Sympathetic to his ideas or not, it is next to impossible to deny Steven Pinker’s matchless gift for writing popular psychology books that are at once incisive, stylish, and empirically weighty. Luxuriantly curly hair aside, there’s no excuse mistaking him for the less cerebral Malcolm Gladwell. And as a better writer, Pinker has attracted a more interesting set of critics—who, owing to the deeply interdisciplinary character of The Better Angels of Our Nature—come from all angles at the Harvard psychologist’s bold, unifying thesis.
For instance, I’d venture a guess that many Pinker detractors find immediate fault with a supposedly scientific thesis that cannot be fully separated from the moral exuberance it provokes. That is, given that few readers of popular psychology books are heartless automatons or preliterate warrior-patriarchalists, it is fair to assume that most of Pinker’s readers are happy to hear that violence has declined. And as a psychologist, it is fair to assume that Pinker is acutely aware of confirmation bias. Whether in spite or because of it, Better Angels proceeds with an argument about violence that tinges the descriptive with an ample helping of liberal humanistic normativity.
In the process, Pinker grapples with both the empirics and philosophy of enlightenment liberalism, calling to account certain sacred cows, but missing the point on a handful of others. By noting examples of both kinds, I want to raise the question of what Better Angels—a watershed book in so many ways—means for the liberal worldview.
Read broadly, Better Angels fits squarely in the liberal canon: classical liberals, American left-liberals, and international relations liberals can all find themes to draw on in Pinker’s documentation of how human nature can be perfected, how governments can act in service of that goal, and how patterns in human cultural evolution can be generalized and universalized. Most of the arguments advanced to this end are supported by exhaustive historical research and nuanced, compelling findings from psychology.
To be fair, Better Angels makes a laudable effort from time to time to break with the tropes of liberal moral rationale. In no uncertain terms, Pinker explains that political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was right—that man’s first task on the road to civilization is the mortification of desires that make up at least half of his nature. And Mike Cotter details the book’s surprisingly conservative claim about the relationship between reduced policing and violent crime in the 1960s.
But unfortunately, there’s a serious slackening of argumentation when it comes to framing particular subjects that have become matters of sensitivity to modern-day liberal ideologues. Although I write from a pro-choice perspective, Pinker’s conventionally liberal treatment of abortion seems starkly out of step with his very broadly construed thesis about the decline of violence. After generalizing the historical reduction of war deaths, religious obscurantism, child spanking, meat eating, and homophobia into a single phenomenon, he wavers over whether to claim that abortion is a comparable manifestation of violence. Upon closer reading, it appears that he does: a typical graphic on page 428 depicts modest-to-steep cross-cultural reductions in abortion between the 1980s and 2003—even admitting “abortion is seen as something to be minimized.” Yet unlike in cases involving children’s and animal rights, Pinker avoids passing moral judgment here, effectively admitting, against his own principles of universality, that abortion is too political an issue to be judged in the positive light of his thesis.
Additionally, for all its repute as an interdisciplinary bonanza, Better Angels makes a minimal effort to hear the mounting debate in human genetic science over whether the dawn of civilization might have been accompanied by natural selection for society-changing psychological traits. Of course, the suggestion reeks of the sort of biological determinism and racial implication that liberals try to avoid at all costs. In both the text and in personal correspondence, Pinker has made the fair point that out of an abundance of cultural and historical explanations, there is no need to invoke genetic changes to explain man’s first great pacification. While he is practically correct, his focus on solely the argument of Cochran and Harpending’s The Ten Thousand Year Explosion and his undervaluing of the Neolithic Revolution’s transformative depth makes for a weak investigation.
A 2010 study in Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, for example, demonstrated a strong correlation between population frequency of the G allele of 5-HTTLPR, a region in a gene that codes for serotonin production, and the level of cultural collectivism within that population. At some point, the Europeans and Asians might have developed different cultural norms about order, identity, and violence as the result of a single-step genetic mutation. While correlative results are never certain, it is hard to justify omitting such a study among many when attempting a thorough survey of violence’s human history.
In my reading of Better Angels, whose case for an optimistic liberalism I found generally compelling, these examples forced me into a dialogue with a text that I found imperfect. I’m afraid, however, that between the lovingly uncritical embrace of Pinker by many admirers and the wholesale barrage by some opponents, there is little room for a critical but favorable take on Better Angels’ implications for society. To have an honest conversation about what Steven Pinker’s far-ranging insights mean for the relationship between ethics, policy, and human nature, we have to abandon the sacred cows that Pinker chooses to spare.