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A review by lpm100
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
"The Better Angels Of Our Nature"
5/5 stars
"A Masterwork"
*******
Of the book:
-10 chapters over 696 pages. ≈70pps/chapter
-1955 point citations. ≈2.8/page (extremely well sourced)
-1,160 bibliographic sources. ≈1.67 per page(!)
*******
When the topic under discussion is human trends over long periods of time, it's necessarily going to be an interdisciplinary discussion.
The question is: how well can it be done?
As for this book, quite well as it turns out: it's a fascinating, extended and interdisciplinary meditation on the nature of violence from a person who obviously has an exquisite intellect.
And the reader can know that because this author cites/is in communion with the best minds in his discussion. (Kahnemann. Sowell. Haidt. Bentham. Hoffer.) And because of the breadth of the survey. (Genetics. Statistics. Biology. Population genetics. Philosophy/Moral Foundations Theory. History. Neurology. Behavioral Psychology.)
*******
It's impossible to do a thorough write up of a masterwork like this one (for that matter, it was pretty tough to read).
I will just address a few of the points that made the most intense impression on me (the much-maligned availability heuristic) and hope that the reader can get something from this review.
Factoids:
(10) The Bible contains 600 passages that explicitly talk about nations/kings / individuals killing each other and there are approximately 1,000 passages in which HKB"H himself is the executioner.
(328) Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In the Utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite... How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.
(337) 3/4 of all deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments.... 80% of the deaths were caused by 4% of the regimes.
(339) 700,000 deaths in Rwanda were caused by ragtag bands of about 10,000 men.... It actually only takes a small minority of people to create a genocide.
(363) More than half of armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries. Sunni terrorists killed 2/3 of the world's victims of terrorism. Only about a quarter of Muslim countries elect their governments. 100 million girls in Muslim countries have had their genitals mutilated. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 and Mauritania in 1980. Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with Eritrean writing because they thought it was occult symbols and he went to jail for 3 years and was lashed 300 times. About a fifth as many books are translated into Arabic as Greece translates into Greek.
(397) Traditional societies (think Arabs and Bedouins) see women as property of their fathers and husbands, and so rape is conceptualized as a tort for damage goods. Of course a man cannot rape his own wife because that would be like stealing his own property.
(470) At any moment there are three times as many lapsed vegetarians as observant ones.... Vegetarianism among teenage girls is highly correlated with eating disorders.
(509) Five categories of violence. Instrumental. Dominance. Revenge. Sadistic. Ideological.
(523) Even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent.
(633) Many social critics......have been smart ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?
Thoughts:
1. (p.119) He thoroughly and methodically corrects the misinformation spread by Levitt and Dubner that lack of access to abortion can explain an increased crime rate.
2. There is a useful recapitulation of a lot of info that was attempted by Nasim Nicholas Taleb (too much ego and too many words):
a. The common mistake of using Gaussian distributions to describe phenomenon when various other distributions are available / more appropriate (Poisson, power law, etc).
b. Silent evidence / a little bit adds up over a long time. There been several thousand different conflicts that add up to way more than the most, but the biggest ones are within recent memory. When Europe was in smaller administrative units, there were way more deaths because they were more people to fight each other - - even though World War II seems so cataclysmic, there were eight other conflicts in the last five centuries that produced proportionally more casualties.
3. There is a lot of good information andthought here about deriving trends from very incomplete data sets. (Such as trying to find ways to compare conflicts when the data for the number of people dead was not written down 500 to 1,000 years ago).
4. Some people have cast aspersions on this book, I believe, because he spills the beans on Islamic-Arab barbarism.
A common refrain that you hear from people is that "It's only a tiny minority" (blah blah blah), But this author points out that it only takes a very few people to cause a lot of damage, both as an abstract possibility (power law distributions) and a documented historical reality.
5. Moral Foundations Theory is recapitulated.
6. There are a number of EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE thoughts, if you take them to their logical conclusion.
a. I'm not sure what to think about the author's position. People that he would describe as "regressive" (his own Orthodox Jewish brothers) are tribal, but they are the only ones that have enough children to replenish themselves. Regressive Haredim (educated in a way more appropriate for the 11th century) have ≈5.5 children per woman --and almost all of the negative characteristics that this author describes in the book fit them to a tee. (Pinker himself has no children.) Arabs are the quintessential tribal people (female illiteracy of 26% and generally educated in way more appropriate for the 7th century), and they have 3.1 children per woman.
b. The author negatively correlates intelligence and violent crime and positively correlates intelligence and cooperation. But, where does that leave African descended people? Violent crime is highest in the blackest parts of the United States and all over Africa, and cooperation is an urban legend in sub-Saharan Africa. (Governments last there about a week at a time.)
He correlates it with economic literacy. (I think the last Communists in the world are in Africa, Latin America, and US universities.)
c. The European Union seems to be so open-minded that their brains have fallen out. That's the only way I could explain their determination to import the Muslim world that has been holding a grudge against the Europeans for the last 1,000 years.
