children. For his research in the field of psychology of language, Steven Pinker was awarded the Troland Prize of the National Academy of Sciences and two awards of the American Psychological Association. He is a member of several scientific societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The title "The Best of Us" is an allusion to an English expression used by Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address, which he delivered during his inauguration as the 16th President of America. That year, the Southern Confederacy was formed, and Lincoln hoped to avert the impending bloodshed by speaking primarily to Southerners. Lincoln considered philanthropy, compassion, good will-benevolence, respect-tolerance to be “the best in us,” “the angels of our nature.” Lincoln believed that only this would ensure peace and harmony.
From the book's blurb: We've all read about bloody wars and shocking crimes and asked, "Where is the world coming to?" But we rarely ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this amazing new book, bestselling author and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world was a much worse place in the past. With over a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker illustrates some startling numbers. Tribal wars were 9 times deadlier than the combined wars and genocides of the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times higher than it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, unjustified hasty executions were the best characteristics of life for thousands of years - and suddenly they began to disappear. Wars between developed countries have disappeared, and even in developing countries, wars kill a fraction of those they did a few decades ago. Rape, assault, hate crimes, child abuse, animal cruelty have all dropped significantly. How could this happen if human nature has not changed? What made people stop sacrificing children, stabbing each other with knives at the dinner table, or burning cats and disemboweling criminals as popular entertainment? Pinker argues that the key to explaining the decline in violence is awareness of the inner demons that drive us toward violence (such as revenge, sadism, tribalism) and the brightness that draws us in the other direction. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade and cosmopolitanism, we are much better able to control our impulses, empathize with others, negotiate rather than take by force, expose destructive ideologies, and use the power of our minds to limit impulses to violence. With his signature style and the intellectual passion that has made his past books international bestsellers and literary classics, Pinker will challenge you to rethink your deepest beliefs about progress, modernity, and human nature. This stunning work will certainly be one of the most talked about to come out this century.
You can read the details of the discussion of this book on the official
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2012 This acclaimed book by Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate, argues that, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent, over millenia and decades. Can violence really have declined? The images of conflict we see daily on our screens from around the world suggest this is an almost obscene claim to be making. Extraordinarily, however, Steven Pinker shows violence within and between societies - both murder and warfare - really has declined from prehistory to today. We are much less likely to die at someone else's hands than ever before. Even the horrific carnage of the last century, when compared to the dangers of pre-state societies, is part of this trend. Debunking both the idea of the " noble savage" and an over-simplistic Hobbesian notion of a "nasty, brutish and short" life, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people."One of the most important books I"ve read - not just this year, but ever... For me, what's most important about The Better Angels of Our Nature are their insights into how to help achieve positive outcomes. How can we encourage a less violent, more just society, particularly for the poor? Steven Pinker shows us ways we can make those positive trajectories a little more likely. That "s a contribution, not just to historical scholarship, but to the world" Bill Gates "Brilliant, mind-altering ... Everyone should read this astonishing book" David Runciman, Guardian "A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline" Peter Singer, New York Times"[A] sweeping new review of the history of human violence... the kind of academic superbrain that can translate otherwise impenetrable statistics into a meaningful narrative of human behavior...impeccable scholarship" Tony Allen-Mills, Sunday Times "Written in Pinker"s distinctively entertaining and clear personal style...a marvelous synthesis of science, history and storytelling" Clive Cookson, Financial Times "Pinker"s scholarhsip is astounding...flawless...masterful" Joanna Bourke, The Times Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as The New York Times, Time and Slate, and is the author of six books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought.
“In the 20th century, we observed the horrors of two world wars, the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, the events in Rwanda and other manifestations of genocide. In the 21st century, we have seen ongoing genocide in Darfur (Western Sudan) and the war in Iraq. For many, this creates the feeling that modernity has brought us terrible violence. And that we have moved greatly away from the harmony in which primitive people lived. Here is an excerpt from a 2005 article in the influential Boston Globe newspaper: “Life was difficult for the Indians, but they did not have the problem of unemployment, social harmony was unshakable, drug addiction was unknown to them, and crime was almost non-existent. Wars between tribes were largely ritualistic and rarely resulted in massacres.” You are all familiar with such touching theories. But I will present evidence that this understanding of the situation is incorrect. In reality, our ancestors were much more prone to violence than we are. The level of violence has decreased over long periods of time. And today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in the history of mankind.
