“The Better Angels of Our Nature “ by Steven Pinker

I read “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes” and then read several reviews of it.

The most serious flaw in the book is the author's assertion that human action is the resultant of forces. He calls these forces “endogenous” and “exogenous,” which is another way of saying of nature and nurture or heredity and environment or wiring and programming. Another way of stating it, even more abstractly, is to say that human action is a dependent variable that is predictable from an independent variable. This basic scheme can be elaborated by multivariate analysis and weighting of factors, but it's still the attempt to predict human action. The book's numerous linear graphs all display two variables.

But the characteristically human thing is to insert a process of reflection in between the x and the y, during which the human contemplates alternative courses of action, sometimes over a very long period of time, and then chooses or constructs one which he or she may change after further reflection or new developments. This reflection process introduces historicity and futurity into our lives which would be impossible or uneconomical or unnecessary if our actions were just the playing out of forces. It also introduces intentionality, agency, agony, and alterity - phenomena that we all see directly, commonly, but which only academics deny – deny for non-academics, but not for themselves.

Which brings me to the second serious flaw - an inadequate account of what the author variously calls sympathy, empathy and perspective-taking. He devotes a lot of words to the subject and is aware that this is an area of the most persistent objections to the “forces” scheme. The author tries to deal with this and spends a lot of words on the subject which never really satisfy me or him. For example, he says that we get perspective by imagining the other's point of view. He is very careful with his words on that point – that we “imagine” the other's point of view. But this theory involves the epistemological or metaphysical problem of “solipsism,” or the "homunculus argument." The “looking glass self” as well as social darwinism, which he posits, are still very popular but careful thinkers saw through them a hundred years ago or more. He is far from any understanding that people are able to be in two places at once, as in quantum theory.

I was not able to find any mention in this discussion of what is loosely called “projection.” I refer to the idea that humans who refuse to acknowledge their own faults “project” or attribute those particular faults to others. The Freudians called it a defense mechanism and seem not to have accounted for it very acceptably, but I think there is no question that the observation is of something real and common. The existing theories of “projection” may not be very satisfying, or may be very complicated, but I think our common experience is that what gets people really angry and violent towards you is not really you, but something about themselves which they are trying to repress and which your reality elicits within themselves. All the bad stuff within the self is denied, repressed and then projected onto the enemy, thus justifying various forms of violence. I write “various forms of violence” here and reflect that I was not able to find any attempt to define “violence” in this book subtitled “The Decline of Violence and It's Causes.” I looked carefully for a definition of violence, given the scientificky smoke, but just could not find it. But then I found the author writing on his website that he quite deliberately does not define violence. An explicit, careful definition is quite consequential to Pinker's thesis about the decline of violence if you consider, as I do, what the supporters of the bankers and financiers and the 1% have done to us over the last decade or four, to be a form of violence. So Pinker simply and deliberately refuses even to try to define it, sensing that if he did so, it would completely destroy his worldview, his thesis, his book, his reputation, and his comfortable, well-paying, respectable job.

There is one more thing that comes to my mind right now and that is the author's unrestrained use of metaphor and simile. He refers in the title itself to “angels,” but you can see right away that he has no belief nor interest whatsoever in anything remotely like angels. He is clearly aware of the misuse of metaphor, as when he refers in quotes a few times to “hydraulic” theories such as of the flow of libido in classic Freudian psychoanalysis. But he himself is constantly doing it. Anyone who is truly serious about understanding humanity and who has seen how easily a mistaken metaphor can invalidate a sophisticated, highly-elaborated-over-many-years social theory, becomes extremely careful and reluctant about using metaphors. The subtle misuse of one metaphor can destroy an academic's entire life work. Attributing agency to genes, evolution, the system, culture, tradition, instincts, attitudes, needs, drives, forces, history, brains, time, space – a million other "factors" - can do that, too, so you become extremely careful about it. I think now of how Talcott Parsons, another Harvardian, and his acolytes spent so many years and so many words and so many people's lives and funds on positing “system prerequisites” as causing people's actions, and of how B. F. Skinner, another Harvardian, and his acolytes posited there being no such thing as thought or choice or selfhood or dignity, just conditioning.

My own view is that the a depiction of the reality of this book, and of the reality of social sciences in the academy, would require a fiction/fantasy author of the highest ability.