Book Review from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard
The Better Angels of Our Nature. By Steven Pinker. Penguin £12.99.
This is a real brick of a book (over eight hundred pages of text), but its message can be stated very simply: the extent of violence in society has been declining over many centuries and is still doing so. To support this claim, Pinker cites a mass of historical statistics, and to explain this supposed trend he appeals to both political and psychological factors. The title, by the way, comes from a quote by Abraham Lincoln.
In part this drop in violence involves the drastic reduction or effective elimination of such things as bear-baiting, execution by means of breaking on the wheel, human sacrifice and the most gruesome forms of torture. Murder rates have fallen quite drastically, for instance from 110 per 100,000 people per year in 14th-century England to less than one per 100,000 now. But above all it means a reduction in the number of deaths in war, or, more accurately a cut in the proportion of the population killed in war. The Second World War was responsible for 55 million deaths and was the bloodiest conflict ever. Yet the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-century China was responsible for 36 million dead, and, if scaled up to twentieth-century population figures, this would mean well over 400 million deaths.
It may be reasonable enough to speak in terms, not of absolute numbers of casualties, but of proportions and a person’s chances of being killed. Yet this emphasis on relative figures leads to some bizarre conclusions, especially the view that there was a Long Peace in the second half of the twentieth century: but then, all ‘peace’ under capitalism is relative. In the first decade of the present century, the annual global rate of battle deaths was less than one per 100,000 people. But this figure requires some careful redefinitions, such as saying that most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by subsequent ‘intercommunal violence’ rather than the American invasion itself. Moreover, a nuclear war is by no means out of the question now (see Material World in the January Socialist Standard). Also, it is not just war that needs to be considered: according to the One Billion Rising Campaign, one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.
As for the causes of war, Pinker claims that countries no longer fight over scarce resources, though he accepts the existence of a ‘resource curse’, whereby less-developed states with plenty of non-renewable resources are often extremely violent. However, the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, currently in dispute between China and Japan, may well have oil reserves, and war there is by no means ruled out. He also treats cases for and against going to war as rational solutions to a problem in game theory, with positive and negative values for the different sides either fighting or not. But this assumes that those who may benefit (the rulers and owners) are the same people as those who are likely to be killed.
Pinker has featured in these pages before (for instance, see our April 2003 issue for a dissection of his views on human nature and his misunderstandings of socialism). And things have not improved much here: he uncritically considers Stalin and Mao as representatives of ‘Marxian socialism’, and there can be no excuse for referring to ‘the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups’.
Paul Bennett
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