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stacy_wilson's review against another edition
4.0
This is an excellent piece of work, extensively researched and thoroughly uplifting; a perspective-changer.
platypussdivva's review against another edition
5.0
One of the most inspiring and mind opening books I have ever read. It has help me take a different perspective in what we consider to be a current violent spell in our history and a great conversation piece to talk over with people who yearn for the "good old days"
wayfaring_witch's review against another edition
3.0
I was looking forward to reading this book, but ended up a but disappointed. I'm not sure what data I expected Pinker to have regarding more ancient civilizations. I felt he was trying too hard to convince us about violence in the past from stories that survives, while simultaneously trying to calm our nerves about the violence in the news today.
It was interesting to read as a view of history and humanity, but I don't think it did what it set out to do.
It was interesting to read as a view of history and humanity, but I don't think it did what it set out to do.
dmaurath's review against another edition
5.0
Pinker's magnum opus that not only defends the decline of violence, but purports a comprehensive scientific philosophy that enlightens all to the otherwise inherent blind faults of man. The masterpiece stands antagonist to all manner of irration, and defends its position with undeniable scientific evidence, lest you adhere to the blind faults of man.
books_and_pets's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
1.0
This book has been widely debunked by people smarter than me. Anecdotes and unsupported theories masquerading as facts.
aarongertler's review against another edition
5.0
I reviewed this book in some detail over at my blog:
Alpha Gamma Reviews: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Whether you liked it or not, you ought to check out the Amazon reviews. The people who loved and hated this book most had very interesting things to say.
Alpha Gamma Reviews: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Whether you liked it or not, you ought to check out the Amazon reviews. The people who loved and hated this book most had very interesting things to say.
plottingtowin's review against another edition
3.0
This book was a chore to get through as you can tell by my extended 6+ month reading time.
I have learned a lot from the statistics and the stories that Pinker shared, however, the book was not always presented in the most digestible format. Additionally, at times it was difficult to distinguish “fact” (based on data) versus Pinker’s opinion. I would encourage future readers to read closely so that you don’t combine the two.
The first third was about the history of violence in humanity with some current day examples, data/statistics, and lots of examples of him blaming religion as the main cause. Some of the religious examples were relevant, but other times it just seemed like he was trying to convince the reader that religion was a hoax and secular humanism is the way to go. Full disclaimer: I have religious beliefs so take my criticism as you wish.
The second third was a little too scientific than I would have liked as he tried to described the anatomy of the human brain and experiments linked to it. At times he would just throw scientific terms out there and expect the reader to understand. It became dense really quickly and not interesting. This was probably where half my time was spent reading because it just became a chore. Did I learn a lot? Yes. Did it motivate me to read more? No.
The last third was spent on philosophy. I really enjoyed this section because he focused on reason and sympathy. His perspective on the trends and connections between IQ and classical liberalism and how it relates to current politics was very interesting.
I have learned a lot from the statistics and the stories that Pinker shared, however, the book was not always presented in the most digestible format. Additionally, at times it was difficult to distinguish “fact” (based on data) versus Pinker’s opinion. I would encourage future readers to read closely so that you don’t combine the two.
The first third was about the history of violence in humanity with some current day examples, data/statistics, and lots of examples of him blaming religion as the main cause. Some of the religious examples were relevant, but other times it just seemed like he was trying to convince the reader that religion was a hoax and secular humanism is the way to go. Full disclaimer: I have religious beliefs so take my criticism as you wish.
The second third was a little too scientific than I would have liked as he tried to described the anatomy of the human brain and experiments linked to it. At times he would just throw scientific terms out there and expect the reader to understand. It became dense really quickly and not interesting. This was probably where half my time was spent reading because it just became a chore. Did I learn a lot? Yes. Did it motivate me to read more? No.
The last third was spent on philosophy. I really enjoyed this section because he focused on reason and sympathy. His perspective on the trends and connections between IQ and classical liberalism and how it relates to current politics was very interesting.
aislingnuttall7's review against another edition
4.0
Reassuring and thought-provoking. Why is there war? Why is there peace? What have we been doing right?
Tipping point around time of Enlightenment esp in the West. Why do we believe the opposite?
*We now have better reporting
*Cognitive illusion (news articles more memorable the more gory) - easier it is to recall specific instances, higher probability that you assigned to it
*Change in standards can outpace our change in behaviour
*Decline in religion (oversimplified summary on my part), rise in science
*More government intervention, shift in attitude
*Civil & equal rights revolutions, leading to constitution change
Why has violence declined?