Reducing violence is a fractal phenomenon. It can be observed over thousands of years, centuries, decades and several years. Let's take a trip through several orders of magnitude of the time scale - from the scale of millennia to years. 10,000 years ago and before, all people lived as hunter-gatherers without permanent settlements or governments. This period is usually considered the era of primordial harmony. However, archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, studying combat casualty rates among modern hunter-gatherers (the best source of information on this standard of living), came to a different conclusion. He estimated that the percentage of male deaths in war in different hunter-gatherer tribes varied from 60% to 15%. While the percentage of all violent deaths in the United States and Europe in the 20th century, including losses in both world wars, is slightly more than 1%. If the mortality rate of tribal wars had occurred in the 20th century, then not 100 million people would have died, but 2 billion.
If we turn to the Middle Ages, we will notice that socially sanctioned forms of violence have declined quite noticeably since then. For example, dismemberment and torture were then common forms of punishment for crimes. For the violation for which you would be fined today, in those days you would have had your tongue cut out, your ears cut off, your eyes blinded, your hand cut off, and so on. The death penalty was a punishment for numerous non-violent crimes: criticism of the king, theft of a piece of bread. Detailed homicide statistics in European medieval villages, towns and counties are approximately 100 deaths per 100,000 population per year, while today the rate of intentional homicide in most European countries does not exceed three per 100,000 people.
Why does modern violence seem so widespread to us? I think there are many reasons for this. One of them is better means of notification: the Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars than the monks of the 16th century. There is a cognitive illusion: the easier it is to remember specific examples of something, the more likely you are to be convinced of it. Events that we read about in newspapers with shocking photographs are better remembered than reports of more people dying of old age in their own beds.
In addition, the limitation of violence was accompanied by the elimination of psychological attitudes associated with the glorification of violence. Today we are alarmed—and rightly so—as several murderers are executed by lethal injection in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We don't take into account that a couple of hundred years ago they might have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes. And this happened regularly. Today we look at the death penalty as evidence of how low our behavior can be, not of how high our humanistic standards have risen.
Why is the level of violence decreasing? No one really knows, but I can think of four explanations, all of which I think contain some truth.
Centralization. Thomas Hobbes was right when he argued that in the pre-state period life was “solitary, poor, dirty, brutish, and short.” Not, he argued, because people have an innate bloodlust or aggressive instincts, but because of the very logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, there is a constant temptation to preemptively attack your neighbor before he attacks you. One way to solve this problem is deterrence: you do not strike first, but publicly declare that you will mercilessly retaliate if your territory is invaded. This means that you must take revenge for all attacks, which will lead to new rounds of bloody vendetta. Hobbes's solution, Leviathan, is to entrust the legitimate use of violence to a single, democratically elected agency - the Leviathan - which will reduce the temptation to attack, since any aggression will be punished, rendering its effectiveness null and void. Indeed, the period of declining murder rates in Europe coincided with the rise of centralized states. This is an argument in favor of the "Leviathan" theory.
The value of life. The second explanation is that in ancient times, when suffering and early death were common in human life, people rarely repented of bringing suffering and death to others. As technology and economic efficiency have made life longer and more enjoyable, the value of human life in general has increased. That's the argument of political scientist James Payne.
Benefit. A third explanation was developed by journalist Robert Wright. Wright shows that under some circumstances cooperation, including nonviolence, can benefit both interacting parties, for example, profit in trade, when both sides exchange surpluses and end up winning, or when both sides lay down their arms, save on military expenses and are no longer forced to constantly fight. As a result, other people are more valued when they are alive rather than dead, and violence for selfish reasons is reduced.