Vocabulary:
taphonomy
seraglio
atrocitologist
strappado
ambuscade
sheefish
peccadilloes
metonym
bobbies
bargees
recrudescence
calumny
altricial
Prisoner's Dilemma
Tragedy of the Commons
Dollar Auction
synecdoche
atavistic
data snooping
Democratic Peace Theory
autarky
judder/juddering
Kantian triangle (democracy / open economy/international engagement)
commodious
myrmidon
Ad feminam
claustration
uxoricide
chary
Life History Theory
Triage Theory
bhang
overlying
goad (a spiked stick used for driving cattle)
axi pepper
Lesbian Until Graduation
subtetanizing
frugivores
mezaraic
bafflegab
homunculus/homunculi
pedomorphy
moral dumbfounding
routine tradeoff (within a single relational model)
Taboo tradeoff (sacred against secular)
tragic tradeoff (sacred against sacred)
wergild
dumbth
(Lady) Justitia
Quotes:
The distancing effect of a good story can make us forget the brutality of the world in which it was set.
(11) Their reverence for the Bible is purely talismanic..... They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.
If you really believe the failing to accept J***
s as one's Savior is a ticket to fire redemnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life. Better a few hours now than an eternity later.
(328) A man's reach must exceed his grasp.
(343) ..... No small part of the decline of genocide is the decline of communism.
(367) Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
(395) A man wants what a woman has - - sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or on it outright (marriage in most societies).
(397) In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms.
(420)... one can always come up with an ingenious evolutionary explanation for any phenomenon.
(433) The child study movement.... Began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child rearing experts.
(446) Milk carton wanted posters are examples of what criminologists call crime control theater: The advertised that something is being done without actually doing anything.
(479) Non-violence, MLK inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure in mayhem. By removing any pretext for legitimate retaliation by the enemy, it stays on the positive side of the moral ledger in the eyes of third parties, while luring the enemy onto the negative side.
(484) I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
(493) The Balkans are a region cursed with too much history per square mile
(493) The victims of a conflict are deciduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present.
(509) War is merely the continuation of policy by other means [Clausewitz]
(634) Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite. [Soviet proverb]
(640) In this tissue of rationalizations, a real historian is about as welcome as a skunk at a garden party.... The elites of a hereditary cast society, he suspected, figure that no good could come from scholars nosing around and archives where they might stumble upon evidence that undermine their claims to have descended from heroes and gods.
(660) Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.
"The Better Angels Of Our Nature"
5/5 stars
"A Masterwork"
*******
Of the book:
-10 chapters over 696 pages. ≈70pps/chapter
-1955 point citations. ≈2.8/page (extremely well sourced)
-1,160 bibliographic sources. ≈1.67 per page(!)
*******
When the topic under discussion is human trends over long periods of time, it's necessarily going to be an interdisciplinary discussion.
The question is: how well can it be done?
As for this book, quite well as it turns out: it's a fascinating, extended and interdisciplinary meditation on the nature of violence from a person who obviously has an exquisite intellect.
And the reader can know that because this author cites/is in communion with the best minds in his discussion. (Kahnemann. Sowell. Haidt. Bentham. Hoffer.) And because of the breadth of the survey. (Genetics. Statistics. Biology. Population genetics. Philosophy/Moral Foundations Theory. History. Neurology. Behavioral Psychology.)
*******
It's impossible to do a thorough write up of a masterwork like this one (for that matter, it was pretty tough to read).
I will just address a few of the points that made the most intense impression on me (the much-maligned availability heuristic) and hope that the reader can get something from this review.
Factoids:
(10) The Bible contains 600 passages that explicitly talk about nations/kings / individuals killing each other and there are approximately 1,000 passages in which HKB"H himself is the executioner.
(328) Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In the Utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite... How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.
(337) 3/4 of all deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments.... 80% of the deaths were caused by 4% of the regimes.
(339) 700,000 deaths in Rwanda were caused by ragtag bands of about 10,000 men.... It actually only takes a small minority of people to create a genocide.
(363) More than half of armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries. Sunni terrorists killed 2/3 of the world's victims of terrorism. Only about a quarter of Muslim countries elect their governments. 100 million girls in Muslim countries have had their genitals mutilated. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 and Mauritania in 1980. Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with Eritrean writing because they thought it was occult symbols and he went to jail for 3 years and was lashed 300 times. About a fifth as many books are translated into Arabic as Greece translates into Greek.
(397) Traditional societies (think Arabs and Bedouins) see women as property of their fathers and husbands, and so rape is conceptualized as a tort for damage goods. Of course a man cannot rape his own wife because that would be like stealing his own property.
(470) At any moment there are three times as many lapsed vegetarians as observant ones.... Vegetarianism among teenage girls is highly correlated with eating disorders.
(509) Five categories of violence. Instrumental. Dominance. Revenge. Sadistic. Ideological.