1. Thomas Hobbs
- Humans do not have primordial taste for blood or aggression
- Logic of anarchy - in state of anarchy there is constant temptation to invade your neighbours before they invade you
- This train of thought was common in hunter-gatherers and raiding
- Deterrence can work but must be credible (settling all scores)
- Solution = Leviathan Theory
2. 'Life is cheap'
- Lower value on life
- Technology / more things to live for nowadays (education for children)
3. 'Non-zero sum games'
- Technology has increased the number of positive sum games by allowing TRADING (China & major nations) of each others surpluses over long distances and among larger groups of people
- Other people hence become more valuable alive than dead
- Violence declines for selfish reasons
4. 'The Expanding Circle' by Peter Singer
- Evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy
- By default we only employ it to small circle of friends and family
- Over history the circle has expanded - from the village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to other races to both sexes and even to other species
- What has powered this expansion?
- Increasing circles of reciprocity
- Golden Rule - more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realise that you must not privilege your interests over theirs if you want their attention
- Wright's theory - enjoying cooperation over larger circles
- Cosmopolitanism
- Histories
- Journalism
- Realistic fiction
- Memoires
- Travel
- Literacy
- Allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formally you treated as sub-human
Tipping point around time of Enlightenment esp in the West. Why do we believe the opposite?
*We now have better reporting
*Cognitive illusion (news articles more memorable the more gory) - easier it is to recall specific instances, higher probability that you assigned to it
*Change in standards can outpace our change in behaviour
*Decline in religion (oversimplified summary on my part), rise in science
*More government intervention, shift in attitude
*Civil & equal rights revolutions, leading to constitution change
Why has violence declined?
1. Thomas Hobbs
- Humans do not have primordial taste for blood or aggression
- Logic of anarchy - in state of anarchy there is constant temptation to invade your neighbours before they invade you
- This train of thought was common in hunter-gatherers and raiding
- Deterrence can work but must be credible (settling all scores)
- Solution = Leviathan Theory
2. 'Life is cheap'
- Lower value on life
- Technology / more things to live for nowadays (education for children)
3. 'Non-zero sum games'
- Technology has increased the number of positive sum games by allowing TRADING (China & major nations) of each others surpluses over long distances and among larger groups of people
- Other people hence become more valuable alive than dead
- Violence declines for selfish reasons
4. 'The Expanding Circle' by Peter Singer
- Evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy
- By default we only employ it to small circle of friends and family
- Over history the circle has expanded - from the village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to other races to both sexes and even to other species
- What has powered this expansion?
- Increasing circles of reciprocity
- Golden Rule - more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realise that you must not privilege your interests over theirs if you want their attention
- Wright's theory - enjoying cooperation over larger circles
- Cosmopolitanism
- Histories
- Journalism
- Realistic fiction
- Memoires
- Travel
- Literacy
- Allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formally you treated as sub-human
savaging's review against another edition
1.0
Make me a t-shirt that says “I read an 800-page book and all I got from it was this lousy review.”
The Good:
There’s a nice irreverent romp through the Bible, he shows what monsters "chivalrous" knights were, shows why we shouldn't be so afraid of terrorist attacks or child abductions or Iran.
The bad: everything else.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Conquistadors:
“Though imperial conquest and rule can themselves be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered” (56).
P opens with some good, old-fashioned, crappy anthropology. After all, if he’s going to argue that we’ve become kinder gentler people, he needs to lump all pre-state societies into the trashheap of the violent.
He’s mostly inspired by the Napoleon Chagnon crew, which means portraying indigenous people as nasty and brutish (and side-stepping consent/ethics guidelines).
P loves broad statements about very diverse people. He says of all non-state people “In their theory of causation there is no such thing as a natural death” (137). There is a singular “they,” with a “theory.” Or: “Herders all over the world cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation.” I've studied pastoralists, find them to be escape artists from violent confrontation. Some live rough lives and some are gentle and egalitarian. This kind of world-wide smear is something you can do when you’re talking about people who aren’t Harvard academics, and can’t take you to task for what you’re saying.
His methods for tallying war deaths are shoddy and insane, and all the non-state societies he looks at are are on the edge of states, dealing firsthand with imperial violence.
He's constantly flirting with eugenicist narrations -- the Yanomami and the Maori are just genetically more violent, while white europeans maybe are genetically gentler. Forgive me for chuckling when he then shudders that genocide is "unthinkable" and warns against "“The cognitive habit of treating people as instances of a category."
(His lust after the leviathan also pushes him to show that in Nazi Germany the one-on-one homicide rates continued to decline (79). I mean, if you ignore the mass-murdering part.)