Empathy. Philosopher Peter Singer believes that evolution has endowed humans with a sense of empathy: the ability to treat other people's interests as comparable to one's own. Over the course of history, the circle of friends and family with whom man was willing to empathize has expanded - to a village, a clan, a nation, other races, other genders, and, according to Singer's arguments, the circle should expand to other sentient animals. The question is, what is behind this expansion?
Perhaps the expanding circles of collaboration that Robert Wright talks about. The logic behind the Golden Rule: The more you think about and interact with others, the more you realize that putting your own interests before others' interests is pointless, at least not if you want to be listened to. You cannot say that “my interests are special, more valuable than yours.” The reason may be cosmopolitanism: history, journalism, memory, literature, travel, literacy - anything that allows us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of other people whom we may have regarded as “subhuman”, and also to recognize the contingent nature of our own situation , that “it may very well happen that fate will dispose of you or me this way.”
Whatever the cause, the reduction in violence has profound consequences. It should raise not only the questions “Why is there war?”, but also “Why is there peace?” Not only “What are we doing wrong?”, but also “What are we doing right?” Because we did something right, and undoubtedly it would be good to understand what it was.
Steven Pinker, American cognitive psychologist, professor at Harvard University, author of several books, including “The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (Penguin Books, 2011). Listen to Steven Pinker's lecture "The Surprising Decline in Violence" on ted.com.
Every day, each of us is bombarded with a stream of news with incidents that happened in different parts of the planet: wars, violence, rape, maniacs and murders. It seems scary to go outside. However, Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker came to the optimistic conclusion that humanity is becoming less evil and aggressive.
Archeology, which specializes in the study of the history of violence, is called in the West atrociology (atrocity- cruelty, atrocity). Based on the results of this discipline and relying on the fundamental work of the German sociologist and cultural scientist Norbert Elias “On the Process of Civilization” (Norbert Elias. Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation / 1939), Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the norms of human coexistence established by modern states are gradually psychology changed, and people became more tolerant of each other. Western civilization as a whole played a big role in this.
Steven Pinker outlined his own conclusions in a plump intellectual bestseller, “The Better Angels of Our Nature. Why Violence Has Declined.” The Canadian scientist, using statistical data, argues in favor of his hypothesis and analyzes the reasons that, in his opinion, led to such positive results.
Steven Pinker cites archaeological evidence that in prehistoric times, one in seven people died a violent death. In contrast, the death toll in the first half of the 20th century in Europe, despite two world wars, reached "only" three percent of the population, according to the researcher. The author compares the approximately 55 million killed in World War II with the 40 million killed by the Tatar-Mongols in the 13th century.
And since the world's population at the time of the Mongol conquest was only a seventh of that of the 20th century, Pinker contrasts the 280 million victims of Mongol bloodlust with the 55 million who died in World War II. In the list of the 20 most bloody pages in the history of mankind, the Second World War, according to Pinker, ranks 11th, and the civil war in Russia (twentieth century) is ranked last in terms of the number of victims.
“In prehistoric settlements, from half to two-thirds of the inhabitants died a violent death,” writes Pinker. “For European cities, statistics were compiled on the basis of every 100 thousand population (although their population was then much smaller). It turned out that in the 14th-15th centuries In London, 55 people per 100 thousand people became victims of violence. In Oxford - 100, in Amsterdam - 50, in Rome - between 30 and 70. Now the annual statistics of murders in Rome is one person for every 100 thousand population. London - two people, in Oslo - also two (and even after Breivik’s terrorist attack on the island of Utøya, this will add no more than 16 people per 100,000. Now in Europe your chance of being killed is 10-20, or even 50 times lower). than 500 years ago."
In the United States, rape and murder rates dropped by 80 percent between 1973 and 2008 alone. And then the researcher mentions one piquant detail. It turns out that the intelligence quotient (IQ) of US presidents is directly related to the losses in the wars that the United States fought while in power. The lower the IQ of the owner of the White House, the higher the number of victims, Pinker writes in his book.
