Response to the Book Review Symposium: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Abstract

They say that ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.1 And so I was not surprised to see my book The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity described as ‘ideological’ by reviewers who strike me as black pots in glass houses casting the first stone. By the same token, it is not easy for an author to defend himself against such an accusation: ‘I am not ideological’ is bound to sound as convincing as ‘I am not a crook’ and ‘I did not have sex with that woman.’ But I will take my chances. The arguments in The Better Angels of Our Nature are in fact not ideological. They are empirical, though the facts on which those arguments are based are bound to gore some oxen of the hard left, critical theory, and various forms of post-X-ism (together with certain livestock of the hard right, libertarianism, and anarchism). As I note in the preface, and as the paper and internet trails of my writing confirm, Better Angels was inspired by my coming across diverse datasets showing historical declines in violence. The existence of these declines (such as homicide since the Middle Ages, corporal and capital punishment since the 18th century, great-power wars since 1945, and autocracies since the 1980s) are well accepted by the scholarly communities who study them, but they surprised me at the time, continue to surprise most readers, and are adamantly denied by those who are unfamiliar with the relevant literatures.