(523) Even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent.
(633) Many social critics......have been smart ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?
Thoughts:
1. (p.119) He thoroughly and methodically corrects the misinformation spread by Levitt and Dubner that lack of access to abortion can explain an increased crime rate.
2. There is a useful recapitulation of a lot of info that was attempted by Nasim Nicholas Taleb (too much ego and too many words):
a. The common mistake of using Gaussian distributions to describe phenomenon when various other distributions are available / more appropriate (Poisson, power law, etc).
b. Silent evidence / a little bit adds up over a long time. There been several thousand different conflicts that add up to way more than the most, but the biggest ones are within recent memory. When Europe was in smaller administrative units, there were way more deaths because they were more people to fight each other - - even though World War II seems so cataclysmic, there were eight other conflicts in the last five centuries that produced proportionally more casualties.
3. There is a lot of good information andthought here about deriving trends from very incomplete data sets. (Such as trying to find ways to compare conflicts when the data for the number of people dead was not written down 500 to 1,000 years ago).
4. Some people have cast aspersions on this book, I believe, because he spills the beans on Islamic-Arab barbarism.
A common refrain that you hear from people is that "It's only a tiny minority" (blah blah blah), But this author points out that it only takes a very few people to cause a lot of damage, both as an abstract possibility (power law distributions) and a documented historical reality.
5. Moral Foundations Theory is recapitulated.
6. There are a number of EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE thoughts, if you take them to their logical conclusion.
a. I'm not sure what to think about the author's position. People that he would describe as "regressive" (his own Orthodox Jewish brothers) are tribal, but they are the only ones that have enough children to replenish themselves. Regressive Haredim (educated in a way more appropriate for the 11th century) have ≈5.5 children per woman --and almost all of the negative characteristics that this author describes in the book fit them to a tee. (Pinker himself has no children.) Arabs are the quintessential tribal people (female illiteracy of 26% and generally educated in way more appropriate for the 7th century), and they have 3.1 children per woman.
b. The author negatively correlates intelligence and violent crime and positively correlates intelligence and cooperation. But, where does that leave African descended people? Violent crime is highest in the blackest parts of the United States and all over Africa, and cooperation is an urban legend in sub-Saharan Africa. (Governments last there about a week at a time.)
He correlates it with economic literacy. (I think the last Communists in the world are in Africa, Latin America, and US universities.)
c. The European Union seems to be so open-minded that their brains have fallen out. That's the only way I could explain their determination to import the Muslim world that has been holding a grudge against the Europeans for the last 1,000 years.
Vocabulary:
taphonomy
seraglio
atrocitologist
strappado
ambuscade
sheefish
peccadilloes
metonym
bobbies
bargees
recrudescence
calumny
altricial
Prisoner's Dilemma
Tragedy of the Commons
Dollar Auction
synecdoche
atavistic
data snooping
Democratic Peace Theory
autarky
judder/juddering
Kantian triangle (democracy / open economy/international engagement)
commodious
myrmidon
Ad feminam
claustration
uxoricide
chary
Life History Theory
Triage Theory
bhang
overlying
goad (a spiked stick used for driving cattle)
axi pepper
Lesbian Until Graduation
subtetanizing
frugivores
mezaraic
bafflegab
homunculus/homunculi
pedomorphy
moral dumbfounding
routine tradeoff (within a single relational model)
Taboo tradeoff (sacred against secular)
tragic tradeoff (sacred against sacred)
wergild
dumbth
(Lady) Justitia
Quotes:
The distancing effect of a good story can make us forget the brutality of the world in which it was set.
(11) Their reverence for the Bible is purely talismanic..... They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.
If you really believe the failing to accept J***
s as one's Savior is a ticket to fire redemnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life. Better a few hours now than an eternity later.
(328) A man's reach must exceed his grasp.
(343) ..... No small part of the decline of genocide is the decline of communism.
(367) Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
(395) A man wants what a woman has - - sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or on it outright (marriage in most societies).
(397) In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms.
(420)... one can always come up with an ingenious evolutionary explanation for any phenomenon.
(433) The child study movement.... Began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child rearing experts.
(446) Milk carton wanted posters are examples of what criminologists call crime control theater: The advertised that something is being done without actually doing anything.
(479) Non-violence, MLK inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure in mayhem. By removing any pretext for legitimate retaliation by the enemy, it stays on the positive side of the moral ledger in the eyes of third parties, while luring the enemy onto the negative side.
(484) I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
(493) The Balkans are a region cursed with too much history per square mile
(493) The victims of a conflict are deciduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present.
(509) War is merely the continuation of policy by other means [Clausewitz]
(634) Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite. [Soviet proverb]
(640) In this tissue of rationalizations, a real historian is about as welcome as a skunk at a garden party.... The elites of a hereditary cast society, he suspected, figure that no good could come from scholars nosing around and archives where they might stumble upon evidence that undermine their claims to have descended from heroes and gods.
(660) Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.