According to Pinker, many factors contributed to the improvement in the crime situation. One of the main reasons is that humanity is getting smarter. IQ tests show the increased intellectual level of the younger generation. The development of democracy, the spread of education, which promotes rational thinking and prevents, as psychologists say, emotional short circuits.
The author believes that commerce also played a huge role in the history of Western civilization, thanks to which many people developed a sense of altruism. He also noted the increasing role of women who have ceased to be passive. Pinker argues for this thesis by the fact that women began to use contraceptives for family planning, which reduced the birth of (unwanted) offspring.
Back in the late 1980s, Canadian evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, in their book “Homicide,” put forward the thesis that there was much more violence in the lives of people in the past, and the lives of most of our ancestors were more frequent. than today, ended in murder. Of course, there have been periods in history when aggression retreated, but they were too short to be explained by the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection.
Unlike the outstanding Austrian ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, in particular, the author of the book “Aggression” (Konrad Lorenz. Das sogenannte Böse. Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression), who in the 1960s argued that aggressiveness is innate, instinctively determined property of all higher animals and species Homo sapiens, for the psychologist Pinker, the answer is rooted in the human spirit, more precisely in that highly organized system of cognitive and emotional abilities of the individual, which are realized in the brain and owe their basic design to evolutionary processes.
Let us recall that the founder of ethology considered “intraspecific aggression the most serious danger that threatens humanity in modern conditions of cultural, historical and technical development.”
Like Konrad Lorenz, also on rich factual material, using the results of previous studies of his colleagues, Pinker comes to the conclusion that a person is able to master his five inner demons: predatory and exploitative instincts aimed at achieving his own benefit or, for ideological reasons, the desire for domination - authority, glory and power - revenge and sadism.
Against these five demons, Steven Pinker sets up four so-called “better angels of our nature” - as the American President Abraham Lincoln once called them. By these Pinker means self-control; empathy or understanding the emotional state of another person through empathy; morality and reason, which together form a striking connection.
This is not the first time Pinker has surprised me. It's not that I had a bad opinion of it, but I don't usually expect such a strong impression from a long non-fiction book.
This is sometimes a line-by-line interpretation, sometimes a retelling of an excerpt from the introduction, from which it is approximately clear what will happen next. There, from time to time, I started highlighting every second or third paragraph, and as a result there was too much for me to even choose which passages to retell. The actual ideas sound quite simple and very strange, but the data collected is good and I did not see any weak links in most of the long arguments.
“This book is a story about six tendencies, five demons and four angels of human nature and five historical processes.
1) Six Tendencies (chapters 2–7).
To make sense of the many episodes that show how our species has become less violent, I group them into six major trends.
- The first of these, over several millennia, was the transition from the anarchic hunter-gatherer state in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations with cities and governments, beginning about five thousand years ago. Associated with this transition is a decrease in the “natural” number of constant raids and strife between neighbors and an approximately fivefold decrease in the number of violent deaths. I call this transition the process of taming.
- The second transition took over five hundred years and is best documented in Europe. During the period between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century. in European countries, the number of murders has decreased by 10–50 times. Sociologist Norbert Elias, in his book The Civilization Process, cites the unification of small feudal territories into large kingdoms with a central authority and trading infrastructure as the reason for this amazing decline. Following him, I call this tendency the process of civilization.
- The third transformation began in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment (although it had antecedents in classical Greece and the Renaissance, as well as parallels in other parts of the world). During this time, the first organized movements emerged to abolish such socially approved forms of violence as despotism, slavery, dueling, torture in trials, murder based on superstition, cruel punishment and cruelty to animals. Historians sometimes call this process the Humanitarian Revolution.
- The fourth transition took place after the end of World War II. Two thirds of a century later, a historically unprecedented situation is observed: powerful powers and developed states in general have stopped fighting among themselves. Historians called this state the Long Peace.
