Counter to the Inner Demons chapter, the topic of the former post, Pinker’s next one is called Better Angels, and in it he lists and details the traits that caused the allegedly violence decline. These are – empathy, self-control, moral sense and reason, and each has fundamental problems. Continue reading →

In the former posts regarding the former chapters of The Better Angels of Our Nature we tried to show how wrong Pinker’s main argument is regarding the decline of violence mainly since in some cases his data is partial and since the most important figures are totally absent.

However, with the 8^th chapter of the book called Inner Demons, where Pinker broadly details how naturally violent humans are, unfortunately we largely agree. We find it important, so we bring extracts from this chapter here, along with our remarks. Continue reading →

The following is the third part of our critical review from an animalistic perspective of Steven Pinker’s theory of an historical decline in violence.

The strongest blow that the enlightenment ideas received, regards to their significant role in the horrors of the first half of the 20^th century. As a great henchman, Pinker is particularly eager to prove that the enlightenment project didn’t fail despite the 20^th century. Therefore he devoted a substantial part of his book to claim that the 20^th century doesn’t stand out of the historical decline of violence he argues for.

As mentioned in the first part of this book review, most of Pinker’s critics focused on the 20^th century, mentioning colonialism, post colonialism, western imperialism, the not so cold war, the arms race and etc. So we prefer to focus on different areas. If you are interested, we highly recommend the following critiques:
Steven Pinker on the alleged decline of violence by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Or their long version: Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Peace in Our Time by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Precious Steven Pinker by David Bentley Hart

However we do want to address 3 issues regarding these parts of the book: The role of personal responsibility during the atrocities, his choice to work with relative numbers and not absolute numbers, and his general conclusion regarding violence regardless of his statistical approach.

Continue reading →