Hatin’ on the Poors:
The Civilizing Process, which gave us table manners and non-violence, “never fully penetrated” two zones: “the lower strata of the socioeconomic scale, and the inaccessible or inhospitable territories of the globe” (81). Ergo, violence comes from the poor and far-flung (though it’s worth asking, while we’re at it, “inaccessible” and “inhospitable” to whom? The board rooms on Wall Street are inaccessible and inhospitable to me, but I assume that’s not who he’s talking about).
Proof that the lower classes were vicious comes from the fact that terms for poor people were synonymous with viciousness. Epithets are proof of that minority is bad, not proof of some messed-up discrimination.
Racism is a thing of the past, says P, before he says a bunch of racist shit.
Like: white people might just have better genes for “maturity and self-control” (121). Cities became peaceful because “tourists and young, urban professionals recolonized downtowns,” replacing those nasty, poor brown people (117). Uneasily I see him dividing up crime rates between “whites” and “blacks,” to show that any increase in crime is just because “lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honor (sometimes called ‘the code of the streets’) to defend their interests” (98).
What’s the most effective way to end this violence? “putting more men behind bars for longer stretches of time” (121). Because “Imprisonment physically removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them and subtracting the crimes they would have committed from the statistics” (122). Don’t worry about the ways that prison might breed violence or is itself violent.
P repeatedly refers to poor and brown people as living in a state of “anarchy,” without the benefits of belonging to a State. This despite the fact that the poor and brown actually tend to come up against the state far more frequently than others. They bear the bruises from the state on their bodies. They are put behind bars at insane rates, they are physically deported, they are forced by the state to jump through hoops to get basic goods like sufficient food, healthcare, and housing. The wealthy, with their off-shore tax havens, are far more stateless than the poor.
In a global perspective, P puts out a map showing how poor countries have the most “sites of conflict.” He doesn’t ever mention that when a rich country is aggressive against a poor one, naturally the conflict will be fought out on the soil of the poor country. Any counter-attack is, after all, “terrorism,” not the same thing as the gentlemanly war we’re waging on them. The air bases in Nevada from which direct their remote-controlled armed drones are not “sites of conflict.”
Also, extra gross points when he’s reasserting that “European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but they generally had a fairly well-functioning police, judiciary, and public-service infrastructure. And while they often had their pet ethnic groups, their main concern was controlling the colony as a whole, so they enforced law and order fairly broadly” (307). Pet ethnic groups. Well-functioning police. No, no way did he say this.
But as P shows, racism is only natural. Babies are racist, after all (523).
And Sexism:
“We’re all feminists now,” says the man who’s never been a feminist (404).
Evolutionary psychology folks like P are quick to jump into gender-essentializing, and redescribe sexist shit as being biologically mandated. Reading this book helped explain why P hurried to the defense of Harvard pres. Larry Summers when he suggested that women weren’t in math and sciences because of their woman-brains. He reiterates it in this book -- “most labor economists consider these sex differences to be a contributor to the gender gap in earnings and professional success” (517).
The book is full of men-are-from-mars-etc. claptrap, usually in a form that is totally unnecessary, and without caveats. “Men fantasize about copulating with bodies, women fantasize about making love to people” (405), says this expert on your fantasies. He later cites a study showing that when you compare people who have done a will-power-depleting task and people who haven’t, and then ask them if they are likely to have sex with someone, will-power-depleted men are the most likely to say yes. Ergo, such differences are natural, and men are the ones who have to exercise self-control to live in the civilized world. Women, on the other hand, these natural gatekeepers, are just inherently sexually inhibited. (604)
He also claims that biologically, males are Cads or Dads, and explains the differences between the rapists and nice guys as exhibiting these two evolutionary strategies. He explores the evolution of sexual jealousy and the drive to rape, concluding that because it’s because of a prioritizing of evolutionary fitness that in no society do women obsess over the virginity of gooms (397). He will never concede that this might have something to do with social power, rather than reproduction, and so has nothing to say about the raping of little boys or prepubescent girls. Men just naturally can’t see “abrupt unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing” (405). Apparently, men would all love to be raped.
Women don’t like to be raped, according to P, because evolutionarily we’re designed to want to produce fit children, and we experience “agony” when that principle is violated (398). It’s not the pain and coercion and weight of the cultural baggage -- it’s our hope for kids that win at evolution.
P pooh-poohs the feminist responses to rape which point out how power is at play, and not simply lust (406). This "preposterous" claim is just a Marxist penchant to explain all phenomenon as a struggle for power between groups. And with an extra boost of smarm, he corrects us: “But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate” (406). The upswing of all this Marxist feminism is the “campus rape bureaucracy” won’t give the young ladies good advice about dressing modestly and behaving yourself at parties so others can’t take advantage of you (406). “Because of the sacred belief [that rape isn’t the victim’s fault], rape counselors foist advice on students that no responsible parent would ever give a daughter” (406).
Bullshit like this makes me want to enforce Jill Filipovic’s suggestion: “if conservative and anti-feminist men continue to argue that women’s very public presence enables men to assault them, then perhaps they’re the ones who should be pressured to stay home.”
He’ll also throw out some great lines like “men are more likely to find themselves at the receiving end of racism” (525). No really, there was a Study.
Progress Comes from People like Steve Pinker:
Why did people begin to believe in human kindness? Well: they just started thinking hard about it (180). And of course the ones thinking were the privileged, white, male thinkers. they’re the ones who made us play nice. Our distaste for slavery is owed to William Wilburforce, not Harriet Tubman. P is, incidentally, one of these people, using his thoughts to move us all toward progress.
Even when he concedes that some popular movements have been beneficial, that is because of some Great Man who led them, and that great man got the idea from the Great Books (he actually goes through MLK’s philosophical reading list) (479).
This is also where P shows his (anti-Marxist) Hegelian stripes: what the little people do is meaningless -- we can only hope they catch up to the civilizing power of these beautiful white brains.
Adjusting all violence to per-capita:
It’s undisputed that more people are being killed, but your chance of being killed as a random person in the world is arguably reduced.
It’s an interesting question whether rates or amounts are more important. It’s possible to ask: could it just be that at a certain point it’s too difficult to keep up with birthrates when it comes to killing others? We just don’t have the technologies to do away with people as quickly as new ones are created -- is this progress if so?
But the bigger question for me is how this prioritizes mass populations. If there is a small tribe wiped out through genocide, that is still just as horrible as it would be if there were fewer people. Wiping out a village in a dirty war is still wiping out a village, even though New York exists.
What it comes down to is that P could show how the Aztec empire had a low death-through-violence rate, and a neighboring tribe had a high rate, and say See states are more peaceful. When what actually happened is the State massacred the tribe.
(A Utah senator once argued that being gay was bad because you were more likely to be murdered -- instead of concluding that being homophobic is bad because you’re more likely to murder.)
Making meaning and meaninglessness:
P can't edit his arguments down -- he's writing 800 pages, after all, everything in!
Like: remember that Dr. Seuss story, where a man was “nearly beheaded for being unable to remove his hat in the presence of the king”? Now that’s violent.
Or: Let me tell you why the 60’s was so violent with this Wikipedia quote about that wild party. Also quoted in the Wikipedia quote is “[citation needed]” (113).
I mean, come on, you're not even moving these to a footnote?
But P will find his argument anywhere. I had heard of Lewis Fry Richardson before as a kind of tragically comic figure, who tried to figure out the mathematics of war and got nowhere. But P finds this positively instructive: he couldn’t figure out a mathematical formula for war, ergo: war is random. So if we’ve had the most destructive wars in history in the last century, well, that’s all chance, that was bound to happen sometime (207). Our current episodes of violence, like the 20th century wars, are just RANDOM occurrences. Some decade had to be the bloodiest, after all! But all the other violence? It has REASONS. (191)
World War II and the holocaust were basically just the doing of one bad apple. Take away Hitler and viola, peace and understanding (249). Hitler is credited with possessing magical powers to make people behave badly. This can of course be a comforting thought -- you no longer have to hold everyone else to any responsibility (so what if the churches and the social clubs all happily participated? they were hypnotized into it by the dashing Hitler). This also fits with his outdated Great Man theory of history.
He’ll strain to create patterns out of scant data, and when the obvious patterns don’t fit (like, suppose that war has, over time, claimed the lives of more and more people. Suppose the very most deadly wars came after the Enlightenment enlightened us and most players were “democracies”) -- then he’ll spend pages and pages kneading the statistics into chaos, until he can say: “The two world wars were, in a sense, horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical distribution that stretches across a vast range of destruction.” (222)
And maybe he’s right, but if so, every murder is a horrifically unlucky sample also, and he’s severely compromised his attempts to make tidy morals to the story.
His data is also unconvincing when he’s talking about the revolution in animal rights. He basically tells us to look at all that faux-meat at the supermarket. If he were to track the number of animal killings or meat consumption anywhere in the world, we clearly wouldn’t be very optimistic, and so he ignores those numbers and instead tracks how many films harmed their animal actors.
And about cooking the books
When he’s trying to make the case that democracies are less warlike, he sets up a very careful statistical analysis. And then he just throws in that for these statistics, any conflict will be attributed to the “less democractic” country in the conflict. P is living in a belligerent democratic country that is currently and historically creating wars with “less democratic” countries. I’m completely in support of democracy, but this ain’t no Norway fighting Germany. How could he feasibly have written these paragraphs without worry that he was cooking the data? How could his editors and readers have feasibly let him get away with this? Isn’t it better to admit that some democracies can be warmongering, and do some hard thinking to figure out why that is, rather than just wash it of responsibility?