- The fifth trend also relates to armed conflicts, but is not so noticeable. Although it may be hard for news readers to believe, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the number of organized conflicts of all kinds—civil wars, genocides, repression in autocratic countries, and terrorist attacks—has declined around the world. Since this new state of affairs does not yet look sustainable, I will call it the New World.
- Finally, in the post-war era, beginning with the symbolic adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we see growing opposition to aggression on a smaller scale, including violence against ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals. These derivatives of the idea of human rights — civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, LGBT rights, and animal rights — were established by a cascade of movements from the 1950s to the present day that I will call the Rights Revolution.
2) Five demons
Many people intuitively think of violence as a hydraulic system: that people have an internal drive for aggression (the death instinct or bloodlust) that builds up and needs to be released from time to time. Modern science understands the psychology of violence in a completely different way: aggression cannot be the result of one desire or a growing urge; it may be the result of several psychological systems that differ in their triggering external influences, internal logic, neurobiological basis and social distribution. Five of them are described in Chapter 8:
- Predatory or instrumental violence is used simply as a means to an end.
- Dominance — the desire for influence, prestige, fame and power, which can take forms from machismo to struggles for supremacy among racial, ethnic, religious or governmental communities.
- Revenge is the result of a moral desire for justice, a demand for retribution and punishment.
- Sadism is taking pleasure in the suffering of another.
- Ideology — a shared belief system, usually involving a utopian vision of the future that justifies unlimited violence for the sake of unlimited good.
3) Four good angels (chapter 9)
Humans are not inherently good (or evil), but they are endowed with abilities that can guide them away from violence toward cooperation and altruism:
- Empathy gives us the opportunity to feel other people's pain and consider other people's interests as our own.
- Self-control allows us to anticipate and prevent the consequences of impulsive actions.
- The moral sense sacralizes many norms and taboos that regulate the interactions of people within a culture, sometimes reducing the level of violence, but sometimes increasing it.
- The ability to reason allows us to free ourselves from the narrowness of our single point of view, reflect on our way of life, figure out how to improve it, and more effectively use the capabilities of the other “angels” of human nature.
4) Five historical forces (chapter 10):
In the last chapter, I will try to combine psychology and history and name the external forces that gave the advantage to our peaceful side and caused a decrease in the level of violence.
- Leviathan — a state with a judicial system and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force — can reduce the temptation of its subjects to use violence for gain, curb their desires for revenge, and circumvent their self-justifying biases that lead everyone to believe that the truth is on their side.
- Commerce is a positive-sum game in which all participants can win; As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over greater distances and between more participants, people around us become more valuable alive than dead and less likely to be demonized and dehumanized.
- Feminization is a process in which cultures gradually recognize the value and interests of women. Because violence is more common among men, cultures in which women have influence tend to shy away from glorifying violence and are less likely to develop dangerous subcultures of unemployed boys.
- Drivers of cosmopolitanism such as literacy, travel, and the media enable people to accept the perspectives of others who are different from them and to expand their circle of empathy to include them.
- Finally, the ever-increasing application of knowledge and rational thinking to human life — the “reason escalator” — can help people recognize the futility of cycles of violence, limit the privileging of self-interest over others, and approach violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a competition that needs to be won.
When you know that violence is receding, the world looks different. The past seems less innocent, and the present less terrible. You begin to appreciate the small gifts of living together in a world that would have seemed utopian to our ancestors: people of different races can be one family and play together in a public park; comedians can make jokes about commanders in chief; states are finding ways to calmly retreat from escalating conflicts instead of starting wars. I do not want to say that this knowledge leads to complacency: we now live in peace because our predecessors were horrified by violence in their time and fought against it, and we should also fight against the violence that remains in our time. It is the recognition that the level of violence is falling that helps to understand that this fight is worth the effort. Until now we have been able to talk about human inhumanity in moral terms. Now that we know that it recedes under the pressure of some factors, we can think about it in terms of cause and effect. Instead of asking “Why do people fight?” we can ask “Why do people live in the world?”, and think not only about what is wrong with us, but also about what we do well. Because we are definitely doing something right, and it would be good to know what it is.”
The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker
