Steven Pinker and the Better Angels of Our Nature

In 2011, Steven Pinker published a 700-page argument that humanity was becoming less violent. The Better Angels of Our Nature marshaled data from archaeology, criminology, history, and psychology to make a case that seemed counterintuitive to a world recovering from 9/11, watching the Iraq War unfold, and anticipating the next crisis.

The book became both a phenomenon and a flashpoint. Bill Gates called it the most important book he'd ever read. Critics accused Pinker of cherry-picking data, ignoring structural violence, and providing intellectual cover for complacency. A decade and a half later, the debate continues.

Understanding Pinker's argument—its strengths, its blind spots, its implications—is essential for thinking about violence and progress. Even if you ultimately reject his conclusions, you need to grapple with his evidence.

The Six Trends

Pinker identifies six major transitions that have reduced violence over different timescales:

The Pacification Process occurred when humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer bands to settled agricultural societies with governments. Pre-state societies weren't peaceful—quite the opposite. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggests that roughly 15% of people in pre-state societies died violently, compared to less than 3% in the bloodiest centuries of civilization and less than 1% today.

The state, for all its oppressions, established a monopoly on legitimate violence. Instead of everyone being armed and ready to avenge slights, a central authority adjudicated disputes. This reduced overall killing even while introducing new forms of state violence. The Hobbesian bargain—trading freedom for security—actually delivered.

This doesn't mean states are peaceful—they wage wars, imprison millions, and sometimes murder their own citizens. But the statistical reality is that more people died from private violence in pre-state societies than die from all forms of violence combined in modern states. The state concentrates violence while reducing its overall prevalence.

The Civilizing Process unfolded over centuries within European societies. Homicide rates in medieval Europe were astronomical—around 30-100 per 100,000 people per year. By the 20th century, rates had fallen to 1-2 per 100,000 in Western Europe. That's a decline of 95-99%.

Pinker draws on sociologist Norbert Elias's theory: as centralized states consolidated power and commerce replaced plunder as the route to wealth, people developed greater self-control. Etiquette manuals appeared. Table manners emerged. The ability to restrain impulses became a marker of status. What was once ordinary—brawling, blood feuds, casual cruelty—became disgraceful.

The Humanitarian Revolution transformed moral sensibilities in the 17th and 18th centuries. Torture as judicial practice was abolished. Public executions ended. Slavery was attacked and eventually abolished in most of the world. Cruel punishments—drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel—disappeared from civilized nations.

These weren't just legal changes. They reflected a shift in what humans found morally tolerable. Reading the descriptions of public entertainments from a few centuries ago—crowds cheering as prisoners were mutilated—modern readers recoil. Our disgust response has changed.

The Long Peace is the most controversial claim: major powers haven't fought each other since 1945. Before World War II, great power wars were regular occurrences—about one per generation in Europe for centuries. Since 1945, zero.

The United States and Soviet Union spent four decades armed to annihilation but never fired at each other directly. China and the West have clashed through proxies but never head-on. The wars that have occurred—Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan—are small by historical standards, and notably, they've been asymmetric rather than great power against great power.

The New Peace extends beyond great powers. Even smaller wars have declined since the Cold War ended. Civil wars peaked in the early 1990s and have declined since. Battle deaths per capita reached historic lows in the 2000s and 2010s. The conflicts that dominate headlines—Syria, Yemen, Ukraine—are terrible but remain small compared to the wars of previous eras.

The Rights Revolutions have extended protection to previously abused groups within living memory. Violence against women, children, racial minorities, and LGBT people—once legal and socially accepted—is now criminal and stigmatized. Animal cruelty, once unremarkable, is increasingly restricted. The circle of moral concern has expanded rapidly.

This trend is measurable in surveys: the percentage of people who find various forms of violence acceptable has plummeted within a generation. What was normal in the 1950s—corporal punishment, marital rape, gay-bashing—is now widely condemned. The speed of this moral change is historically unprecedented.

The Five Inner Demons

Why are humans violent at all? Pinker identifies five psychological systems that push toward violence:

Predatory violence is instrumental—violence as a means to an end. Humans, like other predators, evolved to use force to acquire resources. Robbery, conquest, and exploitation are ancient strategies.

Dominance drives competition for status and power. Humans, especially males, have evolved to respond to challenges with aggression, to punish disrespect, and to pursue rank.

Revenge motivates retaliation against perceived wrongs. The psychology of vengeance evolved to deter future attacks—but it also creates cycles of escalating violence.

Sadism is the capacity to enjoy others' suffering. While rarer than the other demons, some humans genuinely derive pleasure from cruelty—and this capacity becomes activated in certain circumstances, like wartime.

Ideology is the deadliest demon. Humans' capacity for abstraction allows them to kill for ideas—for religion, nation, utopia, or theory. The 20th century's greatest atrocities were driven by ideologies promising heaven on earth. The Inquisition, the Terror, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution—all justified by visions of purity, progress, or paradise. Humans are the only species that commits genocide for theoretical reasons.

The Four Better Angels

Counterbalancing the demons are psychological systems that inhibit violence:

Empathy allows us to feel others' pain and motivates us to avoid causing it. The expansion of empathy—to strangers, to foreigners, to other species—is central to moral progress.

Self-control enables us to restrain impulses and consider long-term consequences. The civilizing process was largely about cultivating self-control, and it correlates with declining violence across individuals and societies.

Moral sense provides norms and taboos that restrain violence. While moral systems can be weaponized (ideology is often moralized), they also prohibit gratuitous cruelty and establish duties to others.

Reason allows us to see beyond our immediate perspective, to recognize others' interests as legitimate, to identify inconsistencies in our moral thinking, and to devise institutions that channel behavior peacefully. The Enlightenment's emphasis on reason, Pinker argues, has been the master driver of moral progress. If you can be reasoned out of a prejudice, that prejudice will eventually fall. Reason is corrosive to arbitrary distinctions.

The Five Historical Forces

Psychology alone doesn't explain declining violence—historical changes activated our better angels while restraining our demons:

The Leviathan. Effective states suppress private violence by establishing courts, police, and punishment. When people know disputes will be adjudicated fairly, they're less likely to take matters into their own hands. Failed states, by contrast, see violence surge.

Gentle Commerce. Trade creates positive-sum relationships where both parties benefit from keeping the other alive and prosperous. A trading partner is more valuable than a corpse. Globalization, for all its problems, has created webs of interdependence that make war costly.

Feminization. Societies that empower women tend to be less violent. Women, on average, are less aggressive and more oriented toward nurturing and negotiation. As women have gained political and economic power, policies have shifted toward protecting children, resolving disputes peacefully, and investing in social services rather than military might.

Cosmopolitanism. Literacy, travel, and media exposure have expanded our horizons beyond our immediate communities. We can imagine the perspectives of people very different from ourselves. This "expanding circle" of moral concern makes it harder to dehumanize outsiders.

The Escalator of Reason. Education, scientific thinking, and public discourse have created a culture that values consistency, evidence, and logical argument. This makes it harder to sustain arbitrary prejudices and easier to recognize others' claims to rights and dignity.

The Argument's Power

Even critics acknowledge that Pinker assembled impressive evidence. The homicide data is hard to dispute. The abolition of judicial torture and public execution is historical fact. The Long Peace, whatever explains it, is real.

More importantly, Pinker provided a framework for thinking about violence that takes both psychology and institutions seriously. Violence isn't random or inevitable—it responds to circumstances. Change the circumstances, change the violence.

The book also pushed back against a prevalent cultural pessimism. Media coverage emphasizes violence, creating a distorted picture of trends. "If it bleeds, it leads" ensures we see every shooting, every war, every atrocity—while the absence of violence never makes news. Pinker forced readers to look at data rather than headlines.

The Criticism

Pinker's critics raise serious objections:

Sample size and fat tails. Nassim Taleb argues that Pinker's statistics are meaningless given the distribution of violence. When extreme events dominate, recent decades of peace tell us little about underlying probabilities. The book's central claim—that violence is declining—may be literally unprovable.

Structural violence. Johan Galtung and others argue that narrowly counting direct physical harm ignores violence embedded in systems. Colonialism, poverty, and inequality kill millions through preventable disease, malnutrition, and deprivation. If you include structural violence, the picture looks very different.

Eurocentrism. Much of the decline Pinker documents occurred in the West. The civilizing process was a European phenomenon. The humanitarian revolution was substantially about Europeans deciding to stop doing terrible things to each other—while continuing to do them to colonized peoples. The story looks different from the Global South.

Causation problems. Pinker identifies correlations between various factors and declining violence, but establishing causation is difficult. Did commerce reduce violence, or did reduced violence enable commerce? The arrows could point in either direction.

Complacency risk. Perhaps most seriously, critics worry that declaring victory over violence could breed complacency. If we believe violence is declining due to historical forces, we might neglect the institutions and norms that actually keep peace. The Long Peace could end at any moment—especially if we stop working to maintain it.

The Takeaway

Pinker's argument is stronger than many critics admit and weaker than his champions claim. The data on homicide and certain forms of violence is robust—something real has changed. The data on war is more ambiguous, and the theoretical framework, while illuminating, doesn't establish causation.

But the deepest contribution may be methodological: take violence seriously as an empirical question. Don't rely on intuition or headlines. Don't assume things are getting worse because the news is terrifying. Don't assume progress is impossible because the past seems romantic. Look at the data.

Whether or not you accept Pinker's optimism, his book changed how we discuss these questions. It established that thinking rigorously about violence trends is possible and important. The debate it provoked—about statistics, definitions, causes—has sharpened everyone's thinking.

The better angels may or may not be winning. But we can only know by looking clearly at the evidence—and that means grappling with Pinker's argument, whatever we ultimately conclude.

Further Reading

- Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature. Viking. - Elias, N. (1939/2000). The Civilizing Process. Blackwell. - Singer, P. (1981/2011). The Expanding Circle. Princeton University Press.

This is Part 2 of the Violence and Its Decline series. Next: "The Fat Tails of Violence: Nassim Taleb's Critique"