Love affair with enlightenment and capitalism
He finally gets to his real argument, which is that capitalism is peace. We don’t bomb the Japanese because they made my minivan. He says the good arguments for this are “sure to leave leftists speechless.” Ha ha, remember when we used to call capitalists "merchants of death"? And so if we’re now in corporate-fueled resource wars at the behest of war profiteers -- well, that’s clearly the “less democratic” country’s fault, for not simply handing their resources over to our CEOs to begin with.
His love affair with corporatocracy is further clarified when he rejects the United Nations as a “soap box for dictators” and instead promotes IGOs as the answer (289). You might think it’s odd, with his previous assertion that democracy is important for peace, that he would see the future of peace as coming from non-democratic IGOs like the World Bank. But in the end, he only supports “democracy” inasmuch as it supports free-market capitalism, which is the real ultimate goal. The democratic part can be skipped completely if we can get to corporate governance in a faster war.
Anything that gets in the way of the free functioning of markets is sure to cause violence. Also, it’s sure to be an ideology. An ideology is a different thing that some people have, particularly if they’re communists, while P and his book are free of ideology (556).
He blames communist ideas for Stahlinism and the violence of the 60s, but when he’s up against the violence of the French Revolution, which clearly grew out of his precious Enlightenment ideas, he’ll say, with characteristic smarm, that the connection between the two is “to put it mildly, dubious” (184). “Political murder, massacre, and wars of imperial expansion are as old as civilization, and had long been the everyday stuff of European monarchies.” In other words: shit happens. You can’t blame ideas for that. UNLESS that shit is utopian, and then it’s an “ideology.”
Marx can be blamed for Hitler, his “fraternal twin” (343). Sure, Hitler hated Marx, but we have some proof that he read a book by him, and basically the holocaust is just a tweaked class war. They’re both counter-enlightenment doctrine.
This is when his ire toward Vietnam comes out. Those “expansionist” jerks only beat us because they had an ideology and so didn’t care about human lives anymore (308). “The American democracy was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit (no one asked the [Vietnamese] men how they felt about this).” Fortunately, now that they’ve sloughed off most of their ideology, and are instead “commercial” (which is ideology-free terrain), they’re less interested in these “unnecessary wars” and we can all have a little peace.
I’ve seen a lot of victim-blaming in my days, but never anything so blatant and disgusting as this.
But Marx is to blame for all the anti-communist “reactions” he caused in Indonesia and Latin America (not the democratic and free market US) (343). "The decline of genocide is the decline of communism” (343), and if those genocidal acts were happening at the behest of US puppet dictators against indigenous communities suspected of harboring communist sentiments, you can’t blame captalism for that.
And of course capitalism is in no way to blame for wars of plunder and colonization. Those don’t even happen anymore, anyway. He proves this by showing that countries rich in oil are among the most violent (674) (he ignores the obvious fact that other countries might be trying to plunder their oil).
Of course, P would like to find psychological research supporting his idea that people engaging in commerce are less violent. But unfortunately it doesn’t exist. Why? “I suspect that among researchers, gentle commerce is just not a sexy idea” (684). Intellectuals, he concludes, feel too superior to businessmen to actually study the idea.
Burying Truth:
"In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But --”(47)
“Europe’s ability to kill people [through the present] outpaced its ability to breed more of them. But --”(230)
“European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but --”(307).
“The law may be an ass, but --”(538)
Howard Zinn wrote:
“Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important--it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.”
The Good:
There’s a nice irreverent romp through the Bible, he shows what monsters "chivalrous" knights were, shows why we shouldn't be so afraid of terrorist attacks or child abductions or Iran.
The bad: everything else.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Conquistadors:
“Though imperial conquest and rule can themselves be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered” (56).
P opens with some good, old-fashioned, crappy anthropology. After all, if he’s going to argue that we’ve become kinder gentler people, he needs to lump all pre-state societies into the trashheap of the violent.
He’s mostly inspired by the Napoleon Chagnon crew, which means portraying indigenous people as nasty and brutish (and side-stepping consent/ethics guidelines).
P loves broad statements about very diverse people. He says of all non-state people “In their theory of causation there is no such thing as a natural death” (137). There is a singular “they,” with a “theory.” Or: “Herders all over the world cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation.” I've studied pastoralists, find them to be escape artists from violent confrontation. Some live rough lives and some are gentle and egalitarian. This kind of world-wide smear is something you can do when you’re talking about people who aren’t Harvard academics, and can’t take you to task for what you’re saying.
His methods for tallying war deaths are shoddy and insane, and all the non-state societies he looks at are are on the edge of states, dealing firsthand with imperial violence.
He's constantly flirting with eugenicist narrations -- the Yanomami and the Maori are just genetically more violent, while white europeans maybe are genetically gentler. Forgive me for chuckling when he then shudders that genocide is "unthinkable" and warns against "“The cognitive habit of treating people as instances of a category."
(His lust after the leviathan also pushes him to show that in Nazi Germany the one-on-one homicide rates continued to decline (79). I mean, if you ignore the mass-murdering part.)
Hatin’ on the Poors:
The Civilizing Process, which gave us table manners and non-violence, “never fully penetrated” two zones: “the lower strata of the socioeconomic scale, and the inaccessible or inhospitable territories of the globe” (81). Ergo, violence comes from the poor and far-flung (though it’s worth asking, while we’re at it, “inaccessible” and “inhospitable” to whom? The board rooms on Wall Street are inaccessible and inhospitable to me, but I assume that’s not who he’s talking about).
Proof that the lower classes were vicious comes from the fact that terms for poor people were synonymous with viciousness. Epithets are proof of that minority is bad, not proof of some messed-up discrimination.
Racism is a thing of the past, says P, before he says a bunch of racist shit.
Like: white people might just have better genes for “maturity and self-control” (121). Cities became peaceful because “tourists and young, urban professionals recolonized downtowns,” replacing those nasty, poor brown people (117). Uneasily I see him dividing up crime rates between “whites” and “blacks,” to show that any increase in crime is just because “lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honor (sometimes called ‘the code of the streets’) to defend their interests” (98).
What’s the most effective way to end this violence? “putting more men behind bars for longer stretches of time” (121). Because “Imprisonment physically removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them and subtracting the crimes they would have committed from the statistics” (122). Don’t worry about the ways that prison might breed violence or is itself violent.
P repeatedly refers to poor and brown people as living in a state of “anarchy,” without the benefits of belonging to a State. This despite the fact that the poor and brown actually tend to come up against the state far more frequently than others. They bear the bruises from the state on their bodies. They are put behind bars at insane rates, they are physically deported, they are forced by the state to jump through hoops to get basic goods like sufficient food, healthcare, and housing. The wealthy, with their off-shore tax havens, are far more stateless than the poor.
In a global perspective, P puts out a map showing how poor countries have the most “sites of conflict.” He doesn’t ever mention that when a rich country is aggressive against a poor one, naturally the conflict will be fought out on the soil of the poor country. Any counter-attack is, after all, “terrorism,” not the same thing as the gentlemanly war we’re waging on them. The air bases in Nevada from which direct their remote-controlled armed drones are not “sites of conflict.”
Also, extra gross points when he’s reasserting that “European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but they generally had a fairly well-functioning police, judiciary, and public-service infrastructure. And while they often had their pet ethnic groups, their main concern was controlling the colony as a whole, so they enforced law and order fairly broadly” (307). Pet ethnic groups. Well-functioning police. No, no way did he say this.
But as P shows, racism is only natural. Babies are racist, after all (523).
And Sexism:
“We’re all feminists now,” says the man who’s never been a feminist (404).
Evolutionary psychology folks like P are quick to jump into gender-essentializing, and redescribe sexist shit as being biologically mandated. Reading this book helped explain why P hurried to the defense of Harvard pres. Larry Summers when he suggested that women weren’t in math and sciences because of their woman-brains. He reiterates it in this book -- “most labor economists consider these sex differences to be a contributor to the gender gap in earnings and professional success” (517).
The book is full of men-are-from-mars-etc. claptrap, usually in a form that is totally unnecessary, and without caveats. “Men fantasize about copulating with bodies, women fantasize about making love to people” (405), says this expert on your fantasies. He later cites a study showing that when you compare people who have done a will-power-depleting task and people who haven’t, and then ask them if they are likely to have sex with someone, will-power-depleted men are the most likely to say yes. Ergo, such differences are natural, and men are the ones who have to exercise self-control to live in the civilized world. Women, on the other hand, these natural gatekeepers, are just inherently sexually inhibited. (604)
He also claims that biologically, males are Cads or Dads, and explains the differences between the rapists and nice guys as exhibiting these two evolutionary strategies. He explores the evolution of sexual jealousy and the drive to rape, concluding that because it’s because of a prioritizing of evolutionary fitness that in no society do women obsess over the virginity of gooms (397). He will never concede that this might have something to do with social power, rather than reproduction, and so has nothing to say about the raping of little boys or prepubescent girls. Men just naturally can’t see “abrupt unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing” (405). Apparently, men would all love to be raped.
Women don’t like to be raped, according to P, because evolutionarily we’re designed to want to produce fit children, and we experience “agony” when that principle is violated (398). It’s not the pain and coercion and weight of the cultural baggage -- it’s our hope for kids that win at evolution.
P pooh-poohs the feminist responses to rape which point out how power is at play, and not simply lust (406). This "preposterous" claim is just a Marxist penchant to explain all phenomenon as a struggle for power between groups. And with an extra boost of smarm, he corrects us: “But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate” (406). The upswing of all this Marxist feminism is the “campus rape bureaucracy” won’t give the young ladies good advice about dressing modestly and behaving yourself at parties so others can’t take advantage of you (406). “Because of the sacred belief [that rape isn’t the victim’s fault], rape counselors foist advice on students that no responsible parent would ever give a daughter” (406).
Bullshit like this makes me want to enforce Jill Filipovic’s suggestion: “if conservative and anti-feminist men continue to argue that women’s very public presence enables men to assault them, then perhaps they’re the ones who should be pressured to stay home.”
He’ll also throw out some great lines like “men are more likely to find themselves at the receiving end of racism” (525). No really, there was a Study.
Progress Comes from People like Steve Pinker:
Why did people begin to believe in human kindness? Well: they just started thinking hard about it (180). And of course the ones thinking were the privileged, white, male thinkers. they’re the ones who made us play nice. Our distaste for slavery is owed to William Wilburforce, not Harriet Tubman. P is, incidentally, one of these people, using his thoughts to move us all toward progress.
Even when he concedes that some popular movements have been beneficial, that is because of some Great Man who led them, and that great man got the idea from the Great Books (he actually goes through MLK’s philosophical reading list) (479).
This is also where P shows his (anti-Marxist) Hegelian stripes: what the little people do is meaningless -- we can only hope they catch up to the civilizing power of these beautiful white brains.
Adjusting all violence to per-capita:
It’s undisputed that more people are being killed, but your chance of being killed as a random person in the world is arguably reduced.
It’s an interesting question whether rates or amounts are more important. It’s possible to ask: could it just be that at a certain point it’s too difficult to keep up with birthrates when it comes to killing others? We just don’t have the technologies to do away with people as quickly as new ones are created -- is this progress if so?
But the bigger question for me is how this prioritizes mass populations. If there is a small tribe wiped out through genocide, that is still just as horrible as it would be if there were fewer people. Wiping out a village in a dirty war is still wiping out a village, even though New York exists.
What it comes down to is that P could show how the Aztec empire had a low death-through-violence rate, and a neighboring tribe had a high rate, and say See states are more peaceful. When what actually happened is the State massacred the tribe.
(A Utah senator once argued that being gay was bad because you were more likely to be murdered -- instead of concluding that being homophobic is bad because you’re more likely to murder.)
Making meaning and meaninglessness:
P can't edit his arguments down -- he's writing 800 pages, after all, everything in!
Like: remember that Dr. Seuss story, where a man was “nearly beheaded for being unable to remove his hat in the presence of the king”? Now that’s violent.
Or: Let me tell you why the 60’s was so violent with this Wikipedia quote about that wild party. Also quoted in the Wikipedia quote is “[citation needed]” (113).
I mean, come on, you're not even moving these to a footnote?
But P will find his argument anywhere. I had heard of Lewis Fry Richardson before as a kind of tragically comic figure, who tried to figure out the mathematics of war and got nowhere. But P finds this positively instructive: he couldn’t figure out a mathematical formula for war, ergo: war is random. So if we’ve had the most destructive wars in history in the last century, well, that’s all chance, that was bound to happen sometime (207). Our current episodes of violence, like the 20th century wars, are just RANDOM occurrences. Some decade had to be the bloodiest, after all! But all the other violence? It has REASONS. (191)
World War II and the holocaust were basically just the doing of one bad apple. Take away Hitler and viola, peace and understanding (249). Hitler is credited with possessing magical powers to make people behave badly. This can of course be a comforting thought -- you no longer have to hold everyone else to any responsibility (so what if the churches and the social clubs all happily participated? they were hypnotized into it by the dashing Hitler). This also fits with his outdated Great Man theory of history.
He’ll strain to create patterns out of scant data, and when the obvious patterns don’t fit (like, suppose that war has, over time, claimed the lives of more and more people. Suppose the very most deadly wars came after the Enlightenment enlightened us and most players were “democracies”) -- then he’ll spend pages and pages kneading the statistics into chaos, until he can say: “The two world wars were, in a sense, horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical distribution that stretches across a vast range of destruction.” (222)
And maybe he’s right, but if so, every murder is a horrifically unlucky sample also, and he’s severely compromised his attempts to make tidy morals to the story.
His data is also unconvincing when he’s talking about the revolution in animal rights. He basically tells us to look at all that faux-meat at the supermarket. If he were to track the number of animal killings or meat consumption anywhere in the world, we clearly wouldn’t be very optimistic, and so he ignores those numbers and instead tracks how many films harmed their animal actors.
And about cooking the books
When he’s trying to make the case that democracies are less warlike, he sets up a very careful statistical analysis. And then he just throws in that for these statistics, any conflict will be attributed to the “less democractic” country in the conflict. P is living in a belligerent democratic country that is currently and historically creating wars with “less democratic” countries. I’m completely in support of democracy, but this ain’t no Norway fighting Germany. How could he feasibly have written these paragraphs without worry that he was cooking the data? How could his editors and readers have feasibly let him get away with this? Isn’t it better to admit that some democracies can be warmongering, and do some hard thinking to figure out why that is, rather than just wash it of responsibility?
Love affair with enlightenment and capitalism
He finally gets to his real argument, which is that capitalism is peace. We don’t bomb the Japanese because they made my minivan. He says the good arguments for this are “sure to leave leftists speechless.” Ha ha, remember when we used to call capitalists "merchants of death"? And so if we’re now in corporate-fueled resource wars at the behest of war profiteers -- well, that’s clearly the “less democratic” country’s fault, for not simply handing their resources over to our CEOs to begin with.
His love affair with corporatocracy is further clarified when he rejects the United Nations as a “soap box for dictators” and instead promotes IGOs as the answer (289). You might think it’s odd, with his previous assertion that democracy is important for peace, that he would see the future of peace as coming from non-democratic IGOs like the World Bank. But in the end, he only supports “democracy” inasmuch as it supports free-market capitalism, which is the real ultimate goal. The democratic part can be skipped completely if we can get to corporate governance in a faster war.
Anything that gets in the way of the free functioning of markets is sure to cause violence. Also, it’s sure to be an ideology. An ideology is a different thing that some people have, particularly if they’re communists, while P and his book are free of ideology (556).
He blames communist ideas for Stahlinism and the violence of the 60s, but when he’s up against the violence of the French Revolution, which clearly grew out of his precious Enlightenment ideas, he’ll say, with characteristic smarm, that the connection between the two is “to put it mildly, dubious” (184). “Political murder, massacre, and wars of imperial expansion are as old as civilization, and had long been the everyday stuff of European monarchies.” In other words: shit happens. You can’t blame ideas for that. UNLESS that shit is utopian, and then it’s an “ideology.”
Marx can be blamed for Hitler, his “fraternal twin” (343). Sure, Hitler hated Marx, but we have some proof that he read a book by him, and basically the holocaust is just a tweaked class war. They’re both counter-enlightenment doctrine.
This is when his ire toward Vietnam comes out. Those “expansionist” jerks only beat us because they had an ideology and so didn’t care about human lives anymore (308). “The American democracy was willing to sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit (no one asked the [Vietnamese] men how they felt about this).” Fortunately, now that they’ve sloughed off most of their ideology, and are instead “commercial” (which is ideology-free terrain), they’re less interested in these “unnecessary wars” and we can all have a little peace.
I’ve seen a lot of victim-blaming in my days, but never anything so blatant and disgusting as this.
But Marx is to blame for all the anti-communist “reactions” he caused in Indonesia and Latin America (not the democratic and free market US) (343). "The decline of genocide is the decline of communism” (343), and if those genocidal acts were happening at the behest of US puppet dictators against indigenous communities suspected of harboring communist sentiments, you can’t blame captalism for that.
And of course capitalism is in no way to blame for wars of plunder and colonization. Those don’t even happen anymore, anyway. He proves this by showing that countries rich in oil are among the most violent (674) (he ignores the obvious fact that other countries might be trying to plunder their oil).
Of course, P would like to find psychological research supporting his idea that people engaging in commerce are less violent. But unfortunately it doesn’t exist. Why? “I suspect that among researchers, gentle commerce is just not a sexy idea” (684). Intellectuals, he concludes, feel too superior to businessmen to actually study the idea.
Burying Truth:
"In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But --”(47)
“Europe’s ability to kill people [through the present] outpaced its ability to breed more of them. But --”(230)
“European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but --”(307).
“The law may be an ass, but --”(538)
Howard Zinn wrote:
“Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important--it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.”
stevenrouk's review against another edition
5.0
The best book I've read in a very long time, with profound implications for just about everyone.